Engineer: Head-first slide is quicker

Whether watching the All-Star Game, a World Series game or just a regular-season Tuesday afternoon game, it’s nearly guaranteed that fans will see daring slides, both feet-first and head-first, and even slides on bang-bang plays at first. Who gets there faster, the head-first slider or the feet-first? The head-first player, says David A. Peters, Ph.D., the McDonnell Douglas Professor of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, and big-time baseball fan. He says it’s a matter of the player’s center of gravity.