Contact InformationTerry Bahill520-621-6561[email protected]
Terry Bahill can¥t hit major league pitching, but his photo hangs in a new Baseball Hall of Fame exhibition featuring such revered relics as "Shoeless" Joe Jackson's shoes and the world's most valuable baseball card (the T206 Honus Wagner).
Bahill, a professor of Systems and Industrial Engineering at the University of Arizona in Tucson, squares up with a bat and peers out of the photo through what look like sci-fi goggles. It's the same photo found on the back of his book, "Keep Your Eye on the Ball: Curve Balls, Knuckleballs, and Fallacies of Baseball" (ISBN: 0716737175). Bahill co-authored the book with Tulane University Mechanical Engineering Professor Robert G. Watts. It uses physics, mathematics and studies of physiology to explain some of the longtime mysteries and myths surrounding hitting.
"We selected the photo because it represents baseball as ingenuity, which is one of the main section themes," says Kristen Mueller, assistant curator for the Baseball Hall of Fame. She's talking about the new traveling exhibit, "Baseball As America." It is the first major exhibition to examine the relationship between baseball and American culture and will travel to several major U.S. cities between now and 2005. Currently, the exhibition is on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
The photo is on one of the large, freestanding text panels that accompany the exhibition.
"We were so happy to find that photo," Mueller says. "We were looking for more like it."
"A different thing about this exhibition is that a lot of people will be surprised by its breadth," she adds. "It's not just player equipment, but a wide range of materials from 20th-century and 19th-century popular culture."
Selecting the artifacts was difficult. About 1,500 were originally considered, and that list finally was cut to 520.
Bahill, a lifelong baseball fan, is happy he made the cut.
He notes that the photo was taken when he was studying an old myth that hitters can keep their eyes on the ball from the pitcher's hand to contact with the bat. The goggles were used to track a hitter's eye movements. The data was radioed to a computer through an antenna sticking up from goggles. (Bahill concluded that hitters can't track a fastball closer than about five feet from the bat. After that, they make a very educated guess about where the ball will be when it gets within range of their bat.)
Bahill also has conducted research on the so-called "rising fastball," the physics of end-loaded bats, and ideal bat weights. As part of the latter experiment, he constructed a testing device that can determine the ideal bat weight for a player by finding that best compromise between momentum and bat speed. Members of UA's NCAA Championship women's softball team are among those who have used Bahill's Bat Chooser to find their ideal bat weights.
So while Bahill can't hit major league pitching, he knows a lot more than most record-book hitters about how it's done. Which makes his inclusion in the "Baseball As America" exhibition pretty logical after all.
*** University of Arizona news is online @ http://uanews.org ***
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