A DRY baseball should fly further than a soggy one, shouldn’t it? Well, maybe not, because it turns out that a little moisture has an odd effect on flying balls.
The Colorado Rockies baseball team plays in high-altitude Denver, where the thin air means baseballs travel up to 6 metres further than at sea level. So since 2002, in the name of fair play, the team has placed game balls in a high-humidity chamber for several months prior to a game, reasoning that moist, heavier balls will be more sluggish than dry ones.
Now physicists Edward Meyer and John Bohn…
