Science Behind “To Dream Of Summer”
“To Dream Of Summer” is an urban fantasy witch story, about a young woman who has grown up in the shadow of her spell crafting prodigy of an older sister and is content to let her gifted sibling take over the family business. Marisae just wants to pursue her own dream: to be a Major League Baseball pitcher by using only her natural talent and a wicked knuckleball. But that doesn’t mean she can’t use a little magic to get the tutoring she needs.
While this may seem like a definite fantasy story at first, it has a real-life parallel. I actually wrote this story a couple years before High School pitcher Chelsea Baker pitched against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 2014. Chelsea, like Marisae in the story, used a knuckleball pitch taught to her by the late Joe Niekro.
The knuckleball pitch is particularly suited to female pitchers because it does not rely on brute physical strength, but rather on precision and skill. According to physicist Robert Adair, if it is thrown right, a knuckleball is physiologically impossible for a human to hit except through sheer luck, and in the story Marisae sets out to prove that to herself, if no one else.
If you are as intrigued as I was by the mysteries of the knuckleball, this Physics of Baseball website at the University of Illinois has all the information you could want, on baseball in general, and the knuckleball in particular. You don’t need to follow or understand all the math to appreciate just how amazing this particular pitch is.
