What kind of energy does a baseball in flight have?

Answer 1

Simple Answer:

Any object in flight clearly has velocity, so it must also have kinetic energy.

In addition, the when the object maintains its flight trajectory without any sort of self propulsion, then it will be changing altitude as a response to gravity. Changing the position in a gravitational field changes the potential energy of the object.

The essential answer is that an object in flight has kinetic energy and gravitational potential energy.

More Complex Answer:

There are tiny things to consider that distract from the main issues of potential and kinetic energy. One is that an object that has been launched, like a Baseball from a bat, has been deformed and there was some initial friction that probably created a tiny little bit of heat and the object likely cools as it proceeds in flight and so looses heat energy. Similarly for a bullet fired from a gun, there is likely to be heat loss.

Another potential heat issue is the air friction. For really fast objects, like meteorites entering the atmosphere, that can be tremendous.

The atmosphere does something besides heat, it slows down the object and so decreases the kinetic energy of the object. The result is that the air is heated.

Finally, there is another form of kinetic energy beyond that simply due to traveling at a velocity. There is also rotational kinetic energy if the object is spinning while it travels. (Think of a curve ball in baseball.) This is likely larger than any heating effects for an object just tossed into the atmosphere at speeds that humans can produce by hand.

So, in a picky way of looking at this, an object can have translational kinetic energy, rotational kinetic energy, gravitational potential energy, heat energy and all of those can be exchanged or lost as has been described above.