By Will Carlin
In early 2005, Jennie Finch was the most famous softball player in the world (“softball” here being the larger- ball form of baseball, not the international game of squash). Recently retired as perhaps the most dominating pitcher in softball history, Finch had become one of the co-hosts of This Week in Baseball.
On a slow week for baseball news, the show lined up nine of baseball’s most feared hitters to face off against screaming underhanded softball pitches from the 6’1” tall blonde. Finch’s upper-60-mph pitches, coming from 43 feet away (the softball mound is much closer to home plate than a baseball mound), takes about the same amount of time to reach the plate as does a mid-90’s major league baseball pitch; in theory, no problem for these major league fastball hitters.
Sports Illustrated’s David Epstein describes what happened next: “Barry Bonds went down on three pitches, didn’t even swing. Albert Pujols and Mike Piazza couldn’t make contact. Paul Lo Duca, Larry Walker, Richie Sexson, Dmitri Young: K, K, K, K. A-Rod took the wise course and decided not to even step into the box. The best any big leaguer fared… was Sean Casey’s dink to the right side.”
The question is: why?
Before getting to the answer, it is necessary to understand how professional baseball players can ever hit a major league pitch in the first place. It takes almost all human beings a fifth of a second for the eye to see something, send an impulse to the brain and have the brain return an appropriate signal to the hands and feet to perform an action.
Contrary to what many of us may think, pro athletes don’t do any better on raw reaction-time tests. A fifth of a second (or 200 milliseconds) is about as fast as the signals can travel in most human beings. Those 200 milliseconds is almost half the distance that a pitch travels from the mound to the plate, so a batter must begin to swing when the ball is no more than halfway to the plate.
As Epstein writes: “…given that the window for actually making solid contact with a fastball is about five milliseconds, or 1/200th of a second, it’s a wonder that anyone ever hits it. In fact, the only way to accomplish it—the technique that separates the expert from the amateur—is to see the future.”
Or, in other words, they anticipate.
It turns out that the only reason pro baseball players can hit a baseball is that they can tell where the ball is going long before it ever gets there. “Compared with lower-level players,” writes Epstein, “pros can tell where the ball is going much more accurately, much earlier and with much less information.”
In fact, top squash players can tell from the pre-stroke movement of their opponent’s body—sometimes just tiny shifts of the torso or the arm position on the backswing— where a shot is likely to wind up, whereas average players must wait to see the motion of the racquet or even the path of the ball to determine where it is going.
There is an Australian researcher named Bruce Abernathy who has conducted studies on tennis, cricket and badminton players by taking videos of players and showing them to others. He shows the beginning of a throw or a shot then stops the video and has players predict where the ball or birdy will go. He then blocks out (or “occludes”) various parts of the body before stopping the video to see how accurately players still can anticipate.
Abernathy’s occlusion studies have shown that in cricket, for example, when everything but the hand, wrist and elbow of a bowler is deleted, pros often still see enough to be able to predict the path of the ball. In badminton, on the other hand, if everything is visible but the forearm and the racquet, top players fare no better than beginners.
Of course, recognizing visual clues, analyzing them, and then physically reacting appropriately has to happen very quickly. One of the enabling factors is a process called “chunking.” To see how this works, imagine a researcher reading the following sequence of numbers to you and asking you to remember them: 1-0-2-4-1-9-2-9- 1-2-7-1-9-4-1-1-1-2-2-1-9-6-3.
Chances are that you would be able to recall about the first five-to-seven numbers. Unless, that is, you recognize them as famous dates: 10.24.1929, 12.7.1941, and 11.22.1963 (the Wall Street crash of 1929, the attack on Pearl Harbor and President Kennedy’s assassination, respectively). Instead of trying to recall 23 individual numbers, you would be able to “chunk” them into three pieces of information.
It turns out that pros are better able to chunk appropriate pieces of visual information and translate them into “if-then” sequences (“if the forearm is turned that way, she is going to hit a drop shot”) that give them a significant advantage in being able to predict what will come next.
You already do this in squash. Try playing a few points with your eyes locked onto the front wall when it goes behind you. Your ability to retrieve will be severely compromised because you won’t be able to input all the normal information you usually process to predict where the ball is going.
The opposite also is true, by the way. Almost all of us notice that we perform better after watching a lot of good squash. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is that we likely are storing more visual cues.
Which brings us back to Jennie Finch. It turns out that at least part of her success against the big leaguers is due to her underhand delivery: it was so different visually from a baseball pitch that the big leaguers had no visual cues to latch onto. And against someone as good as Finch, they performed as well as the rest of us would. Whiff. Whiff. Whiff.
