Why in baseball the optimal angle for a home run is a lot less than 45 degrees?
In high school physics (okay, this is no longer 5 year old level) to throw something to the most distant, you throw it at 45 degrees.
But why in baseball the optimal angle for hitting a home run is a lot less than what is taught in physics?
I kind of understand it has to do with air resistance, but why does air resistance change the angle by that much?
In: Physics
There’s a lot of good replies about energy transfer and such. But there’s also the angle and distance to consider.
To get a traditional home run, the ball just has to make it over the back wall. The minimum required angle for that is usually far less than 45 degrees. Using math (Pythagoram theory), the ground (a) and wall (b) make the right angle, and the hypotonuse is the flattened average of the ball’s flight path (c).
So, hitting at an angle smaller than 45 degrees shortens the distance of the ball’s flight from the plate to the back wall. This also means it doesn’t take as much energy to get the homerun at the flatter angle.
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