A video from everyone’s favorite engineer and cartoonist
The creator of the
Unfortunately, the scenario doesn’t end well for the batter, the catcher, people watching in the stadium behind, or those in any nearby city.
“The ideas of aerodynamics don’t apply here. Normally, air would flow around anything moving through it,” Munroe explains in the video, and
The front of the ball gets ripped apart by fusion, but even these constant thermonuclear explosions wouldn’t slow the ball down that much given how fast it was going. Before the batter has registered the ball leaving your hand, they get disintegrated, before houses nearby start getting leveled.
We imagine it would be of small comfort at this point for the batter’s widow to learn the rules state their remains are allowed to advance to first base.