It's all about the dream of feeling what Mark McGwire feels when he connects with a 90-mile-an-hour fastball on a hot, sticky August evening and sends it far into the bullpen for a home run that brings the crowd to its feet. That's the dream that keeps hundreds of grown men on minor league teams earning a modest salary.

And it's all about the dream of hitting a golf ball like Tiger Woods, if only just once, or bowling a perfect game—12 strikes in a row—that motivates amateurs like us to spend millions of dollars per year on high-tech sports gear. We demand top engineered equipment that gives us the best chance to win, and so do our counterparts—the pros.

Performance-enhancing gear may be fine for amateurs. After all, who is really going to complain that during the 1998-99 bowling season 34,470 perfect games were rolled. That's an astounding number when you consider that 30 seasons earlier only 905 were bowled. Dynamic bowling ball cores engineered with CAD programs, combined with outer shells made of proprietary composite and resin mixtures have resulted in highly reactive bowling balls that makes rolling a 300 score seem almost passé. But what happens when the so-called integrity of the professional game is threatened by engineering advances?

Through May alone, a record 2,004 home runs were smashed in the Major Leagues. There have been an endless list of reasons cited for this phenomenon. They range from the notion that bats are engineered differently, to a claim by some ballplayers that the pre-game ritual of muddying baseballs to get them game-ready is being tampered with. But the most common reason is that of the "live" ball, or a ball that is being wound tighter or is somehow manufactured in a way that makes it go farther when hit.

Stepping up to the plate to end this controversy once and for all is a University of Massachusetts mechanical engineering professor—and ASME member—James Sherwood.

He was commissioned by Major League Baseball about six weeks ago to use his knowledge of mechanical engineering and high-tech sports equipment to test the integrity of this year's baseballs as well as to ensure that nothing is amiss at Rawlings' Costa Rica manufacturing plant. Sherwood also has checked the ball's maximum and minimum stresses, and its coefficient

of restitution. This is the first time in baseball's storied history that a study of this magnitude has ever been initiated on the attributes of the baseball.

Key to his research, Sherwood said, is a robotic hitting machine developed three years ago by a Michigan bat manufacturer. This Randy Johnson on servo motors can reach ball speeds up to 100 mph and place the point of impact at a specified spot on both the ball and bat. Thus, it makes the trajectory comparison of baseballs from different cases, and even different years, an engineering science.

An avid Cleveland Indians fan, Sherwood said late last month that the study has been concluded. But despite my urging, he refused to upstage MLB's announcement of his conclusions. He did reason that today's bigger and stronger ballplayers like McGwire, who spend many hours a day lifting weights and boast 20/10 vision, makes the feat of smashing a baseball 430 feet not so rare.

Whether we engineer equipment to enhance human performance, or to test and predict the equipment's own performance, one thing is clear: technological processes are certainly kickin' sports equipment into high gear.

Email your comments or questions to: falcionij@asme.org

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