Mount Desert Island High School juniors Lindsey McEachern and Hannah Chamberlain are batterymates for the softball team. McEachern is the pitcher and Chamberlain is her catcher.
In addition to softball, they also love mathematics and take an AP (Advanced Placement) calculus class together.
So when their calculus teacher, Sara ‘Bo’ Greene, told the class she wanted them to produce an independent project, McEachern and Chamberlain thought it would be interesting to team up and do one related to softball.
And that is exactly what they did.
“It was an instinctive thing,” said McEachern. “We had played something like seven games in nine days so we said why not do a project involving softball.”
They devised a project which saw them gauge reaction times of players in baseball as well as softball. They compared the reaction times in each sport.
They ran experiments at softball practice and were able to get two members of the baseball team, senior Nick Stanley and junior Alex Foster, to help them out with it.
The distance from the pitching rubber to home plate is longer in baseball by 17.5 feet and it is 30 feet longer between the bases (90 feet compared to 60 feet in softball). These were figured into the trials conducted by the girls.
For example, a softball pitcher is 43 feet from home plate and if the pitcher delivers the ball at 61 mph, the ball travels at approximately 89.46 feet per second so a hitter has .48 seconds to react.
A baseball pitcher is 60.5 feet from home plate and if the pitcher throws the ball 85 mph, the ball is traveling 124.67 feet per second. So the hitter has .49 seconds to react.
The next trial involved the amount of time it takes a third baseman to cleanly field a ball and throw across the diamond to first in both sports.
They conducted three trials in each of the two areas and averaged the three results.
The average fielding time for a softball third baseman is 1.03 seconds and it takes 1.98 seconds to throw across the diamond to first. So it takes a total of 3.01 seconds to field the ball and hit the first baseman’s glove with the throw. So the hitter must reach first in 3.01 seconds or less to be safe on a routine grounder to third.
The average fielding time for a baseball third baseman is 1.61 seconds and the throw across to first averaged out to 2.64 seconds so the hitter must reach first in 4.25 seconds or less to be safe.
They chose the throw from third to first because they said it was the longest throw across the diamond.
“One of our teammates, Madison Thornton, asked how that translated to miles per hour (for the runner),” said McEachern. “In softball, the 3.01 seconds works out to 13.59 miles an hour while, in baseball, the 4.25 seconds turns out to be 14.46 miles an hour.”
The conclusion is that you have to run faster in baseball to beat a throw.
“I didn’t know you had to run over 13 miles an hour to beat out a grounder to third in softball,” said McEachern. “That’s really fast for me. It’s crazy. We have a 15 miles an hour speed limit in our school zone.”
The girls wrote in their report that it was important to acknowledge that there could have been discrepancies. For example, they wrote that they couldn’t be certain that the baseball and softballs were hit to the third baseman at the exact same speeds.They also noted that each pitch isn’t going to thrown at the same speed especially if the pitcher throws an off-speed pitch.
Their analogy was that in baseball, players have to run faster to be safe and the fielders have stronger arms. But, in softball, players have less time to react to the ball.
“A lot of people say baseball is harder than softball,” said Chamberlain. “In our testing, we proved that to be wrong. Overall, it’s about the same.”
Mount Desert Island coach Jamey Lewis said it was a fun project to witness.
“I was really impressed that they took the idea and ran with it,” said Lewis. “These two girls talk calculus all the time and I was real proud of how they turned softball into a calculus project.”
In addition to their prowess in the classroom, they have been instrumental in leading the Trojans to a four-win turnaround from last year.
Mount Desert Island finished 9-7 after going 5-11 in 2017.
They are the 14th seed for the Class B North playoffs and will visit third seed Oceanside of Rockland in a preliminary round game on Monday.
McEachern has struck out over 100 and has also been one of their leading hitters. Chamberlain has been rock solid behind the plate and has also come through with some key hits.
“Lindsey has six pitches that we use every game and Hannah is one of the best catchers I’ve ever seen. Not much gets by her,” said Lewis.
“It’s funny, when we were younger, I was the pitcher and Lindsey was my catcher,” pointed out Chamberlain.
Both girls said they learned a lot through the project while also having fun doing it.
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