The other day I read that traditional soccer balls are black and white because that makes for the best visibility in all lighting conditions - which seemed to make sense, except then I remember hearing that tennis balls are yellow because THAT makes for the best visibility (which is why fire engines are often now yellow instead of the traditional red)…then again, baseballs are all white, as are golf balls, two sports in which visibility is very important (in the latter case, if only to find your errant shots)…meanwhile basketball and football players seem to make do with relatively dull orange and brown.
I guess my question is, is there any real science on what the best color(s) for sports balls are?
I can’t answer your question, but I’ll point out that way back when they used a white football with black stripes at either end for night games. I guess with the better lighting now, that’s unimportant.
Some of us oldsters will remember that in the early days of the Houston Astrodome (the first domed stadium) the glare made it very hard for players to see the ball. The National League actually experimented with different colored baseballs, including those day-glo types like cerise and fuschia. That particular problem was finally solved by painting the roof of the Astrodome (and future domes) to cut the glare.
They make those tennis balls in fluorescent yellow (and other fluorescent colors) because they are so incredibly visible. I haven’t seen a traditional white tennis ball on any local court in ages. I suspect fluorescent colors are probably the most visible, and are widely used for the same reason construction crews on city streets wear fluorescent vests. But I haven’t seen any studies on this.
The traditional, classic black and white soccer ball pattern was first developed by Adidas (the Adidas Telstar) in the late 1960’s to make the ball show up better on black and white television.
I remember that back last century, there were some trials to find a more visible colour than the traditional red for fire appliances. Some university came up with a greeny-yellow colour that was definitely visible; the problem was that it made people physically sick.
I suspect it has a lot to do with specific lighting conditions, distance and the background for each sport.
For example, back in college when I used to play a lot of recreational golf, I played around with the colored balls a little. The yellow ones weren’t as visible as I expected, but the safety orange ones stood out like crazy, and the traditional white ones were somewhere in between. I suspect it’s because yellow and green are analogous, especially on the rather indifferently maintained college course, while orange isn’t anywhere near the colors normally seen there.
Similarly, I suspect in relatively close quarters tennis, that yellow stands out because the ball is still relatively large.
Apparently an optometrist named Stephen Solomon, who began his research in the 1970s. He’s still around, and provides some background here:
There are some claims that an added bonus to the color is that it’s remarkably ugly, meaning that very few other vehicles are going to be painted that color. Whoever said that doesn’t remember the snot-green Datsun B210s from the 1970s.
Yes, when I was growing up, Toronto police cars were bright yellow - which made the traditional back-and-whites in movies seem very foreign. For a while I seem to recall, they tried painting fire engines puke-yellow-green.
Those fluorescent tennis balls are fairly new in the last few decades; when I was growing up, tennis balls started out fuzzy white and got browner with use. I expect the change was because the courts varied from public asphalt courts to reddish clay courts and dark green grass courts and the best compromise was that one. Dodge balls were usually dark, I assume as a contrast to white tee shirts. Similarly for court sports like racquetball, the balls are blue or dark red in contrast to the white court walls. Pucks are black on white ice - certainly the best to follow. White golf balls do stand out against grass (from my experience as a caddy way back when) but in a field of dandelions or lots of litter they are harder to find.
I suspect for most sports, the optimum choice evolved over time - like tennis balls; given a choice, most people found the bright green most visible in assorted circumstances. I wonder that in tennis stadiums where spectators could wear white, and the ball is often as not above eye level, it was less optimal to have a white ball. Whereas in golf, unless the sun is behind you, a white golf ball is typically visible in flight as a dark spot against a bright sky.
I suspect there isn’t a single definitive answer, as the most visible color will be the one that provides the most contrast against the background, and that’s going to vary. There’s some debate on what color surface marker buoy scuba divers should use to make themselves most visible on the surface; most SMBs are fluorescent orange or yellow, but there’s supposedly some study out there that says hot pink is better. (I haven’t been able to find it.) Time of day can be a factor too; this article states (again without citation) that orange is more visible in full sun while yellow is more visible at dawn: Which Delayed Surface Marker Buoy should I choose?
To throw in (pun intended) some science, here is a study from 2013 that concludes: “Blue and yellow balls produced significantly higher catching scores than the white balls. The significance of interaction effects suggested that various combinations of ball color and background color produced high catching scores. Blue balls projected against white background produced the highest catching score.” It thus seems to contradict this 2000 paper which concluded that, for cricket, the colour of the ball didn’t make a difference.
