We’ve all seen it a thousand times: a baseball player tries to field a ball, but can’t catch it and it goes rolling on the outfield grass.
“That ball went right through him!” an announcer will then say.
Well, what if that was literal?
Destin Sandin has the answer.
Sandin, an engineer and baseball fan, is the maker of the YouTube series Smarter Every Day. His video last year in which he created a machine called “The Mad Batter” to hit “the world’s longest home run” has gotten nearly 15 million views. This summer, he built an air cannon that launches baseballs past the speed of sound. Giancarlo Stanton destroys baseballs figuratively. Sandin does it literally.
This week, Sandin posted a new video with his supersonic baseball cannon, and it shows what it really looks like when “That ball went right through him!” becomes reality. A thousand-mile-an-hour-ball plus a crash test dummy, unsurprisingly, results in a crash test dummy with a baseball sized hole.
It’s incredibly cool to see, especially in super slow motion, and so are the other tests, showing what might happen if someone tried to catch a baseball traveling at Mach 1. Spoiler alert: goodbye, hand. And, how many gloves would it take to finally stop a ball going at such a speed? Well… a lot. Give it a watch.
Here’s hoping that Sandin keeps doing more videos with his cannon, giving us more answers to the questions of what would happen if “Baseball Bugs” was real life:
We’d say don’t try this at home, but you don’t have the equipment or the expertise to build a supersonic baseball cannon, so just watch those videos.
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