Question

The “strike zone” or distance across home plate is 17 inches. Determine how long a baseball pitched at 90 mph is in the strike zone. Show your work

Answer 1

The ball will spend 10,730.4012 microseconds in the strike zone

Explanation:

Here, we want to calculate the time spent by a ball in the strike zone given the distance across the strike zone and the speed of the ball

Mathematically, we have ;

time = distance/speed

Before we proceed to use this formula, we need to have the parameters in the same units

So let’s convert 17 inches to miles

Mathematically;

1 inch = 1.578 * 10^-5 mile

So 17 inches = 1.578 * 10^-5 * 17 = 0.00026826 miles

So let’s now calculate the time

That will be;

0.00026826/90 = 0.000002980667 hours

It will be best if we convert this to seconds

Mathematically,

60 seconds = 1 minute

60 minutes = 1 hour

So the number of seconds in an hour is 60 * 60 = 3600 seconds

= 0.000002980667 * 3600 = 0.0107304012

Mathematically, 1 second = 10^6 microseconds

Thus multiplying 0.0107304012 by 10^6

we have; 10,730.4012 micro seconds