Baseball

So I was watching the Rays versus Sox game this afternoon when I saw Pedroia hit a homerun in the top of the first inning. Then I realized that you could calculate the amount of momentum needed to hit the ball over the center field fence, if you knew the mass of the ball and the height of the fence, and the angle its hit at. By taking the angle its hit at and the length and height, you could use the range equation and solve for the initial velocity of the ball. Then you could use this velocity to find the momentum of the ball and finally the bat. The calculation isn’t completely correct because of air resistance and such but it should be fairly close. The collision should be inelastic because you lose some kinetic energy to the reverberation of the bat as well as the heat and spin of the ball. If you really wanted to have fun you could take into account those factors.

Thanks for reading; I’m going to sleep… Mark.