Frank Vizard - Popular Mechanics Why a Curveball Curves: New & Improved Edition: The Incredible Science of Sports

Science bored me in high school and scared me in college. But then around noon on April 16, 1962, in a dank clubhouse at the old Polo Grounds in New York, it suddenly became exciting and relevant. Jay Hook drew a diagram to show me why a curveball curves.

Not that I fully understood. I was a 24-year-old New York Times sportswriter and former English major. Hook was a 26-year-old right-handed pitcher for the New York Mets and an engineering graduate of Northwestern University. He was also a member of the American Rocket Society. The intricacies of Bernoullis law, which he was explaining, were over my head. But Hook was a patient teacher and he was trying to distract himself; that days game against Houston had been postponed by rain, and Hook would get the chance again the next day to register the very first win for what would be baseballs worst team.

He told me that the principles behind the curveball were the same as those that kept an airplane aloft. He talked about air pressure and boundary layers. This is really quite simplified, he said apologetically. He was smiling when he said, Just because you understand Bernoullis law doesnt mean you can apply it effectively.

Hook was primarily a fastball pitcher, and his own curveball was hittable. He didnt win that next day, but a week later, in Pittsburgh, he did get credit for the first victory in Mets history. By that time, my story about him and Bernoulli, along with his diagram, had appeared and he was known in New York as the thinking fans pitcher. I got more credit than I deserved for my science erudition.

But my interest was now piqued in the science of sports, which was just beginning to become an aspect of intelligent coverage of athletics. Over the next 40 years, we started writing about atmospheric conditions in yacht racing and the bone structure of racehorses. There were stories about the importance of the spiral to maintain stability in a long pass in football and about brain damage to boxers. The athletic version of the Cold Warthe Olympic rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United Statesput a spotlight on the emergence of sports medicine, from orthopedic repair to chemical performance enhancement.

I wish I had been more sophisticated about drugs in the 1970s. While I was aware of greenies, the amphetamines that baseball players popped like candy, it was years before I realized the impact of steroids on football and track-and-field events. I can remember looking at all the backne, those splashes of pimples on football players shoulders and backs, and wondering if the equipment was chafing their skin. The few times I asked, I got nasty replies that would now be ascribed to roid rage.

By the 1980s, most professional and big-time college teams had psychologists, nutritionists, and weight-training specialists, along with more and more doctors with prescription pads. By the 1990s, the technology was NASA-grade, from hand-eye training machines at Olympic prep sites to the heart-and-lung monitors the bike racers wore. Every sportswriter needed to know as much about fast-twitch versus slow-twitch muscles as about the Curse of the Bambino.

Of course, by the 21st century, the Curse was part of the science story. Babe Ruths single-season and career home run records were again broken, this time by players suspected of steroid use, and that became the focus of a larger discussion of performance enhancement in sports and in the larger society. Athletes were undergoing Lasik surgery to improve their eyesight, as well as complex regimens of supplements and injections of anesthesia before a game. Why was that different from men using Viagra and opera singers taking beta-blockers to overcome stage fright and school kids being dosed with candy-flavored meds to keep them calm and focused? Werent steroids, human growth hormone, and EPO logical extensions? Was science leading us into a post-human era?

The chance to talk sports with chemists, biologists, physicists, and neurologists was fascinating, but sometimes depressing. Most of this was, after all, junkie science, the search for better ways to cheat through drugs. I yearned for something more positive, another shot of Bernoulli.

Then, around noon on January 14, 2001, in a garage outside Charlotte, North Carolina, I became as excited as Id been back in the Polo Grounds almost 40 years earlier. I was doing research in preparation for covering NASCAR in my