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A small, but interesting, portion of baseball can be understood on the basis of physical principles. The flight of balls, the liveliness of balls, the structure of bats, and the character of the collisions of balls and bats are a natural province of physics and physicists.

— Robert Adair

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More quotes by Robert Adair

Balls curve as a consequence of asymmetries in the resistance of the air through which they pass.

Note that the ball falls at a rather large angle at the end of its flight; the trajectories are not symmetric.

To hit a baseball with dispatch, one needs both to step into the ball and to rotate.

Control pitchers hit corners with an uncertainty of about 3". One must be a fairly good shot to shoot a pistol with that accuracy.

Much of the subtlety of baseball is derived from the fact that so much of the game is played in the region between definitely smooth flow and definitely turbulent flow, at ball velocities greater than 50 mph and smaller than 120 mph.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Robert Adair (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.