It is much easier to think in two dimensions than three. If you picture the ball following a parabolic trajectory in space then you are really thinking in three

It is much easier to think in two dimensions than three. If you picture the ball following a parabolic trajectory in space then you are really thinking in three dimensions here. It might be easier to think of throwing the ball straight up, after which it eventually falls straight back down. NOW plot this in two dimensions with one of the dimensions being time. As the original comment says, the scaling of the time dimension in seconds is not a good comparison to meters. Physicist like units where the speed of light is 1 (one). In these units, in our two dimensional space-time graph, the ball travels a very far distance while the change in our space dimension is still small. It is very close to straight line.