Home Plate

$\begin{figure}\begin{center}\BoxedEPSF{HomePlate.epsf scaled 800}\end{center}\end{figure}$

Home plate in the game of Baseball is an irregular Pentagon. However, the Little League rulebook's specification of the shape of home plate (Kreutzer and Kerley 1990), illustrated above, is not physically realizable, since it requires the existence of a (12, 12, 17) Right Triangle, whereas

$\begin{displaymath} 12^2+12^2=288\not=289=17^2 \end{displaymath}$

(Bradley 1996).

See also Baseball, Baseball Cover

References

Bradley, M. J. ``Building Home Plate: Field of Dreams or Reality?'' Math. Mag. 69, 44-45, 1996.

Kreutzer, P. and Kerley, T. Little League's Official How-to-Play Baseball Book. New York: Doubleday, 1990.