Relativistic Baseball!

Randall "XKCD" Munroe has started a new blog in the "what if" venue which I really find entertaining. He is taking what if questions and treating them as reasonable questions. The first question was, what would a pitch be like if the pitcher could throw at or near C.

Here is a short piece of the response I found in Boing Boing:

• The ball is going so fast that everything else is practically stationary. Even the molecules in the air are stationary. Air molecules vibrate back and forth at a few hundred miles per hour, but the ball is moving through them at 600 million miles per hour. This means that as far as the ball is concerned, they’re just hanging there, frozen.
• The ideas of aerodynamics don’t apply here. Normally, air would flow around anything moving through it. But the air molecules in front of this ball don’t have time to be jostled out of the way. The ball smacks into them hard that the atoms in the air molecules actually fuse with the atoms in the ball’s surface. Each collision releases a burst of gamma rays and scattered particles. fusion illustration fusion zone of baseball
• These gamma rays and debris expand outward in a bubble centered on the pitcher’s mound. They start to tear apart the molecules in the air, ripping the electrons from the nuclei and turning the air in the stadium into an expanding bubble of incandescent plasma. The wall of this bubble approaches the batter at about the speed of light—only slightly ahead of the ball itself.

Boy does that sound like the most frightening game you ever heard of?  First pitch, top of the first...one pitch and the whole stadium is reduced to slag from the fusion blast!  SWEET!