Baseball

Today was a pretty boring day. While i was watching tv i happened to turn to the Boston Red Sox vs. Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim game when it was in the 11th inning. As i watched the game i realized that there is a lot of physics involved in baseball whether it be pitching the ball which creates a projectile, or hitting the ball which uses many physics properties like newton's laws and which also creates a projectile. The game was very intense but in the end the Angels won which forced a game 4 of the ALDS. THe game lasted more than 4 hours and ended around 1:45 a.m. Eastern time. This gave me the idea for my physics blog and i found these pictures of a game i played a couple years ago. Before i slid into home plate, i was at third base and i started accelerating to home and right before i got there i slid which caused me to slow down until i came to a complete stop and then i jumped up. In the action of sliding there are many uses of physics. The first of which is Newton's first law of motion. Newton's first law states that an object at rest stays at rest and an object at motion stays in motion unless acted upon by a net force. In this case i am the object in motion and the net force is the ground. Another physics use in sliding is acceleration. Before i slid into home i was at third base where i began to accelerate to home plate. I continued to accelerate until i started to slide where i became a projectile of sorts. As i began to slide into home i was in mid-air where i then fell at -9.8 m/s/s . I continued to fall at this rate until i hit the ground where my vertical acceleration was 0 m/s/s. I had no idea there was so much physics in baseball.