The ball has to leave the bat anywhere between 90 and 120 miles an hour. But you can easily pop home runs at 100 miles an hour exit velocity. The only way to get the velocity of the ball is to use a Doppler phenomenon on it. If you are looking exactly in the direction the ball is coming, if you are at any angle to that, you will measure a lesser speed than the actual ball is moving.
What is exit velocity? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly explore parabolas, measuring the speed of an object using the Doppler effect, and other physics in baseball.
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Photo Credit: Andrew nyr, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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