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[hit4power]

Originally Posted by mbcrowder

If this is true (and I'm not convinced yet), then in baseball, this player's tactic would have worked the way he wanted it to. I can't imagine, were this the actual case, that NO ONE in 100+ years of ball has thought of trying this on a sky-fly-ball, especially a high and short one that they aren't likely to score on anyway.

Not a blue so don't generally post here, but I think the reason you've never seen this in baseball is that no one can hit a pop-up high enough to give the runner time to get home and back to 3B. It's 60yds from 3B to home and back and a world class 60 yd dash time is 7 seconds. Allowing an extra second for the time to stop and turn around before sprintinig back to 3B plus assuming less than world class speed and I'd guess that the best 3B-Home-3B time you could hope for is 8 seconds or a bit more. Some quick calculations show that a pop-up with an 8 second hang time has to be hit about 260ft high or over the top of a 17 storey office building. Not saying it couldn't ever be done, but awfully hard. At a MLB game the other day, I counted the hang times (I know, but the physics of stuff like this is interesting to me) of several really high pop-ups and none even got to 6 seconds.