Welcome to my site devoted to research on the physics of baseball . My particular research interests are two-fold: the physics of the baseball-bat collision and the flight of the baseball. I have done quite a bit of independent research in both areas. I am also heavily involved with several areas of practical interest to the game. One is characterizing, measuring, and regulating the performance of non-wood bats, an area for which I have served on committees advising the NCAA and USA Baseball. Another is exploiting new technologies for tracking the baseball, such as PITCHf/x, HITf/x, and TrackMan, for novel uses in baseball analytics. But this site does much more than catalog my own work. It attempts to provide links to much of the high-quality work done over the past decade or so on various aspects of the physics of baseball. If readers know of a site that I have overlooked, please contact me.

Recent Research Highlights

Contributions to Variation in Fly Ball Distance Alan Nathan, Fangraphs, July 6, 2020. Contributions to Variation in Fly Ball Distance: A Followup Alan Nathan, July 20, 2020. It is a known fact that for given launch conditions, there is a variation in the distance a fly ball carries. Various aspects of this were studied an earlier article and again in a followup article. The currently research takes full advantage of the Statcast capabilities for tracking the batted ball and determining its spin rate and spin axis to answer this question. After controlling for exit velocity, spray angle, and launch angle, the remaining rms spread of 11 ft come from four different sources in roughly equal contributions: variation of backspin from mean value; variation of sidespin from mean value; ball-to-ball variation in drag coefficient; measurement noise. The followup article shows, among other things, that the total spin rate provides far less information in determining the distance than does the individual backspin and sidespin components. It also shows that the measurement noise is dominated by the noise in the actual distance measurement rather than in the drag coefficient measurement.

Determining the 3D Spin Axis from Statcast Data Alan Nathan, May 25, 2020 update, Unpublished The 3D Spin Axis: An Addendum Alan Nathan, August 31, 2020, Unpublished A technique is developed to determine the direction of the spin axis for pitched baseballs. The method utilizes the Trackman measurement of the trajectory, specifically the spin-induced movement, to determine the active spin. An important physics input to this method is the relationship between active spin and movement, which is separately determined from laboratory experiments under controlled conditions. The combination of active spin and the Trackman measurement of the total spin allow a determination of the spin axis in 3 dimensions and the spin efficiency, the latter being the ratio of active to total spin. A useful formula is developed relating the movement to the number of rotations of the ball between release and home plate. The role of experimental noise on the measurement of the trajectory is discussed. An important caveat is that the technique implicitly assumes that the movement is due to the Magnus effect and not to other possible forces on the ball. Click here for the spreadsheet template for performing the calculations. The addendum points out an unresolved ambiguity in the relationship between spin and movement whenever the spin efficiency is less than one.

Why Does a Fly Ball Carry Better to Centerfield? Alan Nathan, Unpublished This article is an analysis of the reasons why fly balls with otherwise identical launch conditions carry farther to centerfield than to left or right field.

Optimizing the Swing: A Physics-Based Approach Alan Nathan, Presentation at 2019 SABR Analytics Conference In this presentation (audio link), I present the results of various experiments on oblique ball-bat collisions and show how they are used to predict batted ball parameters from the swing parameters, as shown in the figure. Then I start to address the "reverse engineering" problem, whereby one tries to determine the swing parameters, especially the attack angle, from the batted ball parameters. The issue of timing enters if the attack angle of the bat differs from the descent angle of the ball, and this issue is investigated quantiatively. Finally, the question is addressed whether it is advantageous to alter the swing to sacrifice exit velocity to gain some extra spin on the batted ball. Further links related to this topic can be found by clicking here.

Pitch Movement, Spin Efficiency, and All That Alan M. Nathan, The Hardball Times, August 27, 2018 This article takes a critical look at how movement is determined from measurements of the trajectory. Two techniques are investigated. Technique 1 is that used currently by Statcast/Trackman. Technique 2 is based on one that I investigated over 10 years ago. I show that Technique 1 results in systematic deviations of the movement from the exact values whereas Technique 2 does much better. The underlying physics behind Technique 2 is discussed here; click here for the spreadsheet template described there.

Trajectory Calculator This is a link to a page describing the latest version of my Trajectory Calculator, which is now fully 3-dimensional and utilizes drag and lift coefficients that have been optimized using Statcast data.

Going Deep On Goin' Deep Alan Nathan, The Hardball Times, April 6, 2016 In this article, I use Statcast fly ball data from the 2015 season to investigate how fly ball distance depends on exit speed, vertical launch angle, and elevation. The Coors Field effect is quantified. Indirectly, this analysis is used to determine the effect on fly ball distance of temperature, relative humidity, and wind. A perhaps surprising result is the weak dependent of distance on the rate of backspin, in agreement with earlier findings reported in this article.