[msb-alumni] Peter Brancazio, 81, Physicist Who Sank Concept of Rising Fastball, Dies on April 25, 2020
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 20 May 2020 14:30:42 -0400
BlankTHOSE WE'VE LOST. Peter Brancazio, 81, Physicist Who Sank Concept of
Rising
Fastball, Dies. By Richard Sandomir.
He used science to demystify the myths of rising fastballs and Michael Jordan's
seemingly long hang time. He died of complications of the novel coronavirus.
Peter J. Brancazio, a physics professor who debunked concepts like the rising
fastball (physically impossible) and Michael Jordan's apparently endless hang
time
(much shorter than fans believed), died on April 25 in Manhasset, N.Y. He was
81. The
cause was complications of the novel coronavirus, his son Larry said.
Professor Brancazio, who taught at Brooklyn College for more than 30 years, was
one
of a small number of sports-minded physicists whose research anticipated the
use of
the advanced statistics that are now accessible through computerized tracking
technology.
His work, which he began in the 1980s, was filled with terms like "launching
angle"
(how high a ball is hit, in degrees) and "spin rate" (the measurement of a
pitch in
revolutions per minute) that are now part of baseball's lingua franca. (Launch
angle,
not launching angle, is the term now widely used.)
Although he was obsessed with basketball, Professor Brancazio was best known
for what
he had to say about baseball, notably his explanation that a so-called rising
fastball could not rise -- even if pitches thrown by fireballers like Nolan
Ryan had
seemingly been doing that for decades.
"The rising fastball is an illusion," Professor Brancazio told The Kansas City
Star
in 1987. Gravity, he said, makes everything fall, even baseballs, and no one
can
throw one fast enough and with enough spin to overcome gravity's natural force.
"The
rising fastball just looks as if it's rising," he said. "It's really just not
dropping as far" as a typical fastball.
A fastball thrown at 90 miles per hour and 1,800 revolutions per minute would
drop
three feet when it reached home plate, he said. But a fastball that is thrown
with
still more backspin will fall only two and a half feet, a six-inch difference
that
creates the illusion of rising.
Professor Brancazio, whose tools included a calculator and a TRS-80 computer,
wrote
about his research in professional journals; in magazines like Popular
Mechanics; and
in the 1984 book "Sport Science: Physical Laws and Optimum Performance."
In a June 1991 segment of the ABC News program 'PrimeTime Live,' he presented a
scientific solution to a sports question: Why does Michael Jordan seem to be
able to
fly during a spectacular slam dunk? Several fans were asked during the segment
to
guess how long Jordan seemed to hang in the air. Their guesses ranged from six
to 10
seconds. No, Professor Brancazio, said. Even Jordan was subject to gravity.
His hang
time was only 0.9 seconds.
Later that year, Professor Brancazio elaborated on the physics of hang time for
Popular Mechanics. In an article about the science of slam dunks, he devised a
formula that determined that a 36-inch vertical leap would equal hang time of
0.87
seconds and that a four-foot vertical leap would equal one second.
"No small part of Jordan's greatness is the fact that he seems to cover
enormous
horizontal distances in the air," Professor Brancazio wrote. "He accentuates
this
illusion by releasing his shots on the way down, rather than at the peak of his
trajectory."
Peter John Brancazio was born on March 22, 1939, in the Astoria section of
Queens.
His mother, Ann (Salomone) Brancazio, was an actuarial worker for The Hartford,
an
insurance company. His father, also named Peter, sorted mail for the Post
Office.
When Professor Brancazio and his future wife, Ronnie Kramer, were dating as
teenagers, she gave him a gift that would help guide him in his professional
life: a
telescope.
"It made him want to study astronomy," she said.
After graduating with a bachelor's degree in engineering science from New York
University in 1959, Brancazio earned a master's in nuclear engineering from
Columbia
University a year later. He began teaching physics at Brooklyn College in 1963
while
working toward a Ph.D. in astrophysics from N.Y.U.
During his 34 years at Brooklyn College, he was also a director of the
college's
observatory. Professor Brancazio wrote his first sports article, about
basketball,
for The American Journal of Physics in 1981.
In it, he calculated the optimum launching angles for shots from various
distances on
the floor. Having distilled the lessons of shooting on the schoolyards of
Astoria, he
found that a ball was best launched at an angle of 45 degrees, plus half the
angle of
the incline from the shooter's hand to the front of the rim of the basket, or
about
50 to 55 degrees.
He had, he admitted, a personal reason for writing the paper. "In truth," he
wrote,
"the major purpose of this research was to find some means to compensate for
the
author's stature (5' 10' in sneakers), inability to leap more than eight inches
off
the floor, and advancing age."
His intellectual detour into baseball, basketball and other sports enlivened
his
classes and made him part of a small group of physicists who brought science to
sports, among them the Yale professor Robert Adair, who wrote the 1990 book
"The
Physics of Baseball." (Both the original edition and the updated 2002 edition
are
available on Bookshare.)
Michael Lisa, a professor of physics at the Ohio State University, said that
when he
did the research for his 2016 book"'The Physics of Sports," Professor
Brancazio's
book had been an inspiration. "His book is a favorite among physicists for its
clear,
accurate treatment," Professor Lisa wrote in an email. "Meanwhile, it is
popular
among a broader readership for its compelling approach, obviously driven by a
passion
for sports coupled with a scientific mind."
Professor Brancazio had no doubt that the people he most wanted to impress --
athletes -- would disdain his research. And he knew why, or at least why they
did in
the era before advanced training techniques transformed athletic achievement.
"Larry Bird does not need to be told to release his shots at the optimum
launching
angle," he wrote in The American Journal of Physics in 1988, "nor does Dwight
Gooden
have to understand the Magnus effect in order to throw a devastating curveball."
Professor Brancazio retired from Brooklyn College in 1997 and then briefly
taught
adult education courses there and at Queens College. He lectured on science,
religion
and astronomy at Hutton House, part of Long Island University, from 1999 until
last
year.
In addition to his wife and his son Larry, Professor Brancazio is survived by
another
son, David, and five grandchildren.
Professor Brancazio became a sought-after physicist in the news media when
sports met
science. During Game 1 of the 1991 World Series, for instance, CBS introduced
SuperVision, a computerized animation of the path and speed of pitches. One
pitch, by
Jack Morris of the Minnesota Twins, clocked in at 94 miles per hour when it
left his
right hand and was the same speed when it landed in the catcher's mitt.
CBS's analysts were impressed. But when asked a day later, Professor Brancazio
said
that a ball could not maintain the same speed on its path of 60 feet 6 inches.
"The
ball has to slow down by air resistance," he told The New York Times in 1991.
"No way
it can maintain speed or pick up speed. It should lose 9 percent of its speed
along
the way."
The inventor of SuperVision acknowledged the error, saying that the speeds had
probably been rounded off -- the ball might have left Morris's hand at 94.4
m.p.h.
but had landed at 93.6.
A pitch that maintained its speed, it turned out, was as magical as a rising
fastball.
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