The Contentious Physics of Wiffle Ball
Wiffle ball is a variant of baseball played with a plastic perforated ball. Eight three-quarter-inch, oblong holes cover half the ball’s surface area, while the other hemisphere is uninterrupted. Originally designed to relieve the arm of a young baseball pitcher (the son of its inventor, David N. Mullany), the ball achieves a curving trajectory without requiring the pitcher to impart spin or hurl at top speed. Each ball is packaged with instructions for how to release it in order to achieve various effects—with the perforations up for a straight ball, toward the pitcher’s thumb for a curve, and toward the outer fingers for a slider.
The inventor’s grandsons still run the family enterprise, with a product unchanged since its 1953 launch. Their dad, the pitcher for whom the ball was designed, told in 2002 that the Mullany family believed cutting the holes might create a
