Wired Science

The Scientists Who Keep Major League Baseball Honest

Back when baseball was young, it was a rare major league batter who had hit more than 50 home runs in a career. Then all of a sudden in the 1990s, the number of heavy homer hitters started going up like a high flyball, with dozens passing that coveted milestone, from Grady Anderson to Barry Bonds. But why? Some fans cried foul. The explanation, they insisted, must be steroids, or doctored bats - or even that something had been done to the balls themselves to make them easier to hit out of the park.

That's when Major League Baseball called in the experts: James Sherwood and Patrick Drane, engineers who run the Baseball Research Center at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Since 1999, it has been this pair's exclusive duty to make sure that every baseball pitched in a Major League game has precisely the officially-prescribed degrees of hardness and bounce.

At the start of each season and again just before the World Series, the league sends the scientists crates of its official Rawlings baseballs. Some they strip down, peeling back their leather covers to ensure that their insides consists of 85% wool and 15% cotton/polyester yarn wrapped around a red rubber "pill" with the regulation degree of liveliness. Others they blast out of an air cannon at a slab of ash, the wood used in most bats, measuring the balls' rebound speed to make sure their bounciness is within the league's strict limits.

WIRED Science took a trip to the lab to learn just how these engineers are keeping America’s favorite pastime honest. We also took a look at the batter-baffling physics of one of the game's most talked-about new pitches - the gyroball.