“…thinner air” cited by sports broadcaster
From DeadSpin’s Timothy Burke:
Tim McCarver Blames Global Warming For The Increase In Major League Home Runs
We’d normally save this sort of thing for McCarve’d Up (which will be back next week after being pre-empted for NFL draft coverage) but Tim McCarver said one of the stupidest things ever spoken on a television broadcast today, blaming global warming for “making the air thin” and thus leading to a rise in home runs.
Climate change, or in McCarver’s words “climactic change,” is the culprit (and not, say, steroids, the age of which McCarver insists is over). Global warming is a real thing (climate change deniers are already giving McCarver a beatdown online) but the theory it’s led to increased major league offensive production is one of the most insane things ever asserted by a professional broadcaster. And this man is in the Hall of Fame! [Fox]
h/t to WUWT reader Eric Neilsen
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Former MLB player and broadcaster Tim McCarver…Image from Wikipedia
Too many balls to the head?
UPDATE: It gets dumber. MLB has blocked the video on YouTube citing copyright violations…except that under fair use exceptions to the copyright law, criticism of boneheadedness is allowed, especially when using short snippets like this video clip.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSRwnY3eHKU&feature=player_embedded
And these two incidents, combined with exorbitant prices to support exorbitant salaries, are why I don’t go to baseball games anymore. The great American pastime has lost its mojo.
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As a lifelong Cardinal fan and WUWT follower I heard the remark from Mccarver. I immediately remembered that he was a catcher. Catchers equiptment in the baseball community is known as “the tools of ignorance”. Only the ignorant play the position. Even if you’re not ignorant when you put on the equipment a few foul balls or 50 foot curve balls quickly knocks the good sense out of you.
WRT Carrick. I remember Ted Williams always talking about swinging up.
And I can’t help but show this link if the moderator doesn’t mind.
Recall, from your atmospheric studies, balloon/rawinsonde ‘soundings’ (Skew-T diagrams/plots etc) and personal observations during SLF experience aboard commercial airliners even that above ~ 10,000 ft (this can vary) you’ve got dry air (note this is where fair-weather puffy cumulus ‘terminate’ during their rise from ground-based thermals) … so unless you’re limited on flight ceiling RH at cruise altitude is not so much a factor for TAS …
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I will have to exception to, and challenge this last assertion on the basis of previously cited characteristics of ‘moist’ humid air (higher RH air, which is less dense) vs dry (lower RH) air (at the same temperature) which possesses a higher density. The ‘spin’ does effectively what the extra length on an airfoil does; providing for increased ‘velocity’ (ball wrt to air) above the ball and hence reduced pressure above the ball; per the Bernoulli principle, allowing the net ‘pressure’ exerted on the bottom of the ball to force the ball upward (this we term ‘lift’). For the same reason that some aircraft must recalculate an acceptable minimum speed for take-off (for higher than normal humidities) to achieve a necessary lift figure, I contend that the ‘lift’ of a baseball hit with back-spin would also be reduced on a ‘humid’ day.
Other factors which were cited above such as the environment the baseballs are stored in (I would call it an ‘environmental soak’ wherein the leather and other ball materials either absorb or release moisture that affects the impact characteristics of said ball when in contact with the bat) before use per ‘experiment and observation’ provided by the Mythbuster crew provides compelling insight into a very important factor affecting the distance a baseball may be hit.
“Curve of a Baseball”: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/pber.html
Airfoil and lift: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift_(force)
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On a less encouraging note, I’m pretty sure that Climate Change is responsible for the marked decline in the number of young ladies I have scored with over the last thirty-five years.
Jim, the Magnus effect depends on the skin thickness around the baseball. The larger the skin thickness, the greater the effect. The skin thickness is a function of the viscosity of the atmosphere and increases with increasing absolute humidity. For a relatively slow moving ballistic object like a baseball, I think the extra lift you get from Bernouli’s effect will outweigh the increased drag on the object.
The lift on a jet plane’s wing (including commercial jet airliners) isn’t primarily from the Bernouli effect, but from the angle of attack of the wing (supersonic-capable jet fighter wings cross sections are nearly symmetric for example). If you rely on asymmetric wing shape for lift, you get too much drag at high speed.
For a propelled object like an airplane that relies on momentum transfer generating lift, the thicker skin depth is just a drag term, and since it doesn’t contribute to the plane’s lift, I can see how it would require a larger net force for takeoff. I don’t have a reference that says humidity affects the take-off speed though. Do you have one?
I agree of course there are a lot of other facts that are at play besides humidity and temperature in how far a baseball will travel, given an initial set of conditions (e.g., velocity and spin vectors).
DirkH says: “The increased CO2 content clearly enables faster oxygen release in muscle tissue, as hemoglobin is sensitive to the higher acidity caused by the CO2. It has nothing to do with thinner air. ”
Aha. That explains the many times I’ve seen guys sitting in the dugout, inhaling CO2 from a compressed gas cylinder. : ]
BTW, I think McCarver was trying to be funny.
Alvin W:
No doubt the angle that the ball leaves the bat affects its trajectory too, lol.
I was just considering places where humidity (and other state variables of the atmosphere) affect the trajectory of the baseball, given an initial velocity vector. I doubt humidity has any direct effect on the angle that the bat is swung at for example. 😛
Yeah. The players juicing it up has NOTHING to do with it. Right……
Wow. I thought Tim was smarter than that. Guess I was wrong.
Kind of answering my own question to Jim. Here’s the FAA manual covering the relevant part. See in particular the discussion of “density elevation” versus “pressure elevation”, some interesting content there.
It mentions that water vapor, being less dense that dry air, will decrease the density of the air, hence the airfoils will produce less lift. Since warmer air can hold more moisture (before it precepts) a higher temperature with the same RH will have a lower density. But the effect is very minor.
There’s a calculator here that let’s you play with this.
Some numbers (Temperature in °C, density dry air and density saturated air in kg/m3, and % difference, assuming P = 1000 hPa ≈ 1 atmosphere).
T rho_dry rho_moist %diff
0 1.2753 1.2724 -0.2%
5 1.2524 1.2484 -0.3%
10 1.2303 1.2247 -0.5%
15 1.209 1.2013 -0.6%
20 1.1883 1.178 -0.9%
25 1.1684 1.1546 -1.2%
30 1.1491 1.131 -1.6%
Quite obviously, even in high temperature environments, the effect of moisture on lift (via angle of attack anyway) is very small, and much less important than the air temperature in determining how much lift you get (e.g., the “density elevation” discussed in the FAA manual.]
It would be interesting to look at effect of temperature on airframe drag via the change in viscosity for moist versus dry air. Fun stuff.
The video has been removed
_Jim says:
April 29, 2012 at 2:21 pm
@me: Recall, from your atmospheric studies, balloon/rawinsonde ‘soundings’ (Skew-T diagrams/plots etc) and personal observations during SLF experience aboard commercial airliners even that above ~ 10,000 ft (this can vary) you’ve got dry air (note this is where fair-weather puffy cumulus ‘terminate’ during their rise from ground-based thermals) … so unless you’re limited on flight ceiling RH at cruise altitude is not so much a factor for TAS …
Generally speaking, that’s true for altitudes greater than 10,000′ MSL (above mean sea level), unless you’re doing mountain flying — it can get pretty humid in river valleys with bases at 13,000′ MSL; above 13,500, not so much. Most of my flying is at altitudes below 1,500′ above ground level (AGL), and the difference in power requirements between hot-dry and hot-humid is usually less than 3%, but if you’re operating at a high power setting to begin with, that extra 3% requirement can be a show-stopper.
Well, if the improvements in the players are due to AGW and not the coaches and trainers, then those people, and their expensive salaries can be fired.
But since we all know that is wrong, the coaches and trainers should instead be encouraged to sue Tim McCarver for defamation of character.
On the stupid sports statement front, a blast from the past.
So Bum Phillips was only partially right. It wasn’t helium, it had to be the global warming running amok when Ray Guy was punting for the Raiders. For those who may not know, Bum Phillips, coach of the NFL’s Houston Oilers in the 70’s, accused Ray Guy, punter extraordinaire, of filling footballs with helium to get the massive hang time and distance he, Guy, attained throughout his career. Phillips even sent a football he retained from a game against the Oakland Raiders to Rice University to have it tested and the results were naturally negative. He should have blamed global warming, except at the time we were headed for another Ice Age. Well, according to all the peer-reviewed work, and the authorative Time magazine..
So what’s wrong with this? The previous warm period in the US was in the 1930s, and that was when Jimmie Foxx would have shattered Babe Ruth’s home run record, but for some netting installed that robbed him of 9 home runs.
Tell that to Albert Pujlos
Deion must have been just trying to cool McCarver off what with the global warming and all.
Mike Busby says:
April 28, 2012 at 10:41 pm
Yes but lets not forget that baseball players also think a purely US based competition is somehow a World Series,
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Never mind that Canada too fields a major league team is there a particular baseball team in the myriad other countries that play baseball that could challenge the MLB WORLD Series champion?
Most of you must not be baseball fans. Tim McCarver has been saying stupid things for years. On the subject of baseball. Why would anyone think it surprising for him to say something stupid about climate change? For anyone who has listened to McCarver broadcasting a baseball game, a statement like this is to be expected and given as much attention as it deserves – none.
An actual reply defending this silly assertion:
OReilly? H2O is lighter than O2 and N2, whereas CO2 is heavier. “Thinning” would mostly result from warming — or altitude. Pitchers hate tossing in Colorado; the balls curve less and get hit farther.