The curveball argument lasted 100 years

A curveball really does curve — twenty-one inches over the distance from mound to plate, measured with ten cameras at 700 frames a second. The late, sudden break batters describe has never been found in any trajectory. This is how that got settled: Newton in 1671 with no way to measure, Lyman Briggs dropping spinning baseballs through a wind tunnel in 1959, Alan Nathan's motion-capture measurements in 2008 that contradicted the textbook explanation, and a 2010 vision experiment that finally accounted for the break — by pointing the instrument at the batter instead of the ball. #curveball #magnuseffect #sportsscience #baseball #physics