Nationals Baseball: Plus or Minus time wasted

Monday, March 26, 2012

Plus or Minus time wasted

I can't leave this well enough alone.

Could Werth have hit the ball 500 ft? Assuming all Boz's walking was correct it IS possible. Boz assumes a 3-4-5 triangle to calculate the distance the ball would have went if it didn't hit the tree. Why does he go with 3-4-5?  Probably because he remembers it from school, but as you can imagine there really isn't any good reason for that choice. A line drive hitting the tree 12 feet up would go further than 12 feet out, a can of corn
 hitting at the same place would probably be lucky to go 4 feet more.

Without knowing the angle of the ball when it hit the tree, we're pretty much at a loss for being exact. (there are other ways of getting at it but they involve even more stuff we don't know). But at 12 feet up on a long home run there isn't that much difference between a good average guess, which is kind of what Boz put out, and the most accurate calculation. He said 9-12 feet. The old baseball Tale of the Tape, which is slightly better (but honestly not much), would put it at 7.5 (high fly) -14.5 (line drive) extra feet.  If we take the longest possible answer from that (and why wouldn't we for a Spring Training home run) we get 501 feet.

So let's say that then.  501 feet for Werth.  Why not, right?

4 comments:

Mike B said...

Sounds good to me.
501 it is.

Anonymous said...

Yes Harper sounds good to me as well. It's all in good fun. Hey at least Werth is actually hitting (for now).

Ollie said...

We're debating the distance of a Spring Training homer. It's time for the season to start.

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