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This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Steve Mirsky. Got a minute?
It's been a fun baseball season, but the storm cloud of steroids has hung over the game for years now, especially tarnishing BarryBon's assault on the all-time home run record.Tufts University physicist Roger Tobin is a big baseball fan / and recently did some calculations to evaluate just how much of an impact steroids could actually have on power hitting. When he crunched the numbers, he found the following:
Steroids might bring about a 10% increase in muscle mass, that extra muscle could help a batter swing 5% faster. And that extra bat speed could cause a ball to jump off the bat 4% faster. It doesn't sound like much, however if you add 4% initial velocity to a model distribution of trajectory of batted baseballs, you can increase homers by a full 50%.Tobin's research will appear in the American journal of Physics. He notes that weight-lifting in / smaller ball parts also plays a role in pumping up the number of homeruns. But the power surges of the 90s coincide with steroids more than the other factors.
Thanks for the minute for a Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Steve Mirsky.