Mixed feelings for sure. Sometimes it feels like a dream and sometimes it feels like a loss. Overall it’s nice, though; there are still problems here, but for the most part they’re different problems.

But you got un-bored at T + 0.20s, right?

In all reality, I find physics and writing far more interesting than I do the arcana of MLB rules. Different kinds of neurodivergent, I guess.

I also hope that I am correct, but I’m glad at least that it was entertaining.

Someone might be along to do the actual math, but the base answer is that there really isn’t a way for a true, over the wall, home run to occur from a bunt.

Okay, yeah…so I spent way too much time doing just that. tl;dr the pitcher would have to literally pitch his own arm off.

If you mean just a run, then sure, you just need to be a phenomenally fast runner or have infielders who can’t grip the ball. But I think you mean a home run that goes out of the park.

For all intents and purposes, a bunt is just a bounce. That means that it will always leave the bat moving slower than it was being pitched; even with ideal materials and no air resistance, the best a bunt can do is bounce the ball as fast as the pitch. So the first question is, could a sufficiently fast fastball go over the wall?

A professional baseball player can throw a baseball about 100 meters, which also happens to be about the same distance from the batter to the outfield wall on most fields; so just on the face of it the answer is “no,” because even in an ideal scenario it’s already traveled 18 meters from the pitcher’s mound to the plate before it starts moving toward the wall, meaning that an ideal pitch of a perfect ball bouncing as efficiently as possible off a perfectly-bouncy bat would fall 18 meters short of the wall at best.

So what would it take to make this work?

Well, let’s consider location. For an out-of-the-park homer, pure distance isn’t enough; we don’t just want to hit the wall, we want the ball to go over it. Assuming MLB stadiums, you might think our best bet is to send it over the right field wall in Fenway Park in Boston, which is only a meter tall; but the Pesky Pole that’s 92 meters away is 4 meters and it doesn’t come down until it’s 115 meters from the plate. So we should go for Yankee Stadium, which has a 2-meter wall in the right field at 96 meters.

And obviously we’re going to need an amazing pitcher here, which we’ll talk about in a minute, but the batter is actually important too. Specifically his height; we need him to be as tall as possible, so that the top of his strike zone is as close to the height of the wall as we can get (or taller, if we can manage). Plus, he needs to be a southpaw, as a right-handed batter would have to contend with the taller left field wall. He’ll also have to focus on hitting the ball at an ideal angle (30°) and imparting whatever backspin he can to give it a little bit of aerodynamic lift.

What we need from a pitcher is just speed (and I guess a tendency to pitch to the very top of the strike zone). The ball is going to lose a good deal of speed in the bunt, so it needs way more coming off the mound. In a normal hit, the batter puts a ton of energy into the ball, but in our bunt, it’s all up to the physics. The bat-ball coefficient of restitution in the MLB is usually around 0.5, so the best we can realistically hope for is that it’s going to lose about half of its speed to heat, sound, and vibration. It’ll actually lose even more to the fact that the BBCoR is measured against a perfectly stationary bat (so even the most sturdy human bunting would decrease that number as their muscles and bones absorbed the impact), but the batter could try to push the bat and give it a little bit more power at that point, which could compensate for that loss. We’ll call that part a wash.

But here we are into a realm where we can start putting some actual speed numbers on stuff. The slowest speed-off-the-bat of an over-the-wall home run is about 42 meters per second, and since we’re effectively not going to get any help from the batter, x/2 has to equal 42. So the pitcher needs to be able to throw at 84 meters per second, which is a 188mph fastball; interestingly, that’s exactly double the average MLB fastball speed (94mph), and about 178% of the speed of the fastest fastball ever recorded. (Actually it’d need to be 89 m/s to account for the speed it would lose to drag from the pitcher’s mound to the plate, but at that point we’re just being pedantic.)

Unfortunately, unlike human running speed, the fastest a human can throw a fastball seems to be pretty much optimized, and in fact biomechanical models suggest that any human throwing faster than about 108mph would probably tear the ligament in their elbow from the torque. A 188mph fastball thrown by a human would certainly be career-ending and maybe even dismembering. So not only do we need a superhuman baseball pitcher, we also need them to be willing to throw their entire pro baseball livelihood away on our stunt. And we only get one shot at it.

So let’s talk through this crazy situation, second-by-second (with apologies to Randall Munroe). I’ll treat the moment of the bunt as T0.

T - 10.00s: The most powerful pitcher in all of human history stands atop the pitching mound at Yankee Stadium. The catcher gives him the sign, which in this case I can only assume would be showing him a picture of the pitcher’s family, whom he’s kidnapped and threatened in order to get the pitcher to do this.

T - 5.00s: The pitcher sheds a tear and nods. The catcher probably moves out of the way, knowing as he does what’s about to happen.

T - 1.75s: The pitcher winds up for the pitch. The batter begins to move the bat into position for the bunt, right at the top of his strike zone; he has to do it now, even though the pitcher will see it, or else it won’t be in position in time. Any other pitcher would switch up his throw, seeing this, but the catcher has his kids, man.

T - 0.25s: Our ball leaves the pitcher’s mound, traveling at 89 meters per second about a meter off the ground, at about a 10° downward angle with significant backspin. Close behind it is the pitcher’s lower right arm, severed at the elbow from the rotational torque severing the UCL, muscles, and skin. Luckily the pitcher managed to release the pitch at the optimal angle before he threw his arm.

T - 0.125s: Our ball is halfway to the plate, and it’s now 0.9 meters above the ground.

T + 0: Our ball reaches the bat traveling 84 m/s, right at the top of the batter’s strike zone, and compresses both itself and the bat before rebounding at 42 m/s at a 30° angle toward the right wall of the outfield. A very loud crack is made from the contact. The leather cover of the ball is torn during the impact, and it’s very possible that it could’ve exploded entirely into a tangle of yarn and cork. Good thing for us it didn’t.

T + 0.05s: The crack of the bat reaches the pitcher’s mound, though the pitcher is a little bit preoccupied to think about it right now.

T + 0.20s: The pitcher’s right forearm hits the ground, a few meters in front of him, having reached its terminal velocity much sooner than the ball did.

T + 0.25s: The batter drops his bat and begins to run toward first base.

T + 0.30s: A very loud crack of the bat reaches the outfield wall.

T + 0.48s: If the ball were bunted straight down the middle, it’d probably hit the pitcher in the head, as it’s only about a meter and a half off the ground. But he’s probably suffered enough, and we’re aiming to the right anyway.

T + 0.53s: The bat dropped by the batter hits the ground.

T + 1.21s: The ball is halfway to the outfield wall, and it’s reached the apex of its trajectory, about ten meters off the ground. It’s also slowed down to 32 m/s.

T + 2.42s: The ball just barely clears the outfield wall (it’s a good thing the right fielder was so concerned about the pitcher pitching his arm off that he decided to run in to help the pitcher rather than running after the ball, or he could’ve easily caught it).

T + 3.00s: The pitcher has lost about 32ml of blood (not counting what was in his arm) and while the blood loss isn’t critical yet, he’s certainly going into psychogenic shock.

T + 4.50s: The runner makes it to first base.

From that point on, I suppose you could probably guess pretty easily as to what happens. The runner rounds the rest of the bases, but nobody really pays attention to him anymore. Medics swarm the pitcher’s mound. The catcher tries to sneak away, but is caught by stadium security and later arrested for kidnapping and reckless endangerment. The pitcher’s family is rescued as the pitcher himself is taken to the hospital for emergency arm-reattachment surgery. The batter is questioned extensively about his involvement in the scheme. The pitcher becomes famous for accomplishing a feat that no one can ever repeat.

I still remember people telling me the country needed Trump because it needed to be run like one of his businesses. “You mean used as a half-assed vehicle for his own vanity that gets stripped for parts and then driven into bankruptcy the moment he loses interest?”

Seriously, the man failed to sell alcohol, meat, and gambling. Those have been three of the four easiest things to turn a profit on for most of human history (and he doesn’t have the body for the fourth). If you gave me a distillery, a beef farm, and a casino, I would be a millionaire inside a couple of years—and I’m the worst salesman I know. And somehow he also became a millionaire after starting all three of those businesses, which is decidedly less of a flex for someone who started out as a billionaire.

“Their turd sandwich has vegetables in it” doesn’t excuse the fact that they took the ham sandwich off the menu entirely.

Fair point. I also took pretty good notes, which as I recall formed a pretty good outline for me.

I lived 98% of my life in the US, but six months ago I moved to New Zealand. It’s far from socialist, and I look with envy on much of what you have, but it’s so much better than the life I was living before.

I just realized I didn’t address the three year limit. Sure, they’re only saving $50k over the term of the visa now. But they’re gambling that the visa situation will be more favorable in three years, or that the job market will be in such shambles that they can afford to cut pay across the board, or replace people with AI, or whatever. It doesn’t just save them $50k, it lets them defer that cost for three years, which is three years that money can be earning interest for them. Plus, if they write it down as compliance or governmental fees or whatever, I believe there are beneficial tax implications.

Is it, though? If the big companies causing this problem are just ignoring the cost, and the small companies that might actually need to bring people in from overseas for legitimate reasons can’t afford to pay it, is it doing more good than harm?

There’s an Ethiopian restaurant in my old neighborhood that was very clearly run by a couple who used it as a way to get their cousins and friends out of Ethiopia in the '80s and '90s. They wouldn’t be able to do that with a $100,000 visa fee; that’s more than the restaurant makes in a year, after expenses.

And I’ve known a couple of people who have some very specific, very niche skill sets that aren’t taught at trade schools in the US; skills like scientific glassblowing, which small companies disproportionately need more than big companies. When the previous guy retires from the job, the company has to decide whether to outsource the production, hire someone to move from overseas, or exit a product line entirely (maybe going out of business in the process). When a $100,000 visa fee is introduced, their options are decreased by one. When there are also insane tariffs, their options decrease even further.

So no, I’d argue that charging them $100,000 is objectively worse than charging them nothing. It doesn’t harm the companies that are abusing the system, and it harms or even kills the companies for whom the H1B was originally created.

Thank you for the kind words, especially from amid the anxiety sludge! Honestly, I think every graduating senior should be given a psychiatric exam, just so they know and don’t have to wait until they’re 35 and maxed out their deductible for the year to get tested.

Thank you! You’re very kind. That’s an interesting observation I hadn’t considered–but now I’m kind of struck by the chicken-and-egg question of whether I passed classes I didn’t put in the work for because I was a decent writer, or if I got good at writing so that I could slack off in classes.

Oh, thank you! You’re very kind. I’m glad you enjoyed it.

That’s another great point. There are a lot of knock-on effects from this, just like there are from tariffs. (Honestly it is a tariff, just levied on people immigrating rather than goods importing)

Sure, in theory. But they’re not pulling people over here for a year or two. They’re getting them over here for several years, and every year they keep them on is another $50k saved.

But on the other end, you have small businesses who need specialized labor that’s not available in the US. Or family businesses who want to bring other family members from out of the country and hire them to work for their little mom-and-pop shop, to further help bring their family out of poverty. Neither were likely to hire anyone local to do the job, and the $100k might be everything the business earns in a year after expenses.

So the $100k fee does nothing to curb the onshoring of cheap labor by big companies who are causing the problem you want to solve, but it completely kills the ability of people in developing nations or people here who are trying to do right by their community to hire anyone who doesn’t already have the right to work in the US.

That look on his face is exactly how I felt.

I just said, in the very comment you’re replying to, that an additional fee doesn’t do that. Even if the goal is a good one, this isn’t an effective way to do it. $100,000 is a pittance to any company big enough to be importing overseas labor in the first place. Even if it wasn’t, it’s absolutely worth it for them to pay $100k now in exchange for getting a $50k per year discount on labor for that role.

Except $100,000 is a pittance to any company big enough to be importing cheap labor in the first place. These are companies that shrug off billion-dollar fines, they have $100k in the executive boardroom couch cushions, so it’s absolutely worth it for them to pay $100k to the government in exchange for getting a $50k per year discount on labor for that role.

One of my greatest academic achievements was a very long, in-depth research paper that was assigned on the first day of the semester and due on the last. “Don’t put it off until the end,” our teacher warned us, “because you won’t be able to finish this in a couple of hours. You should be doing a little bit of work on it every week.” It was to be deeply-researched, extensively endnoted, and (if I recall correctly) fifty pages long, single-spaced, 10pt.

Except I had a full-time job throughout college, and that semester my schedule found me going to work immediately after that (morning) class, both days, every week. By the time I was off work, the thought of that assignment had left my undiagnosed ADHD brain entirely. The semester melted away like the cotton candy in that raccoon video.

And suddenly the last day of class was approaching. I requested the prior day off of work, figuring that I’d work the whole day on it. Only I made a mistake: I hadn’t requested the day before it was due. I had requested the day it was due. I’d be working four full days of work, with classes (and at least one early final exam), and then the paper would be due, and only after that would I have the day to write it.

But you do what you have to, and when you’re 19 years old, the vagaries of time and sleep seem almost meaningless to you. I was going to get off work at 6pm, which was 14½ hours before the assignment was due. My university had a 24-hour computer lab, which was good, as it was 2004 and I didn’t have internet in my apartment (how did I ever live like that?).

So I went home, ate a quick dinner, and went to school, locking myself into the computer lab at 8:00pm. When I poked my head out the door at 7:30am, the sun was bright and the air slightly crisp; and I held 52 freshly-printed pages in my hand. I was done early (technically) and had beaten the page count (also technically). I felt like I had beaten the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time. I ate breakfast to supplement the copious amounts of Nutty Bars and soda I had consumed overnight, and then I turned the paper in; and as class that morning was “optional,” I opted to go home, where I discovered that perhaps time was not so vague at all, nor sleep, and I went unconscious for the rest of the morning and a decent chunk of the afternoon.

A week later, I got my grades back. At that point in any semester I was always beyond caring about how well I had scored, but I looked anyway out of curiosity.

“Well done!” she had written in the notes. “I can tell you really put a lot of time into this. 95/100”

I mean, technically she was right, I had put a lot of time into it: the 11½ hours immediately leading up to my turning it in, to be precise.