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Home plate is basically in Mexico and dead center is somewhere up in Canada, so call it ~2,000 miles to center. That’s about 10,560,000 feet.
Normal MLB home run:
- distance ~400 ft
- off‑bat speed ~110 mph
For a simple projectile with the same launch angle and no air resistance, the range goes like the square of the launch speed. So the speed scales with the square root of the distance ratio.
Distance ratio: 10,560,000 / 400 ≈ 26,400
Square root of that ≈ 162
So you’d need an exit velocity of roughly
110 mph × 162 ≈ 18,000 mph.
That’s already basically orbital velocity (low Earth orbit is ~17,500 mph), and that’s ignoring air drag, spin, the ball ripping itself apart, etc. In reality you’d need even more.
So to hit a home run in Huge Baseball, the batter has to stop being an athlete and start being a railgun.
At no point were we playing sports. "Playing sports" stopped when someone asked a question that presumed that a human batter would hit a ball to propel it to 100,000mph to traverse 2000 miles
I wonder how accurate and consistent our new form of artillary could be? No expects Mexico to directly drop homerun bombs on Canada; surprise and an absolutely juiced batter are their best weapons.
Not the best idea...hit northern sask with a railgun that big and you might just make the most pure uranium on earth go critical...not sure if Pluto would be far enough a3ay from that much uranium going boom....
Maybe aim at Manitoba they like to stab people and dont have like the entire planets nuclear material underfoot
Well the player needs to be able to withstand the impact of contact. Of course robot umps will be a given in this scenario. Also an indestructible stadium and those cut-out "spectators" from the COVID season.
I don't have time to run through the maths myself because I'm picking up a friend in a minute, but the Google AI overview thinks a 5kg sphere of tungsten (roughly the size of a baseball) going at orbital velocity of 7.8km/s would have roughly 150 Megajoules of kinetic energy.
Roughly equivalent to 35kg of TNT
Now an AI calculated that so take it with an entire bag of salt, not just a grain.
But it sounds vaguely correct to me based on what I know about micrometeorite and high velocity ammunition impacts.
Did you also consider the curvature of the earth? I think that would end up being a diff-eq problem, but if we assume the earth is flat there it would tell us we would need to hit the ball quite a bit further
Let’s assume the baseball field is perfectly level. I mean if you’re going to make a field that big, you definitely have the resources to make it perfectly level come on now!
Level to what? Sea level is curved at this size. You likely mean perfectly flat, but that actually makes things a bit difficult because then gravity is pulling in a different direction rather than straight towards the ground. Let alone the phenomenal amount of resources that you'd need to make this field flat rather than just drawing some long lines there's no amount of resources you could use to create uniform gravity
i think trying that would make "mutually assured destruction" in nuclear war look like a walk in the park. The layer below tectonic plates where substantial quantities of magma are stored as a liquid, would intersect with the path of this flat baseball field. All the liquids nearby are going to try to move to the point on the baseball field that is closest to the center of gravity of the earth. (I'm not really sure what we are doing with the material being removed, but that will cause issues.)
You say that like it wouldn't make me want to actually watch baseball.
I am down for for a baseball league using railguns to fire tungsten projectiles into Canada and the players have to hop into F1 cars to race from San Antonio to Memphis to get to first base....
Actually yall, I think we just figured out the next Deathrace sequel...
If you keep the ball the same mass as a real baseball (~145 g) and leave the speed to what “Huge Baseball” needs for a homer, you’re looking at around 18,000 mph, which is about 8,000 m/s.
Energy-wise that’s roughly 4.5–5 million joules, basically a kilogram of TNT going off. If a catcher tried to stop that in, say, half a meter of glove/arm “give” like a normal catch, the deceleration would be in the millions of g’s and the force would be on the order of 9 million newtons. The glove, the hand, the arm, and probably a good chunk of the catcher just wouldn’t exist in any recognizable form afterward.
To make it even vaguely survivable you’d have to stretch the stopping distance out over kilometers. Think a long rail or tunnel with progressively softer material or a giant multi‑kilometer crash net. At that point the “mitt” is basically an industrial decelerator or a small bunker, not a piece of leather on someone’s hand.
So you don’t really “catch” that ball. You build infrastructure to survive being hit by it.
I was going to say essentially the same, but then I realized that technically you still have to run the bases, and that's going to be a long, arduous process where whoever eventually fields the ball will be chasing you.
Well how far are the bases away? 750 miles? So if he does a bunt at home plate he needs to run 3000 miles for a home run, before the catcher can toss a ball to one of the bases.
Catcher, if he’s not a faster runner than the batter to just tag him, is probably better off just holding onto the ball and waiting for the runner to round home in 300ish days. Because the catcher can’t throw a ball 750-1500 miles, and to coordinate that with the outfield and baseman, without the ball being gps encoded seems rather difficult, or he’d just have to throw it, then run up to it and pick it up and throw it again, repeatedly.
unless the catcher has more stamina than he can tag the runner while he’s sleeping at a motel 6 or something during his base run lol
Since the only stated parameter of the question is a home run, the catcher has no need to deliver the ball anywhere but near home. While the batter travels thousands of kilometers the catcher can casually walk to the ball, pick it up, and walk to the baseline between third and home. When the batter reaches third the catcher will be on the baseline with the ball and the batter won't reasonably be able to proceed.
If so then I have to assume that the bases themselves scale up, making it even harder to defend against the hitter. In this scenario, my answer would change. The catcher would have to proactively hunt for the batter because it would be impossible to defend home.
However, in this scenario I think we assume that all distances have scaled. In that case I am certain that the batter would never hit because the pitcher would not be able to throw the ball anywhere near home.
The funniest answer is what I hope for, and I find it funny if the pitcher has to throw it really hard then run and pick it up and throw it again and it takes 75 days for him to do that before he even gets in range of throwing it at the plate. He has to eat a lot of Hampton Inn breakfast on his work trip from the pitchers mound and racks up a lot of Hilton points
tangentially related - if the batter manages to hit one out, the distance between bases here is about 600 miles (3,168,000 ft), meaning that a home run trot at the mlb average 22.02 sec/240 ft would take 290664 seconds or 3.36 days
pitch clock be damned
EDIT: turns out i calculated for just one base, multiply by 4 to get the actual time of 13.44 days, just under two weeks
What are the rules about getting food and water during your HR trot? No human is capable of covering anything near that distance without eating, and no one could possibly carry enough food with them for a trip that long. So they're going to have to get resupplied on the way to first base. But there's probably a rule against that?
(Next we can discuss what happens when they stop to sleep or poop along the way.)
17776 is a story that is, ostensibly, about football growing increasingly bizarre over thousands of years as an immortal, needless humanity seeks more and more elaborate ways of staying occupied.
It isn't actually about football at all. I have literally never watched a game of football and it is one of my favorite works. It's about humanity. Also the main characters are space probes. Highly recommended.
A friend of mine had a similar idea. He said what if we played "traveling" baseball; wherever the ball landed on a successful hit became home plate on the next at-bat. I told him "Congratulations, you just invented golf."
So, not that guy, but you'd need your pitcher to become a railgun before your batter. Also, It'd be really easy to hit a homerun bc none of the defense players (except the catcher) would know if you hit the ball or not. So, after you hit the ball, hop in the car and start driving; you could likely outrun (outdrive) the other players.
They get the ball and take it to home plate and wait. At the rate of play one game would take longer than you’d be alive. Your grandkids would have to finish the 9th inning.
it’d be kind of fun if the rules were basically the same and the bases were the same as regulation baseball you just had to travel to get there. Like you’re allowed to use planes and cars. i call it baseball 17776
You need to check the baseball rulebook, how much of explosive remain of a baseball need to be caught for it to count as a baseball. The batter will explode most soild material to hit a ball with enough enery to make it fly across multiple states.
With a launch angle of 45 degrees, a distance traveled of 1300 miles (basically from the inside corner of texas border to about Detroit Michigan) and an initial height of 3 feet. The initial velocity came out to be 10,132 miles per hour. The ball would need to take about 1.5 million joules of energy.
(ignoring air resistance and a bunch of other things probably)
If they bunt and they make an error throwing to first base the ball might end up in the mississippi and the batter can walk home while first base tries to find the ball
Not very hard, probably the same amount of force to get a normal home run minus a bit due to no wall being in the way. Sure it wouldnt be a out of the park home run but i doubt the enemy team has anywhere near fast enough players to stop the batter.
This all assumes the batter survives the pitcher throwing mach jesus to get the ball that far.
Not only do you have to consider the curvature of the earth but also the speed and rotation of the earth and the time it would take for the ball to actually travel.
So it looks like this baseball game will be infinitely long as not even any of the greatest MLB pitchers of all time would even be able to get to first base, making them walk every batter. The second team to bat will then most likely win this game without taking a single at bat. The reason is they get to sit around and not do any walking. The first team will forfeit the game first once its players are fed up with walking 3,000 miles.
The orthographicly project baseball field doesn’t match the mostly spherical map projection. This game will never work. The foul lines are going to be curved.
I don't have to do maths to be 99% sure that there is no material on Earth , 80% sure that there is no material on the universe and 30% sure that there is no material in fiction that can withstand the amount of force that would need to be applied for making that shot.
Would exiting and entering the atmosphere in any way reduce the exit velocity at which you need to send the ball off the bat? Like as opposed to hitting it at your standard ~45⁰?
Where you gonna find a hurler who can pitch a strike with a 15 kilo tungsten ball, from 1000 km away? And how's he supposed to read the catcher's signals?
honestly not very far. If the players were at their normal positions that puts home plate in texas by the border and first base by oklahoma. The catcher would have to drive to southern wyoming to try and get the runner at 2nd. In my mind baseball this size is played with cars
Assuming the ball and players remain a normal size and the hitter can smash the ball to anywhere on the field, the advantage is to the hitter because the bases are all at known locations; whereas the ball will likely roll into that magical void that eats socks and keys.
I took a crack at it, assuming the launch point is Huston and the center of the fence is the Canadian border.
Simplified calculation ignoring air resistance, ball spin, and assuming the earth is also not spinning:
4.21 km/s at a launch angle of 40.2 degrees.
time of flight 9.25 minutes, and it gets to about the altitude of the ISS.
Energy required to make such a launch is just under 1/3rd of a 1k of TNT, at 4.184 Mega joules of energy.
Sadly, if we add air into the calculation, the ball would be dumping all of it's energy almost instantly.
No amount of speed will over come this issue, as drag increases with the square of velocity. This is all while assuming the ball is made of unobtanium indestructible materials. Increasing the velocity will just turn the whole situation into air instantly turning into a gabbilion degree fireball that expands with a shockwave that will leave a massive crater where Huston and home plate would be.
Can I ask I different question? I’ve seen people compare winning the powerball to getting one roulette number on a roulette wheel that’s like the size of the US. Can someone do the math and create an image? And how hard would you need to throw the ball to make it go all the way around?
The bigger issue is getting the ball from the pitcher's mound to the batter. If we're including an inside the park home run, the batter can just hit it down the left foul line and start their months-long run around the bases. Possible, but unlikely they'd be able to slip by whoever has the ball. Though now that I'm thinking about it, the three feet deviation you get in the base path would be scaled up to miles. Maybe you could sneak by? And the plates would be city sized as well.
How do you expect the pitcher to get the ball to the plate? And the outfield is hours away from catching a ball between bases. Each base looks.like almost a 2 hour drive across at points. Basemen would never see if someone is on base or not and runner likewise so they wouldn't know if they were safe or not. This game would take months to play 9 innings with the normal amount of players.
Have Aroldis Chapman fire a heater at Ted Williams and we’ll find out. I’d say Dave Kingman, but we need someone to actually hit the ball instead of generating wind energy
If the players are standing in the corresponding positions, he just has to hit a regular valid ball. then start running to the first base.
Before any of the catchers get to the ball, he'll be halfway to the second base.
Only if one of the players would take a shortcut to second - don't know if that is possible according to the rules - they would reach him, otherwise they would have to negate a few weeks headstart around the field.
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So I did some back‑of‑the‑envelope math on this.
Home plate is basically in Mexico and dead center is somewhere up in Canada, so call it ~2,000 miles to center. That’s about 10,560,000 feet.
Normal MLB home run: - distance ~400 ft
- off‑bat speed ~110 mph
For a simple projectile with the same launch angle and no air resistance, the range goes like the square of the launch speed. So the speed scales with the square root of the distance ratio.
Distance ratio: 10,560,000 / 400 ≈ 26,400
Square root of that ≈ 162
So you’d need an exit velocity of roughly
110 mph × 162 ≈ 18,000 mph.
That’s already basically orbital velocity (low Earth orbit is ~17,500 mph), and that’s ignoring air drag, spin, the ball ripping itself apart, etc. In reality you’d need even more.
So to hit a home run in Huge Baseball, the batter has to stop being an athlete and start being a railgun.
And the ball needs to be a metal with serious ablative resistance.
Okay, so it's going to be made of tungsten.
At this point we have stopped playing sports and started shelling Saskatchewan.
As a Canadian, I'm actually ok with this.
So long as it's televised, and the team I'm rooting for are winning.
As a Saskatchewanean... I'm not so ok with this.
But think of the tourism dollars! "Come see the Crater known as Saskatoon!"
I thought that was their slogan already
No that's the capital. The place that rhymes with megina.
I read this a mangina 🤣
At that point it's more like SaskaBOOM
It looks closer to Regina. It may be the city that rhymes with fun but that would not be fun.
There’s like five of you guys.
What’s the odds they any damage happens?
I know I hope they hook right..right into Montreal 😈
We're Canadian.
The team we're rooting for isn't winning.
Too. Soon.
"Hey Brent. You heard about that giant baseball field they built in the US?"
"Oh yeah. I guess they got jealous of the dirt spoon."
"Well uh. I mean I heard Lacey say they were evacuating Dog River since uh. I guess we're in the Home Run zone?"
"And what's your point, Hank?"
"They built a rail gun as the hitter."
[Panning swish cut]
The cast is driving off and waving just before the shelling starts.
That would've been a great finale for Corner Gas
I’m laughing so hard at this, my dog just looked at me with genuine concern
actually, proportionally most home runs are hit towards the pull line not centre field. So more likely shelling Idaho/Montana
Although the reason for that is based in human bio mechanics, so it does assume a human batter, which probably isn't a safe assumption.
This whole thread reminds me of the XKCD Relativistic Baseball.
A nuclear blast has sent a manhole flying at 125,000 mph... so we know that something can hypothetically travel 18,000mph+ easily with enough force.
The bat would need a small nuclear warhead on it. So maybe more like a small nuking.
Lmao. Bravo!
Yo I saw Shelling Saskatchewan live in concert
Never stop. 👊🏼
OK, this wins as perhaps the best thing I've seen on Reddit in a very long time, bravo.
Canadians of Reddit, would this be a good outcome or a bad outcome?
aim for Ottawa and Etobicoke
Underrated comment
Those wheat-growing bastards
To be fair not much to hit up there
At no point were we playing sports. "Playing sports" stopped when someone asked a question that presumed that a human batter would hit a ball to propel it to 100,000mph to traverse 2000 miles
Chill. Only 17,000 mph.
I wonder how accurate and consistent our new form of artillary could be? No expects Mexico to directly drop homerun bombs on Canada; surprise and an absolutely juiced batter are their best weapons.
Shelling Saskatchewan from Mexico I might add.
Statistically, most of the HRs would land near the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge in NW Nevada.
🎵Oh, I wish I was blowing up Prince Edward Island And going on to bomb Ontario The destruction of Canada and all of its culture Is by far my fav-o-rite scenario🎵
Most likely not going to hit anybody.
I mean, it would hit me.
Not the best idea...hit northern sask with a railgun that big and you might just make the most pure uranium on earth go critical...not sure if Pluto would be far enough a3ay from that much uranium going boom....
Maybe aim at Manitoba they like to stab people and dont have like the entire planets nuclear material underfoot
"Do you want to hear the terrifying truth, or would you like to see me sock a few dingers!?"
Bahahahaha fuck this got me good
My favorite American pastime, fucking with the neighbors
Paging Tungsten Arm O'Doyle
Man. Can we please get back to insane old-timey nicknames for baseball players?
Billy “Country Breakfast” Butler
Wait the PLAYER is going to be made of tungsten??!
It's a joke, made tungsten cheek.
Best quip yet
Three small tungstens in a trenchcoat
Well the player needs to be able to withstand the impact of contact. Of course robot umps will be a given in this scenario. Also an indestructible stadium and those cut-out "spectators" from the COVID season.
A wooden bat will never be able to achieve this.
I don’t want to think about the destructive power an 18,000mph baseball of tungsten would deliver on impact. 😬
Not to mention what the bat is made of, or how much power the batter has to produce to hit it.
I don't have time to run through the maths myself because I'm picking up a friend in a minute, but the Google AI overview thinks a 5kg sphere of tungsten (roughly the size of a baseball) going at orbital velocity of 7.8km/s would have roughly 150 Megajoules of kinetic energy.
Roughly equivalent to 35kg of TNT
Now an AI calculated that so take it with an entire bag of salt, not just a grain.
But it sounds vaguely correct to me based on what I know about micrometeorite and high velocity ammunition impacts.
It's enough to blow your entire house up.
can't imagine how painful it would be hit a tungsten baseball in real life
Superman steps up to plate.... hulk rubs a little kryptonite sap on the ball before the first pitch. Thor's hammer as the bat... hmmm
Wait superman can lift the hammer?
I need tungsten to live! Tuuunnnngggssstttteeeennnn!!!
I just need you to know that at least 1 person appreciates the reference. Thank you.
The ball has to circle the earth at least once to not be considered a foul
Hey my wedding ring is made of tungsten!!
Wait, did we establish whether the ball MUST survive?
If the ball burns up in the atmosphere from the speed of the hit, wouldn't that still be a home-run since it can't be caught to tag them out?
Maybe the speed required is *only* enough to make the ball disintegrate so you have unlimited time to make the home run?
I think the ball disintegrating would be ruled a ground rule double.
Did you also consider the curvature of the earth? I think that would end up being a diff-eq problem, but if we assume the earth is flat there it would tell us we would need to hit the ball quite a bit further
Curvature of the earth is probably not relevant given the bat and ball will both explode if they collide at a fraction of the 18k mph figure
Well yea, but the question was "how fast do we need to hit the ball?" Not "can we hit the ball that fast?"
This is becoming more of an xkcd problem
This would be an excellent comic on xkcd
The Earth isn't flat?
Let’s assume the baseball field is perfectly level. I mean if you’re going to make a field that big, you definitely have the resources to make it perfectly level come on now!
Level to what? Sea level is curved at this size. You likely mean perfectly flat, but that actually makes things a bit difficult because then gravity is pulling in a different direction rather than straight towards the ground. Let alone the phenomenal amount of resources that you'd need to make this field flat rather than just drawing some long lines there's no amount of resources you could use to create uniform gravity
i think trying that would make "mutually assured destruction" in nuclear war look like a walk in the park. The layer below tectonic plates where substantial quantities of magma are stored as a liquid, would intersect with the path of this flat baseball field. All the liquids nearby are going to try to move to the point on the baseball field that is closest to the center of gravity of the earth. (I'm not really sure what we are doing with the material being removed, but that will cause issues.)
Gonna find a lot more resources leveling that area. Mines, oil, etc.
So approximately Mach Fuck, to use freedom units.
You say that like it wouldn't make me want to actually watch baseball.
I am down for for a baseball league using railguns to fire tungsten projectiles into Canada and the players have to hop into F1 cars to race from San Antonio to Memphis to get to first base....
Actually yall, I think we just figured out the next Deathrace sequel...
Anyone else looking at this and thinking that Jon Bois needs to finish 20021 so he can then do the baseball version of it?
The things he could do with that math and some storytelling.
I feel like I’d do better as a railgun too.
Can we now do the calculations on the mitt an outfielder would need to catch this?
If you keep the ball the same mass as a real baseball (~145 g) and leave the speed to what “Huge Baseball” needs for a homer, you’re looking at around 18,000 mph, which is about 8,000 m/s.
Energy-wise that’s roughly 4.5–5 million joules, basically a kilogram of TNT going off. If a catcher tried to stop that in, say, half a meter of glove/arm “give” like a normal catch, the deceleration would be in the millions of g’s and the force would be on the order of 9 million newtons. The glove, the hand, the arm, and probably a good chunk of the catcher just wouldn’t exist in any recognizable form afterward.
To make it even vaguely survivable you’d have to stretch the stopping distance out over kilometers. Think a long rail or tunnel with progressively softer material or a giant multi‑kilometer crash net. At that point the “mitt” is basically an industrial decelerator or a small bunker, not a piece of leather on someone’s hand.
So you don’t really “catch” that ball. You build infrastructure to survive being hit by it.
Relevant xkcd
“And it’s gone!”
Just hard enough to make the ball move forward slightly. As long as no one fields the ball, any fair hit can be a home run.
It wouldn't be possible to go over the fence, though.
I was going to say essentially the same, but then I realized that technically you still have to run the bases, and that's going to be a long, arduous process where whoever eventually fields the ball will be chasing you.
Well how far are the bases away? 750 miles? So if he does a bunt at home plate he needs to run 3000 miles for a home run, before the catcher can toss a ball to one of the bases.
Catcher, if he’s not a faster runner than the batter to just tag him, is probably better off just holding onto the ball and waiting for the runner to round home in 300ish days. Because the catcher can’t throw a ball 750-1500 miles, and to coordinate that with the outfield and baseman, without the ball being gps encoded seems rather difficult, or he’d just have to throw it, then run up to it and pick it up and throw it again, repeatedly.
unless the catcher has more stamina than he can tag the runner while he’s sleeping at a motel 6 or something during his base run lol
Since the only stated parameter of the question is a home run, the catcher has no need to deliver the ball anywhere but near home. While the batter travels thousands of kilometers the catcher can casually walk to the ball, pick it up, and walk to the baseline between third and home. When the batter reaches third the catcher will be on the baseline with the ball and the batter won't reasonably be able to proceed.
Would the basepaths scale up? If so, the runner could sneak up from any angle to approach home plate and have a chance at avoiding the tag
If so then I have to assume that the bases themselves scale up, making it even harder to defend against the hitter. In this scenario, my answer would change. The catcher would have to proactively hunt for the batter because it would be impossible to defend home.
However, in this scenario I think we assume that all distances have scaled. In that case I am certain that the batter would never hit because the pitcher would not be able to throw the ball anywhere near home.
The funniest answer is what I hope for, and I find it funny if the pitcher has to throw it really hard then run and pick it up and throw it again and it takes 75 days for him to do that before he even gets in range of throwing it at the plate. He has to eat a lot of Hampton Inn breakfast on his work trip from the pitchers mound and racks up a lot of Hilton points
tangentially related - if the batter manages to hit one out, the distance between bases here is about 600 miles (3,168,000 ft), meaning that a home run trot at the mlb average 22.02 sec/240 ft would take
290664 seconds or 3.36 dayspitch clock be damned
EDIT: turns out i calculated for just one base, multiply by 4 to get the actual time of 13.44 days, just under two weeks
I may be misunderstanding but I don’t think people can run 320km in a day
I think they just calculated for one base. Would take almost 2 weeks of round-the-clock running for a full HR trot.
What are the rules about getting food and water during your HR trot? No human is capable of covering anything near that distance without eating, and no one could possibly carry enough food with them for a trip that long. So they're going to have to get resupplied on the way to first base. But there's probably a rule against that?
(Next we can discuss what happens when they stop to sleep or poop along the way.)
Cool idea about the size of these playing fields... here's an interesting article on how it would work if it were football!
https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football
I was hoping someone mentioned this! This is one of my favorite pieces of fiction EVER tbh
Jon bois is a national treasure
CAN I HAVE A SINGLE ORIGINAL THOUGHT, PLEASE
Came here looking for this.😀👍
... woah
What the fuck elab pls
17776 is a story that is, ostensibly, about football growing increasingly bizarre over thousands of years as an immortal, needless humanity seeks more and more elaborate ways of staying occupied.
It isn't actually about football at all. I have literally never watched a game of football and it is one of my favorite works. It's about humanity. Also the main characters are space probes. Highly recommended.
lunchables!
what the fuck is this
I just time traveled I am lucky not to be on drugs
Im gonna skip the math and just assume any object traveling at the speed needed to make this arc would vaporize instantly in our atmosphere.
A friend of mine had a similar idea. He said what if we played "traveling" baseball; wherever the ball landed on a successful hit became home plate on the next at-bat. I told him "Congratulations, you just invented golf."
Golf with people on the greens with gloves? Awesome
So, not that guy, but you'd need your pitcher to become a railgun before your batter. Also, It'd be really easy to hit a homerun bc none of the defense players (except the catcher) would know if you hit the ball or not. So, after you hit the ball, hop in the car and start driving; you could likely outrun (outdrive) the other players.
Science ain't an exact science for those bozo's
They get the ball and take it to home plate and wait. At the rate of play one game would take longer than you’d be alive. Your grandkids would have to finish the 9th inning.
it’d be kind of fun if the rules were basically the same and the bases were the same as regulation baseball you just had to travel to get there. Like you’re allowed to use planes and cars. i call it baseball 17776
I immediately thought of 17776 when I saw this lol
You need to check the baseball rulebook, how much of explosive remain of a baseball need to be caught for it to count as a baseball. The batter will explode most soild material to hit a ball with enough enery to make it fly across multiple states.
Punching in some numbers into this calculator: https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/projectile-motion
With a launch angle of 45 degrees, a distance traveled of 1300 miles (basically from the inside corner of texas border to about Detroit Michigan) and an initial height of 3 feet. The initial velocity came out to be 10,132 miles per hour. The ball would need to take about 1.5 million joules of energy.
(ignoring air resistance and a bunch of other things probably)
Technically not that fast.
If they bunt and they make an error throwing to first base the ball might end up in the mississippi and the batter can walk home while first base tries to find the ball
Well now you've wandered into Finland's version of baseball
Not very hard, probably the same amount of force to get a normal home run minus a bit due to no wall being in the way. Sure it wouldnt be a out of the park home run but i doubt the enemy team has anywhere near fast enough players to stop the batter.
This all assumes the batter survives the pitcher throwing mach jesus to get the ball that far.
Not only do you have to consider the curvature of the earth but also the speed and rotation of the earth and the time it would take for the ball to actually travel.
So it looks like this baseball game will be infinitely long as not even any of the greatest MLB pitchers of all time would even be able to get to first base, making them walk every batter. The second team to bat will then most likely win this game without taking a single at bat. The reason is they get to sit around and not do any walking. The first team will forfeit the game first once its players are fed up with walking 3,000 miles.
range formula for a projectile:
x = (v2 / g) * (sin(2θ))
assuming
x = 2,000,000 m
g = 10 m/s2
θ = 45 degrees
air drag = 0 N
then
v = 4472 m/s = 10,004 mph
note 1: orbital speed ≈ 7900 m/s ≈ 17,700 mph
note 2: with air drag, the ball would incinerate
forget the batter, that pitcher better have a literal ICBM for an arm.
put-outs at first are gonna be a nightmare, and I dare baserunners at first to try and steal.
The orthographicly project baseball field doesn’t match the mostly spherical map projection. This game will never work. The foul lines are going to be curved.
I don't have to do maths to be 99% sure that there is no material on Earth , 80% sure that there is no material on the universe and 30% sure that there is no material in fiction that can withstand the amount of force that would need to be applied for making that shot.
Would exiting and entering the atmosphere in any way reduce the exit velocity at which you need to send the ball off the bat? Like as opposed to hitting it at your standard ~45⁰?
All y'all aren't asking the right question.
Where you gonna find a hurler who can pitch a strike with a 15 kilo tungsten ball, from 1000 km away? And how's he supposed to read the catcher's signals?
honestly not very far. If the players were at their normal positions that puts home plate in texas by the border and first base by oklahoma. The catcher would have to drive to southern wyoming to try and get the runner at 2nd. In my mind baseball this size is played with cars
In this game will hitting a ball into orbit be considered a home run or will it be considered to be a foul ball? Inquiring minds want to know.
Assuming the ball and players remain a normal size and the hitter can smash the ball to anywhere on the field, the advantage is to the hitter because the bases are all at known locations; whereas the ball will likely roll into that magical void that eats socks and keys.
I took a crack at it, assuming the launch point is Huston and the center of the fence is the Canadian border.
Simplified calculation ignoring air resistance, ball spin, and assuming the earth is also not spinning:
4.21 km/s at a launch angle of 40.2 degrees.
time of flight 9.25 minutes, and it gets to about the altitude of the ISS.
Energy required to make such a launch is just under 1/3rd of a 1k of TNT, at 4.184 Mega joules of energy.
Sadly, if we add air into the calculation, the ball would be dumping all of it's energy almost instantly.
No amount of speed will over come this issue, as drag increases with the square of velocity. This is all while assuming the ball is made of unobtanium indestructible materials. Increasing the velocity will just turn the whole situation into air instantly turning into a gabbilion degree fireball that expands with a shockwave that will leave a massive crater where Huston and home plate would be.
Can I ask I different question? I’ve seen people compare winning the powerball to getting one roulette number on a roulette wheel that’s like the size of the US. Can someone do the math and create an image? And how hard would you need to throw the ball to make it go all the way around?
Odds of winning the powerball are 1/292,200,000
The smallest regulation roulette ball is 15 mm. The (pocket + fret) size for the 15 mm wheel is 15.527 mm.
On the low side, the wheel in question would have a circumference of 4,536.98 km.
I mean, you can hit a home run without knocking it out of the park. But it'll take days to run the bases.
The pitcher must have one hell of an arm
same difficulty.
basically any normal park home run hit would be a home run here too. . . . they aren't throwing that ball back to home plate. . . .
The bigger issue is getting the ball from the pitcher's mound to the batter. If we're including an inside the park home run, the batter can just hit it down the left foul line and start their months-long run around the bases. Possible, but unlikely they'd be able to slip by whoever has the ball. Though now that I'm thinking about it, the three feet deviation you get in the base path would be scaled up to miles. Maybe you could sneak by? And the plates would be city sized as well.
How do you expect the pitcher to get the ball to the plate? And the outfield is hours away from catching a ball between bases. Each base looks.like almost a 2 hour drive across at points. Basemen would never see if someone is on base or not and runner likewise so they wouldn't know if they were safe or not. This game would take months to play 9 innings with the normal amount of players.
I don’t think the atoms in our atmosphere would part and allow this ball to pass… that friction would see it burn up before it was out of eyeshot.
Have Aroldis Chapman fire a heater at Ted Williams and we’ll find out. I’d say Dave Kingman, but we need someone to actually hit the ball instead of generating wind energy
You would have to scale the size of the batter, the bat, the ball and the pitcher proportionally not taking in account gravity for the added mass.
About 4300 m/s is the lowest velocity that allows for a parabolic orbit that traverses the 19.89 degrees across earth's surface.
(This is of course neglecting air resistance because that's a PDE I don't feel like solving lol)
Easy:
If the players are standing in the corresponding positions, he just has to hit a regular valid ball. then start running to the first base.
Before any of the catchers get to the ball, he'll be halfway to the second base.
Only if one of the players would take a shortcut to second - don't know if that is possible according to the rules - they would reach him, otherwise they would have to negate a few weeks headstart around the field.