Breaking in a Baseball Glove...and a Little Physics
From http://glovesonline.net Given my quasi-rant from a couple of days ago, you would think I'd have minimal time to waste on baseball. That's simply not true. The game itself has an elegance to it and I see my son hustling and trying his best. He says practices are boring and it's hard, but that also means he's learning to handle himself somewhere besides on the couch. One thing I noticed was the number of balls that bounced in and out of his glove. Essentially, he caught most of what was thrown to him only to have it fall out of his glove. I can imagine this being tiring and frustrating. Then the thought occurred to me that his glove was advertised as "pre-softened", but that it was only "half-fast" pre-softened. The softening makes the glove, well, softer. It allows the hand to squeeze the glove easier to catch, but also there's a little physics to something being softer as well. When a ball strikes a hard surface, the collision coul...