How fast do baseballs get hit

But I only missed a couple of games. Wright got hit in the head by a 93 mph fastball thrown by Matt Cain in I got headaches for a week. But, you have to get back on that horse. Kendall was once hit in the head by Danny Graves. There is no yellow card that comes out. You don't lie on the ground for 20 minutes, then hop up and start running again.

You have to have respect for the game, for the guys that came before you. You have to show respect to the guys that faced Bob Gibson without wearing a helmet.

I am wearing an arm guard at the plate and a helmet that can take [the] mph impact of a fastball. Ty Cobb didn't wear that helmet or those pads. Ty Cobb didn't rub it. There is a code of masculinity that exists in this game. You can't do that. So you just take it like a man. After you get hit by a pitch in the back, you go in the family room after the game, and all your little cousins are in there, and they run up to you and slap you on the back, and you think, 'Oh, God, please don't do that.

You can't let little kids think you are in pain. He hit a ball that went so far, he hit it 10 years ago, and it just landed the other day. He wouldn't run until it landed, so we were waiting and waiting and waiting for him to run. So next time up, we hit him in the shin. He reached down and pretended to brush off his shin, like a fly had landed on it. Then he gave our pitcher the death stare. Our pitcher was scared. When you get hit, you just run down to first base.

Sometimes, if you are hit in the back, you are gasping for air the whole way, but if you stop, you are a wuss. The pain is excruciating. The game is on national TV. Everyone sees you. Don't show it. But if he hits you with 96 and you just walk to first, he might have a doubt in his mind. He might say, 'Maybe my stuff isn't that good.

You get them off their game. No matter how hard you get hit, no matter where, Jones said, "You can't rub it, don't rub it, don't rub it. You are a major leaguer. You can't rub it. Go somewhere where the cameras can't see you or else the fans will be all over you. He walked through the clubhouse, and everyone would slap him on the back where it really hurt; that's what 5-year-olds we really are," Baker said. Spring training , my last at-bat, I got hit right in the a-- with a sinker.

I had two half-moons on each butt cheek, half of a baseball on each butt cheek. It was like I had stood in front of a pitching machine and let it hit me right up in there. I looked so funny. My teammates railed on me for about three days, but you have to take it.

That was a very comedic bruise. There was no way I was sprinting to first base after that. I'm sure once Will Rhymes came to [his senses], his teammates had a lot of fun with him after that. I didn't care what my teammates said. Let 'em laugh all they want. I need a second here. It is a crossroads for players. You can't have courage unless you're afraid. If you don't have fear, there's nothing to be brave about. Everyone fears that little white sports car. To acknowledge fear of the ball is to acknowledge weakness, which is not in a player's constitution.

Only on occasion, and usually with humor, does anyone acknowledge fear publicly. I got way in the back of the box, like Henry Rowengartner from the movie 'Rookie of the Year.

I had some fear. Everyone has fear. Former third baseman Larry Parrish once said, "It is there all the time, with every hitter. That was the whole idea behind Goose Gossage. It's why Ryne Duren took his glasses off when he pitched. Former outfielder Ken Harrelson, now a broadcaster for the White Sox, once said, "I played nine years with fear. Everyone has it. I can't remember a hundred at-bats when I didn't have fear. I almost quit my second year in the big leagues because I was so afraid. One day in Kansas City, Al Kaline, one of my idols, walked past me.

He saw my fear. He said, 'We all have fear at the plate,' and kept on walking. That helped. Harrelson was a good major league player. He dealt with his fear by moving closer to the plate, which is what separates the major leaguers from everyone else.

They get hit, and they get back in there. Sometimes it takes some time. Former major leaguer Gary Ward was hit in the face by Dan Petry in September and struggled terribly during the first half of Then, one July night in Baltimore, he turned off all the lights in his hotel room after a game and told himself to get past the fear or his career was over.

And he got past the fear. It is in our DNA to get back in the box. The Padres' Carlos Quentin seemingly has no fear. He has been hit times in games, more times than Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and Hank Aaron were hit in 8, games combined. He is the epitome of the alpha male in baseball. He is not going to show weakness. He gets hit, and he doesn't care. In the minor leagues, we used to hit him on purpose. It's just his style of hitting.

He defends home plate, and he does so in an offensive way. He comes from the Stanford way of doing things, team overrides everything, anything to win, any way to get on. Hinske shook his head and said, " Reed Johnson and Chase Utley are that way; they do not budge up there. That doesn't make me any less of a man or any less of a player than them, but they don't have a flinch mechanism at the plate. I will jump out of the way. I went down to first base. If you have fear, you will never have success in this game.

It's a part of the game. But the game has changed. If you get a bruise now, you come out of the game. That's not the way I played. My old man [Fred Kendall] played in the big leagues. They played their a--es off back then [in the late '60s and '70s]. You play with bumps and bruises. I've had concussions. For six to eight months a year, you get the s beat out of your body.

It's hot, it's cold and you get hit by pitches. I was the guy that snapped his ankle, started a lot of fights and got hit a lot. The Rays' Sean Rodriguez also gets hit a lot. And we never have to wonder who that is yelling from our bench to take one for the team. It's Sean. My dad taught me, you will do whatever it takes to get on base and win a game -- anything," Rodriguez said.

There is a fear factor, but you can't have any fear. You have to get back in there. So you get back in there. I want to get back in there and get that pitcher's a-- for what he did to me. Speed: "The fastest a pitch can come in is about mph; the fastest it can go out is Quickness: "After the pitcher throws the ball, you have. Agility: "Agility is as important as strength," he says. It requires agility more than brute strength. Wind: "The players and the pitchers usually look at the flag.

It's not because they're patriotic. The stadium blocks the wind at low altitude, but it blows freely at a high altitude.

The air: "Pitchers like low temperatures, they like high humidity and they like high air pressure," Johnson says, all of which are functions of air density.

Hits between the two produce minimal vibration -- and transfer more energy -- at both frequencies. Boosting two factors -- the mass of the bat and the speed of the swing -- can raise batted ball speed BBS , which adds distance to a hit.

But swing speed can affect BBS more dramatically. Research has shown that doubling the weight of a ounce wood bat can raise a BBS of But Daniel Russell, a professor at Kettering University in Michigan, found that doubling the swing speed of a ounce bat can raise a BBS of 62 mph to In terms of turning a hit into a homer: Against a mph fastball, every 1-mph increase in swing speed extends distance about 8 ft. University of Arizona professor Terry Bahill found that the maximum bat weight before swing speed drops is about 41 ounces.

But a pro player's ideal bat weight, he says, is lighter -- in the to ounce range. This weight produces a BBS 1 percent below the BBS of the maximum-weight bat -- allowing the batter greater maneuverability with a negligible loss of power.

Zimmerman has discovered the same principle with his in. For the first 50 milliseconds of a swing, a batter can stop his 2-pound bat in time to check the swing. By milliseconds, the bat, moving at up to 80 mph, carries too much inertia to be stopped.

A mph fastball can reach home plate in milliseconds -- or four-tenths of a second. But a batter has just a quarter-second to identify the pitch, decide whether to swing, and start the process.

What happens next is "pretty much just instinct.