Peter Brancazio, who explored physics of sports, dies at 81

Peter Brancazio, a physics professor who debunked concepts like the rising fastball (physically impossible) and Michael Jordan’s apparently endless hang time (much shorter than fans believed), died on April 25 in Manhasset, New York, on Long Island. He was 81.

The cause was complications of the coronavirus, son Larry Brancazio said.

Peter Brancazio, who taught at Brooklyn College for more than 30 years, was one of a small number of sports-minded physicists whose research anticipated the use of the advanced statistics that are now accessible through computerized tracking technology. His work, which he began in the 1980s, was filled with terms such as launching angle (how high a ball is hit, in degrees) and spin rate (the measurement of a pitch in revolutions per minute) that are now part of baseball’s common language. (Launch angle, not launching angle, is the term now widely used.)

Although he was obsessed with basketball, Brancazio was best known for what he had to say about baseball, notably his explanation that a socalled rising fastball could not rise; even if pitches thrown by fireballers such as Nolan Ryan had seemingly been doing that for decades.

“The rising fastball is an illusion,” Brancazio told The Kansas City Star in 1987.

Gravity, he said, makes everything fall, even baseballs, and no one can throw one fast enough and with enough spin to overcome gravity’s natural force.

“The rising fastball just looks as if it’s rising,” he said. “It’s really just not dropping as far” as a typical fastball.

A fastball thrown at 90 mph and 1,800 rpm would drop 3 feet when it reached home plate, he said. But a fastball that is thrown with still more backspin will fall only 2½ feet, a 6-inch difference that creates the illusion of rising.

Brancazio, whose tools included a calculator and a TRS-80 computer, wrote about his research in professional journals; in magazines such as Popular Mechanics; and in the 1984 book “Sport Science: Physical Laws and Optimum Performance.”

In a June 1991 segment of the ABC News program “Primetime Live,” he presented a scientific solution to a sports question: Why does Michael Jordan seem to be able to fly during a spectacular slam dunk?

Several fans were asked during the segment to guess how long Jordan seemed to hang in the air. Their guesses ranged from 6 to 10 seconds.

No, Brancazio, said. Even Jordan was subject to gravity. His hang time was only 0.9 seconds.

Later that year, Brancazio elaborated on the physics of hang time for Popular Mechanics. In an article about the science of slam dunks, he devised a formula that determined that a 36-inch vertical leap would equal hang time of 0.87 seconds and that a 4-foot vertical leap would equal 1 one second.

“No small part of Jordan’s greatness is the fact that he seems to cover enormous horizontal distances in the air,” Brancazio wrote. “He accentuates this illusion by releasing his shots on the way down, rather than at the peak of his trajectory.”

Peter John Brancazio was born March 22, 1938, in the Astoria section of Queens. His father, also named Peter, sorted mail for the post office. His mother, Ann (Salomone) Brancazio, was an actuarial worker for The Hartford, an insurance company.

When Brancazio and his future wife, Ronnie Kramer, were dating as teenagers, she gave him a gift that would help guide him in his professional life: a telescope.

“It made him want to study astronomy,” she said.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in engineering science from New York University in 1959, Brancazio earned a master’s in nuclear engineering from Columbia University a year later. He began teaching physics at Brooklyn College in 1963 while working toward a doctorate in astrophysics from New York University.

During his 34 years at Brooklyn College, he was also a director of the college’s observatory.

Brancazio wrote his first sports article, about basketball, for The American Journal of Physics in 1981. In it, he calculated the optimum launching angles for shots from various distances on the floor.

Having distilled the lessons of shooting on the schoolyards of Astoria, he found that a ball was best launched at an angle of 45 degrees plus half the angle of the incline from the shooter’s hand to the front of the rim of the basket, or at about 50 to 55 degrees.

He had, he admitted, a personal reason for writing the paper.

“In truth,” he wrote, “the major purpose of this research was to find some means to compensate for the author’s stature (5 foot, 10 inches in sneakers), inability to leap more than 8 inches off the floor, and advancing age.”

Brancazio had no doubt that the people he most wanted to impress — the athletes whose work he admired — would disdain his research. And he knew why, or at least why they did in the era before advanced training techniques transformed athletic achievement.

“Larry Bird does not need to be told to release his shots at the optimum launching angle,” he wrote in The American Journal of Physics in 1988, “nor does Dwight Gooden have to understand the Magnus effect in order to throw a devastating curveball.”

Brancazio retired from Brooklyn College in 1997 and then briefly taught adult education courses there and at Queens College. He lectured on science, religion and astronomy at Hutton House, part of Long Island University, from 1999 until last year.

In addition to his wife and his son Larry, Brancazio is survived by another son, David, and five grandchildren.

Brancazio became a goto physicist in the news media when sports met science. For instance, during Game 1 of the 1991 World Series, CBS introduced Supervision, a computerized animation of the path and speed of pitches. One pitch, by Jack Morris of the Minnesota Twins, clocked in at 94 mph when it left his right hand and was the same speed when it landed in the catcher’s mitt.

CBS’ analysts were impressed. But when asked a day later, Brancazio said that a ball could not maintain the same speed on its path of 60 feet, 6 inches.

“The ball has to slow down by air resistance,” he told The New York Times in 1991. “No way it can maintain speed or pick up speed. It should lose 9% of its speed along the way.”

The inventor of Supervision acknowledged the error, saying that the speeds had probably been rounded off; the ball might have left Morris’ hand at 94.4 mph but had landed at 93.6.

A pitch that maintained its speed, it turned out, was as magical as a rising fastball.