The Most Entertaining Baseball Article I've Read Today

[Sylvus]

To call it in-depth analysis would be a gross understatement, but this article on one of the greatest baseball games ever played boggles the mind. It's quite humorous, if you have some time to kill I recommend it. Who doesn't remember watching that as a kid?

Using an orthodox delivery, Bugs delivers a pitch which appears quite fast, but is then able to take the catcher’s position and (as the catcher) encourage himself (as the pitcher). When he catches the ball, the force of the impact throws him back and shatters the backstop.
...

This provokes a most interesting investigation. Clearly, the ball cannot have been thrown with much force, or he would not have been able to have run and caught it. We can be especially sure of this given that catching the ball imparted far more force than he could have expended throwing it. However, from what we can see from the ball’s path as it is caught is that it is nearly flat and extremely fast. Relativity prevents us from believing that he is able to travel and nearly-luminal speeds, as it rules out traveling extremely fast and arriving three-seconds before the ball without (as one barrier) himself experiencing massive and noticeable aging.

What can we make of this then? Two theories appear initially viable:

There is a wormhole as theorized by Feynman and others that allows Bugs to step off the mound and be transported back just slightly in time and over about sixty feet in distance without affecting anything else
Bugs’ delivery of the pitch is deceptive, and it is actually extremely slowly thrown with respect to the plate, and it is his encouragement of the pitch that acclerates the ball towards the plate, "flattening" its trajectory
When thrown, the pitch must be traveling at least as slow as 15ft/s (to give him time to run to the plate and then talk). At the same time, it can’t touch the ground before crossing the plate, or be ruled an automatic ball, so it must actually be thrown upwards at least as fast as to resist the force of gravity (as g =32ft/s^2). Since the pitch crosses the plate at approximately the same height it was thrown, we know when it left Bunny’s hand, it was traveling at about 64ft/s. Neglecting air friction and the effects of spin on the ball:

0s: 64ft/s up
1s: 32ft/s up
2s: 0ft/s up
3s: 32ft/s down
4s: 64ft/s down

64ft/s = 3,840ft/m = 230,400 ft/h = ~44mph