SOLUTION: The official distance between home plate and second base in a baseball diamond is 120 ft. Find the area of the official ball diamond and the distance between the bases. (The offici

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Question 1038655: The official distance between home plate and second base in a baseball diamond is 120 ft. Find the area of the official ball diamond and the distance between the bases. (The official ball diamond is in the form of a square.)
Answer by solver91311(24713) (Show Source):
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I don't know where you got the idea that the measurement from home plate to second base is 120 feet. If you are playing professional baseball in the United States, the diamond is a square 90 feet on each side. The distance from the vertex of the square at home plate to the vertex of the square at second base is approximately 127.28 feet.

The irregular pentagon that forms home plate is inscribed in a 17" by 17" square. Hence the distance from the vertex of home plate at the corner of the baseball diamond square to the front edge of home plate is 17". Each of the three bases are 15" squares, so the diagonal across the base is approximately 21.21 inches. A little arithmetic shows that the front edge of home plate is approximately 124 feet from the front corner of second base.

Since the diamond area is defined by the measure of the sides of the square, namely 90 feet, the area of the diamond is 8100 square feet. Since the sum of the measures of the edges of two bases is 30 inches, the distance BETWEEN two bases is 87.5 feet. The distance from home to first and from third to home being a few inches shorter.

John

My calculator said it, I believe it, that settles it