Always wondered how fast a pitch would be on the moon? Wonder no more
The answer to how fast a pitch would be on the moon
I think a lot about space baseball, or sbaseball, if you will. After all, beyond the fact that, duh, it's space and that's super cool, who doesn't want to imagine Mike Trout leaping dozens of feet in the air to rob a home run? Or just think of how far a Giancarlo Stanton home run would fly? Or imagine the mind-blowing speeds of an Aroldis Chapman fastball in an atmosphere-free environment?
Well, wonder no more. Thanks to 10-year-old Joe Miller who asked "Would a baseball pitch travel faster [on the moon] or on Earth?" we now have our answer.
According to one of the faculty members at Binghamton University, a ball that leaves a pitcher's hand at 90 mph on Earth arrives at the plate at about 80 mph, having dropped about three feet thanks to gravity along the way.
Thanks to the lack of atmosphere on the moon, there is no "drag force" slowing the pitch down on the way to the plate, so it will hit the catcher's mitt at the same speed -- while also only dropping about six inches.
Which means that this would be even harder to hit:
That's also why we need to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into NASA funding -- so we can start the outer space World Series immediately. And don't tell Buzz Aldrin that it's impossible. He wouldn't like that very much.