Related XKCD (takes your question to the extreme): https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2026
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No Stupid Questions
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A careful reading of official Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered "hit by pitch", and would be eligible to advance to first base.
This is gold!
Oh man there is an XKCD for everything!
Damn, the moment i saw the post i wanted to comment this lol
That's an excellent analysis - nice find!
3
maybe 4
I don't have the knowledge of physics or math to figure it out, but I suppose we could find something that definitely can rip through someone, like a small cannonball, and figure out how much force it would put on the body, and adjust the mass and size for a baseball and see how much speed you'd need to get that amount of force?
Cannonballs are insanely OP. Mythbusters shot a small cannon once; it blew entirely through their backstop and rolled through a few houses before stopping. Your method will result in an overestimate.
That's okay, an overestimate provides a bracket. If the cannon turns out to be way too much, we know the right speed is somewhere between human-thrown and cannon-fired. Then it's a matter of reducing the parameters until they're barely enough to work.
I was thinking that might be the case, but I'm not sure what would get us closer to the minimum force required to punch holes in someone.
I have an idea. We take the richest person in the world, and gradually shoot them with faster and faster baseballs until we have an answer. If, by unlucky circumstances, the person should perish, we take the next richest person.
Great idea! Using real people would just be cruel.
What if the previous wounds affect the next shot? You’d need a control with the 2nd richest to confirm the target speed with a fresh impact still does it.
I'm ok with this.
As long as their dimensions are identical, the actual force of a cannonball or a baseball hitting a body isn't dramatically different, as it's determined how much force the body can withstand until it's penetrated. – By measuring the initial velocity and the velocity of the ball leaving the body after penetration, you can calculate the energy required to punch a hole through thad body.
The interesting question is how does the pitcher hit themselves? Throw the ball around the world? Portal gun?
... The batter hits the ball
The question says "pass through a pitcher". He's having fun at OP's mistake.
Yeah I was thinking the batter would hit the ball hard enough to swing back and strike right through the pitcher. Not that the pitcher would hit themselves.
My bad on my unclear question.
What was OP's mistake?
Unless it has been edited to be more clear, the question (complete with "pass through a pitcher") makes sense as it is written.
I read it as a pitcher throwing a baseball through a batter (batters are the ones that typically have balls coming at them). Though he now says a batter hitting a ball through a pitcher.
You reading it that way does not mean the OP made a mistake. Pitchers are struck by hit pitches with some degree of regularity.
But what does their response offer?
I assume they’d be sentenced to be blown from a gun, but with one of those auto pitchers from a batting cage
I'm not physicist, but I'd imagine the force required to propel the ball to that speed would also disintegrate the ball itself?
The shape of the ball would exert the force over a relatively large area compared to a bullet, and the ball material is much weaker than metal objects that would blow through people (ie cannonballs).
So the force required would increase due to larger surface area, but then the ball would break apart from said force. The solution is a metal baseball propelled by a railgun.
Now to just find ~~victims~~ test subjects to trial it.
That might be okay though. The ball doesn't necessarily have to be intact when it hits the pitcher - if it becomes a stream of smaller particles they still might be energetic enough to do the job.
It definitely stretches the definition of "a baseball", but, on the otherhand that does make it easier to penetrate with smaller projectile. Hrm...
IMO if it was a baseball when you launched it, you used a baseball.
A railgun feels excessive, we had cannons.
True, but also, go big or go home. We're already talking about murdering someone by accelerating a baseball through their body. Might as well make their body turn into a fine mist, same jailtime.
The Waterjet Channel used to do things like this. They'd launch stuff out of an air cannon at a torso made of ballistics gel on what seemed like a regular basis.
And I daresay The Slow Mo Guys, if not also the OG Mythbusters must have done something similar at some point, not that I can call anything specific to mind right now.
A pitcher of what?
Kool-Aid.
Oh no
ohhhh YYEEAAHHHH
asking for a friend
It's not a "subreddit".
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
Old habits die hard :(
EDIT: fixed.
I don’t think it’s possible from a bat at any force. The ball would unravel and slow from wind before it hits the person and at worst it would just knock them back.
You've been watching too many cartoons.