Why is it so difficult to hit a baseball? originally appeared on Quora: the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights. Originally answered on Aug.18, 2016.
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Answer by Charles Tips, Co-Founder of Star Maker Baseball Academy, on Quora:
Michael Jordan, as gifted an athlete as any, sought to play professional baseball after finishing his career in basketball, a return to a game he loved but had not played in well over a decade. We don’t think about that because in his brief minor league season, he ended up not just with the lowest batting average on the team, but in the entire league.
How can that be? More than any other sport, baseball is about honing vision to high levels of perfection. This means actually laying down neurology by means of endless consistent repetitions. For example, baseball players have neurons that fire when a pitched ball will be in the strike zone. You don’t. Neither did Michael.
I’ll get into some of the tolerances in play in hitting a ball. Hitting well is not about making contact between bat and ball. When an area of the bat (the so-called “sweet spot”) between the bat’s two nodes (the prime one being about four inches from the end of the barrel) about three inches wide, makes hard contact with the dead center of the ball, an area smaller than an inch wide, the result will be a line drive. About 85 percent of line drives go for hits. Contact with the ball that is not so centered will result in a fly ball or ground ball. About 85 percent of those go for outs.
The pitcher’s job, then, is to keep the hitter from centering the ball.
I saw Luis Tiant in his year as a Pirate (1981) use an Eephus Pitch to strike out the third Giants batter of an inning, and a couple of years later ran into him at a diner on Interstate Five. I recalled the pitch to him and he remembered it with great gusto and satisfaction. It’s a pitch lobbed to the plate not much different from the ones beer-league softballers can crush. It works on major leaguers simply because they never practice against pitches floating along around 40 mph. Domination of hitters comes in many forms, and most gifted pitchers have an arsenal of techniques for deceiving batters.
The tools in the arsenal include:
Movement
The seams of a baseball beating against air resistance impart motion. With a four-seam spin, the ball can be made to move cross-body (cutter and slider), drop (curve), arm-side (power sinker and screwball) or even rise (four-seam fastball). Pitches using two-seam spin get relatively more drop, though they too can be delivered with some movement to either side. Sink can be added to two-seam pitches by simply letting the hand come over the ball on release or by gripping with the fingers spread wider (split-finger). Also, pitches thrown with no spin (forkball, knuckleball) move erratically, and thus, given the way vision works in tracking a moving object, disappear from sight for an instant only to reappear on a different trajectory.
Pitchers typically vary between four- and two-seam pitches with the goal of four-seamers being to throw pitches that “look strike, go ball” (appear to be headed to the strike zone but become all but unhittable) or “look ball, go strike” (appears well out of the strike zone but catches a corner). Four-seamers are often employed in opposite pairs; there are sinker-slider pitchers, for example, and fastball-curveballs, to keep batters guessing. Two-seamers are typically contact pitches, pitches intended to coax lazy grounders.
Here’s a fun compendium of pitch gifs: The Best, Most Devastating Pitches of the Year: A GIF Roundup [Note: A sinking fastball is much more common and so is more commonly referred to as a “sinker.” A true sinker is sometimes referred to as a power sinker to distinguish. The pitcher in the sinker gif is throwing a power sinker, which confuses the commentator. The change-up commentary is pretty confused too, but otherwise it’s quite a good article for appreciating the difference in pitches. I once taught a power sinker to an exceptional 16-year-old athlete with long arms and big hands. His third try had every bit as much break as the one in the gif and wasn’t all that shy on velocity.]
How hitters handle movement
When a hitter knows what pitch is coming, he generally has a much better chance of hitting safely. A survey of Major League hitters showed three distinct visual approaches to “reading” the coming pitch, on top of which there is also the time-honored method of “stealing” the opposing team’s signals to the pitcher. The three visual camps were of roughly equal size. Some watch the delivery for telltale signs such as a narrow wrist or wide wrist. A narrow wrist inside the ball yields arm-side movement and vice versa for outside the ball. A wide wrist produces a fastball or curve, but with the curve, the ball flashes above the top of the hand.
Another camp reads spin. If the seams of a pitch can actually be seen, it’s a forkball or knuckleball — barely spinning. If it’s a two-seamer, the spin will be “squirrelly” with flashes of the red seams. A four-seamer spins so fast that the ball appears white. If the axis can be determined (by the little red 0 of the seams spinning around the axis), the hitter has a good idea where the ball is headed [1]. The final group I call the gestalt hitters; they blank their mind and go with hunches [2].
Visual memory honed to an extraordinarily high degree is the hallmark of professional ballplayers. Hitters study pitchers. They recall key at bats against pitchers they’ve faced before, what the pitcher’s various pitches looked like and how he generally went about trying to get him out. All of that is deposited into the mind as the player mentally rehearses his coming at-bat. It also explains why some unorthodox rookie pitchers can enjoy success weeks or months into a season and then start getting shellacked.
Finally, all ballplayers look for ways pitchers give away or “tip” the coming pitch. It can be as subtle as the angle of the pitching arm while holding the ball in the glove. Of course, pitchers know this, and cagey ones will play along and then counter-tip at crucial points in the game. When you see a hitter look really bad on a swing, he was expecting one pitch and got another.
The same studies show that Major League ballplayers have a highly refined idea of where the ball will arrive at the plate. What is much harder to gauge is when the ball will get there.
Change of speed
Seven milliseconds represents the difference in timing between a ball sprayed foul to the batter’s open side, versus one yanked foul to his pull side. In other words, the difference between a ball hit up the middle of the field and those sent harmlessly foul to either side then is a mere 0.0035 seconds, or a thirtieth of the tenth of a second of an eyeblink. This, among many reasons, stands as the chief reason that hitting a pitched baseball represents the biggest challenge in all of sports.
Change of speed is accomplished by means of plus and minus fastballs and by the change-up. The many varieties of change-up are simply held down in the hand, which imparts less speed to the ball for a given arm speed. A pitcher’s change-up will often be a close mimic to his fastball, just arriving at a slower speed or even slower speeds as some pitchers have two or more speeds on their change-up; just as they can add or subtract two or three miles per hour from their fastball at will.
Pure speed, a fastball in the upper 90s, automatically puts pressure on any glitch in a batter’s swing, any loop or hitch or imbalance and minimizes reaction time. But pure speed is not the devastating weapon many give it credit for. Throw three 99 mph pitches in a row, and most professional players will have them timed sufficiently to have a chance to center the ball [3].
Knowing when the ball will arrive at the plate depends on a cluster of visual skills that must be honed to a high level. Smooth pursuit is an oculomotor (eye movement) skill that can track moving objects [4]. The limits of accurate foveal vision (the two to three degrees of your visual range in which you can see with fine detail, or about the size of a quarter at arm’s length) when tracking a moving object was widely listed in vision literature as seventy to eighty degrees of movement, or about the speed of someone walking by you at six feet away. That held until they started testing ballplayers, some of whom are able to track sharply up to one hundred forty degrees per second [5].
That ability comes in part through the skill of anticipation resulting in zero-latency tracking, or the ability to see the ball out of the hand rather than a tenth of a second into its four-tenths of a second flight to the plate as unskilled hitters do.
But pitchers know about anticipation and use a variety of techniques to disrupt it. Luis Tiant and Hideo Nomo used elaborate and varied windups to throw it off. Some use sudden extra movement, like Stu Miller’s head jerk or Robb Nenn’s foot tap. And some just have a rubber arm and vary the angle of release to make it difficult.
Finally, extreme steropsis, or three-dimensional vision at depth, allows few hitters — Jason Giambi and Tony Gwynn were notable examples — to distinguish a fastball from a change-up in flight. Not so long ago, this skill existed at a rate of perhaps one player per team, but players have been getting sports vision therapy to improve this skill for some time now.
Fear
Fastballs coming in at 99-plus miles per hour are scary, and if you don’t get out of the way can hurt like hell. Hell, even 70 mph is gonna hurt.
I was a Little League pitching coach, and on one team, the head coach’s son had a natural doorknob slider. I taught him to throw it right at the batter’s face. Its natural motion would take it right into the strike zone. But no Little League hitter is going to stand in the box with a beanball coming the way Major Leaguers routinely must. Even though he was very slight of build, he was the most feared pitcher in the league, so I taught him a routine two-seam fastball at the knees as the first pitch. Sure enough, every hitter jumped on that first pitch rather than wait for one coming right at his head, and he once recorded five straight outs on five pitches!
Now, play that scenario out at Major League pitching speeds and you will have an idea of the intimidation factor hitters face [6]. Or, as Nolan Ryan (I believe) put it, “If a hitter is afraid of an inside pitch, it’s my job to find that out.”
Strategy
I won’t get into the intricacies of pitch-count, outs, runners on base and so on, details of the game that really color pitching and hitting strategy, but will stick with just the visual and mechanical side. Still, it’s worth mentioning that players — pitchers and hitters — think of pitches in different terms from us regular fans. They think in terms of mainstays, cripples, outs, show pitches and more according to the hitter and situation.
A pitcher’s first pitch is typically a fastball at the knees, often the most tempting pitch a batter will see. Why tempt a batter so? Because batters who put the first pitch in play bat more than 100 points lower than ones who see more pitches. If the pitcher starts the third batter out with that same pitch, it becomes his job to try to hit it in order to break up the pitcher’s advantage. The pitcher will keep it up until the other team demonstrates the ability to punish him for it.
A cripple pitch is called for when the pitcher is behind in the count and wants the batter to go for a pitch he is likely to put in play poorly for an out right now without risking a walk. An out pitch is what the pitcher goes with with two strikes, typically it will be a pitch that looks strike, goes ball, in the Majors even on a full-count. The mainstays will be the two or three pitches most relied on by a given pitcher.
A show pitch in the majors will usually be a ball in the dirt to be followed by one at the belt for the out, or, other way around, one up at the numbers before putting one right at the knees. The idea is to force an extreme change in the hitter’s visual reference. At lower levels of play where hitters do not gain so much familiarity with pitchers, a show pitch can be thrown for a ball to make the hitter think that’s as good as that pitch is. “Put that slop over the plate, Meat,” is what the hitter is now thinking. We had a pitcher in Babe Ruth league who’d show a slow rolling curve off the plate. His real curve ball was a hammer, or a hard, straight curve that mimics a four-seam fastball but breaks down at the last instant. Somehow the league’s hitters never caught on that his real curve ball was a killer.
Hitters know pitcher tendencies for what pitches they use in a given situation, and pitchers can tell by body lean and position in the batter’s box when a batter is guessing. It is a game of strategy/counter-strategy with many subtleties. And all of these finely honed through endless repetitions and familiarization with particular players explain why as gifted an athlete as Michael Jordan did not advance to the Majors.
[1] The size of the “button,” or red 0 around the spin axis, is referred to as “dime spin” or “nickel spin.” The smaller the button, the higher the spin rate and the greater the deviation from initial trajectory.
Some pitchers like to brag on their “quarter spin” pitches. Once a batter is catching up to his top four-seam pitch, he throws it with less “finish” (wrist and finger powering through the ball at delivery) hoping the batter will reach with his bat and so hit it harmlessly off the handle.
[2] This phenomenon explains why some hitters “own” some pitchers and vice versa.
[3] Research conducted by one Major League team established that it takes several seconds for a batter to lay down memory of a pitch. They found that whenever a pitch had a batter fooled, if they could get the same pitch off again within seven seconds they were almost certain to get the same result. The team, throughout its farm system, implemented a catcher sign that meant, “hurry up and give me that same pitch again.” The lesson for the offense is to step out of the box and process the last pitch—figure out what you will do if you see it again—especially when it fools you.
[4] Smooth pursuit usually must be learned. Saccading, or swiveling the eyes and/or head is the first oculomotor skill learned in infancy, and for many, that’s it. But saccades involve latencies that block vision. The majority of hitters, even at the major league level, pick up the ball in the general area of the pitcher’s shoulder using perifoveal (semi-blurred) vision and saccade to smooth pursuit of the pitch. Hitters who discipline themselves to see the actual release out of the hand can start recognizing the pitch 50 or even 75 ms sooner, shortening pitch recognition down to .125 of a second instead of the usual .175 to .200. One study showed batting averages rising by about fifty points (0.050) for every 25 ms shaved off pitch-recognition time.
Further, some few hitters develop the compensatory mechanism of initiating the head turn while leaving the eyes on the incoming pitch. This begins at the point where smooth pursuit transitions to angular pursuit (see note 5), and these are the hitters with the greatest acuity in angular tracking of the pitch.
[5] Catchers and umpires crouched centered behind the plate can use smooth pursuit all the way. Batters standing to one side have a lesser vantage point that requires a change to angular pursuit, which requires more compensation for angular velocity. From the batter’s box, a good major league fastball begins to exceed 80°/sec nine or 10 feet in front of the plate, the point where it would begin to blur for an inexperienced batter. It begins to exceed 140°/sec about five feet from the plate, when it becomes a blur to an experienced batter. In both cases, the batter has already committed to his swing. The ball quickly “accelerates” to roughly 1,000°/sec as it crosses the plate. Of course, the ball is actually decelerating a bit, but its angular velocity greatly accelerates because of its proximity and oblique path.
To compound this problem, in visual pursuit skills, there is a processing latency which the brain compensates for by seeing not the actual ball but a virtual ball calculated according to perceived velocity. That works extraordinarily well unless a ground ball takes a last second bad hop or a pitch like a slider or sinker has late break. In those cases the ball is literally no longer visible for an instant. This phenomenon explains why a quality knuckle simply disappears one, two or even three times on its way to the plate.
[6] We blink 12 times a minute on average, a reflex that moistens the eye and relaxes the muscles of the eye. A blink leaves you blind for a full tenth of a second. The blink reflex is overridden when we are using narrow focus as hitters do. However, fear can override that override and start a nervous batter blinking.
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