The Baseball Observer - May/ June 2016
Seeing The Ball Hit The Bat Is Not Important. Seeing It Early Is.
by The Baseball Observer
Hitting a baseball involves quick perception and reaction as well as an accurate swing. In most situations a batter is just trying to hit the ball hard somewhere. So why is “Watching the ball hit the bat” not important? It's because you can’t do it but seeing it early is important and here’s why.
Angular Velocity
Ken Fuld, Visual Psychophysicist at the University of New Hampshire states –
"In the last few feet before the plate, the ball reaches an angular velocity that exceeds the ability of the eye to track the ball.” The best hitters can track the ball to within 5 or 6 feet of the plate."
From “Busting Baseball Myths” - LiveScience
Basically humans cannot follow the complete path of the ball from the pitchers release to bat contact. So being told to “Watch the ball hit the bat” well, is impossible. Even if a batter could see the last 4-6 feet before contact it wouldn’t matter anyhow because they couldn’t adjust quickly enough to do anything due to Visio-Motor Delay (the delay between visual perception and muscle contraction). See Takatoshi Higuchi et. al. Feb 2016 research article on the next page referencing Visio-Motor Delay.
How Batters Actually Hit
It's an educated guess. Yes that's right, hitting a baseball comes down to a guess. Batters actually “calculate” or “estimate” where the ball is going to cross the plate both horizontally and vertically and at what perceived speed early in the delivery. This is why getting the bat on trajectory/plane with the ball is so important – more room for error (see The Baseball Observer article Want to Hit? - Stop Swinging Down!) How humans are able to estimate the expected position of a quickly moving ball is still being researched. The simplest explanation posed is the skill is learned through long practice and seeing thousands of different types of pitches from little league on up. This develops Eye-to-Brain-to-Body coordination. Going through the motions over and over through years of hitting experience is the only way batters seem to develop the ability to accurately predict the arrival location of a pitch. Athleticism alone just won't do the job.
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"You might as well close your eyes," says Robert Adair, of Yale University, and the Physicist to the National League. "All the information you have to hit the ball is in your brain when the ball is at the halfway point to the plate." (Source and graph: Robert Adair, Yale University; The Language of Sport by Tim Considine; Associated Press)