Editor\u2019s note:<\/strong> This is a bonus Weird and Wild. To read this week\u2019s main W&W column, click or tap here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Which is harder \u2014 landing a human on the moon or hitting a home run that dents the top of a foul pole in a major-league game?<\/p>\n You may find that question amusing. Little do you know that is a question I asked an actual physicist this week.<\/p>\n Yes, that\u2019s how we roll here at the Weird and Wild column\u2019s spacious corporate offices (which may or may not really exist). We ask the questions you need asked. We examine the pressing baseball issues you need examined. And the fact that you don\u2019t know you need them asked or examined does not stop us.<\/p>\n This important quest began two weeks ago, when the Pirates\u2019 Oneil Cruz somehow hit a baseball where normal people don\u2019t customarily hit baseballs, in an April 22 game against the Rangers.<\/p>\n ONEIL CRUZ OFF THE TOP OF THE FOUL POLE 😳<\/p>\n (via @Pirates<\/a>) pic.twitter.com\/a4jTiH4CxJ<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) April 23, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n This man (seriously) did that. He hit a ball that left his bat at a ridiculous 116.9 mph. It soared more than 100 feet up into the Texas sky, then plunked down on top of the right-field foul pole.<\/p>\n \n Oneil Cruz\u2019s April 22 homer against the Rangers, by the numbers. (David Adler \/ Statcast \/ MLB)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Just so you know, that foul pole is 92 feet high. And it\u2019s located atop a fence that sits 326 feet from the batter\u2019s box. Hat tip to John Blake of the Rangers for that invaluable info.<\/p>\n Want to see how high up that is, how far from home plate that is and what the top of that foul pole looked like once Cruz had finished assaulting it? Fortunately, the ever-inventive Hannah Mears, the Pirates\u2019 TV sideline reporter, trekked all the way up there to find out.<\/p>\n You can see where the ball left a divot! https:\/\/t.co\/9zeJbF7dAE<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/zOy9Y9d5cg<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Hannah Mears (@mearshannah_) April 23, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n So here\u2019s how most of the world thinks after something like that:\u00a0That\u2019s impossible.<\/i><\/p>\n My next thought was: That seems like something AI could answer. But after my unfortunate experience last month with ChatGPT<\/a>, which just made stuff up it thought I\u2019d want to hear, I went a different route this time: with Perplexity, an AI search engine. Here was my basic little fun-filled question:<\/p>\n How would I calculate the odds of hitting a home run that hit the top of the foul pole?<\/i><\/p>\n Hoo boy. I had no idea what I\u2019d gotten myself into.<\/p>\n This, Perplexity told me, was a \u201csimple calculation,\u201d that a \u201cpractical\u201d scientific person (like me?) should treat as a \u201cconditional probability problem.\u201d Should I have told Perplexity that my idea of a \u201cconditional probability problem\u201d is: What should I wear today if it\u2019s going to be 53 degrees and raining? I did not do that. So let\u2019s move along.<\/p>\n Perplexity then offered me a \u201csimple calculation\u201d it apparently thought I could do at home:<\/p>\n P (top of foul pole HR) = P (ball reaches pole area) x P (hits top\/very top of pole\/pole-area ball).<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n P = P (pulled to the line) x P (fair side trajectory) x P (enough distance) x P (contacts pole top)<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n After reading all that, I had a thought that I\u2019m guessing most of us share pretty much daily:\u00a0Shoot, I forgot to get my master\u2019s degree in physics from M.I.T. again this week<\/i>.<\/p>\n In other words, even with the help of AI\u2019s deepest thinkers, I was way out of my league on performing this \u201csimple\u201d calculation. Perplexity at least plugged some totally imaginary numbers into its formula and gave it a guess, speculating that \u2026<\/p>\n The likelihood of hitting the top of that foul pole worked out to one in every one million balls hit<\/i>.<\/p>\n Awesome. Except for one thing:<\/p>\n Even the AI genius inside Perplexity\u2019s brain basically admitted that wasn\u2019t really a guess. It was more like a wild guess.<\/p>\n Whaaaat? AI can be so disappointing. But Perplexity alibied by telling me that a \u201csimple\u201d calculation wasn\u2019t the way to go anyhow. Lots more data needed to be inputted. And I was pretty sure that the least qualified person I knew to input it was me. So \u2026<\/p>\n What do you know? I did! So I turned to an astrophysicist with expertise in baseball \u2014 Dr. Meredith Wills, a senior data scientist at SportsMEDIA Technology Corp.<\/p>\n She\u2019s more famous for her years of fascinating reporting on how lively or not lively the baseballs might be in any given season. But once she made it into my contacts under the label, \u201cbaseball physicist,\u201d she moved quickly to the top of my list.<\/p>\n I texted her, pretty much begging for help in trying to figure out the odds of Cruz hitting a home run that landed on top of the foul pole.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not even sure where to start,\u201d she replied. \u201cYou need one of the NASA engineers who\u2019s landing people on the moon. And the moon landing is probably easier.\u201d<\/p>\n So could it be true that not even someone labeled in my contacts as a \u201cbaseball physicist\u201d views calculating the aeronautical odds of bizarre homers as their areas of expertise? It could. But did that mean Dr. Wills wasn\u2019t highly intrigued by all this? Turns out it did not.<\/p>\n \u201cWait,\u201d she then texted. \u201cHe actually hit a HR that landed on top of the foul pole?!?!\u201d<\/p>\n \n The flight path of Oneil Cruz\u2019s \u201cone in a million\u201d home run. (David Adler \/ Statcast \/ MLB)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Our official aeronautical odds research project was off and running. Next, we had an enjoyable phone conversation much like those that all the great scientific minds of baseball have regularly.<\/p>\n I wondered: Was this really as impossible as it looked? You just have to land a round baseball on top of a really high pole and pull it directly down the line. What\u2019s so hard about that?<\/p>\n When she\u2019d finished laughing, she conceded that hitting a foul pole in right field was \u201ceasier than if you had the equivalent of a foul pole in dead center field.\u201d Good point!<\/p>\n But then she told me all the data points that would need to be considered to accurately calculate these odds: launch angle \u2026 trajectory \u2026 meteorological conditions \u2026 drag on the baseball \u2026 angle of flight as it approached the foul pole \u2026 and so on. Yikes! I was not the person to supply all of that.<\/p>\n \u201cI just want to at least describe to people the degree of difficulty,\u201d I told her. \u201cI\u2019m thinking, if we can fly a plane from Stockholm to LaGuardia and it lands on the actual runway on time, why can\u2019t somebody hit a baseball on top of an actual foul pole?\u201d<\/p>\n Not surprisingly, she wasn\u2019t in agreement that this was a perfect analogy \u2014 and not simply because that plane would land at JFK instead of LaGuardia.<\/p>\n When a plane lands at LaGuardia, she reminded me, it\u2019s working with slight advantages like \u201cpilots and engines.\u201d Not to mention a steering wheel. Did Cruz work with either of those? Let\u2019s go with no.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce that ball is hit and launched off the bat,\u201d she asked, \u201cwhat are the odds of it getting to the foul pole without any other interference on our part to steer it and make sure it gets there?\u201d<\/p>\n Once again, you\u2019ve got me. But why did I infer she was trying to tell me those odds weren\u2019t good?<\/p>\n \u201cFrankly,\u201d she said, \u201cit\u2019s like comparing it to us sending a spacecraft up and having it land on, like, an asteroid or something.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDo you really think it would be easier to land on the moon than to do what he just did?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, let\u2019s put it this way,\u201d Wills explained. \u201cI actually think they\u2019re of the same order of difficulty. If he was trying to do it intentionally, then, yeah, it\u2019s a hell of a lot harder to do with a baseball than planting something on the moon.\u201d<\/p>\n She\u2019d given me lots to think about. What she hadn\u2019t given me was the exact odds, down to the 43rd percentile point. So the next day, I circled back one more time, to determine \u2026<\/p>\n Was there any shot at answering this question, I asked Dr. Wills. Obviously, America needed to know \u2014 by which I meant: Obviously, I needed to know.<\/p>\n She reviewed the formulas Perplexity had proposed. The term, \u201cfuzzy math,\u201d came up. She then took a shot at devising her own formula. I won\u2019t lay it out for you here. Suffice to say, it had lots of entries and included words like \u201carc\u201d and \u201capex.\u201d<\/p>\n Alas, all the data we would need to compute that doesn\u2019t seem to be publicly available.<\/p>\n \u201cI feel bad that I don\u2019t have a number for you,\u201d she said \u2014 but then fired off one more question:<\/p>\n \u201cDo you know the Drake Equation?\u201d<\/p>\n Um, I know Drake Baldwin<\/a>. And I could probably come up with an equation for him. But that wasn\u2019t where she was going with this.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the standard equation used to calculate the probability of us finding life elsewhere in the universe,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Wow. Alas, that\u2019s a calculation that would take millions of years, she said \u2014 or even longer than this elusive Oneil Cruz calculation was taking us.<\/p>\n \n Oneil Cruz\u2019s shot off the top of the foul-pole sent W&W down another rabbit hole. (Ron Jenkins \/ Getty Images)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n So here\u2019s a little window into the investigative work us dogged baseball researchers sometimes embark on. Sometimes you find your answer in 30 seconds on Baseball Reference<\/a>. Sometimes you wind up two days later calculating whether there is intelligent life beyond Pluto but no closer to answering the question you started out with. I tried to convey that to Dr. Wills.<\/p>\n THE ATHLETIC: <\/b>\u201cThis is very cool. But there has to be a higher probability of hitting a home run off a foul pole than finding life elsewhere in the universe. Right?\u201d<\/p>\n WILLS: <\/b>\u201cDefinitely.\u201d<\/p>\n TA: <\/b>\u201cOK, here\u2019s the real question. If we ever do find intelligent life in the universe, will they be intelligent enough to have foul poles?\u201d<\/p>\n WILLS: <\/b>\u201cMore importantly, would they be dumb enough to call them \u2018foul poles\u2019 when balls that hit them are actually fair?\u201d<\/p>\n\n
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That seemed hard \u2014 but how hard was it?<\/h2>\n
Anybody know a physicist?<\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\nWas it harder to calculate the odds than hit that homer?<\/h2>\n
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