Trajectory of a Baseball and Its Characters Under the Influence of a Drag Force and the Magnus Effect

A flying baseball in the air not only is subject to gravity´s pull it is also subject to air resistance. A spinning ball in addition to these two forces experiences a spin-dependent force. The description of motion of a baseball subject to these three forces for a projectile confined to trajectories in a 2D vertical plane is a set of two coupled nonlinear ODEs. The speed dependent drag coefficient makes these equations highly nonlinear. These equations for certain cases are solved numerically by applying a 4^th-order Runge-Kutta code written in either the FORTRAN or the C++ languages. In this article we show by deploying Mathematica one may easily bypass the explicit need of composing such cumbersome computer codes. Moreover, by utilizing Mathematica´s integrated numeric and graphic features the author reveals features of a flying ball that to-date have not been reported in scientific literature.