There's no shortage of baseball physics articles on Science 2.0. I have dissected the longest home run ever hit, whether curve balls really curve as much as it seems and how fast a pitcher can throw.

One common denominator in all those topics was the impact of air on how balls behave.

A reader wrote me because they say they have created a new app which can help predict, and therefore optimize, the chances of a home run being hit.   Does it work?  

Let's go to the videotape!

First, the hype:

They say Home Run Weather 2012 uses real-time weather data, years of actual game statistics, and NASA-style modeling and physics to determine if weather conditions will help or hurt the chances of hitting a home run.

What does NASA know about physics that baseball players don't know?  Nothing at all, if a NASA computer programmer can hit a curveball, I am a Chinese jet pilot.

. Home Run Weather 2012 factors 

in the local stadium-specific weather conditions including temperature, dew
point, atmospheric pressure, wind speed and direction. It also factors such
things as time of day and the drag coefficient of a baseball in order to
generate a home run favorability index that varies from least-to-most
favorable.

How it works: the user selects any of the thirty big league parks and chooses
the current time or a forecasted time out to 24 hours. Home Run Weather 2012
then pulls in the appropriate local weather data, runs the numerous
behind-the-scenes calculations, and delivers an index on a scale from 0 to
10.

"10" means weather conditions are most favorable for home runs and “0”
means weather conditions will likely hinder baseball flight. As an example,
the most home runs hit in a single day in the big leagues during the first
half of the 2012 season was 42 on June 20th, and on that particular day 10 of
the 13 open-roof ball parks had a home run favorability index of 10 out of
10.

Home Run Weather 2012 also displays the weather conditions for the user
selected city and time. This App may be of particular interest to Fantasy
Baseball players, weather and baseball enthusiasts, and to anyone who may
want an idea as to how many runs might be scored in tonight’s game. Home
Run Weather 2012 is currently available for iPad, iPhones and Android devices
with a free version that has a limited capability that allows for the home
run index to be generated at the current time only, and a paid version that
generates forecasted home run index values out to 24 hours.

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