Baseball Spin: Newsletter Challenge (February 2016)

this is slowmo.....think about it the average batting average is around .250 for people that do this for a living

http://www.thecompletepitcher.com/different_baseball_pitches.htm

http://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/MLB/bat.shtml

I don't know much about baseball, but let's say the pitch speed is 90 mph. Putting that in more reasonable terms, that's 132 feet/sec.

The distance between pitcher and batter is about 60 feet, so the ball is airborne for just under 1/2 second.

Spin rates for balls are somewhere between 1800 to 2400 rpms. That's 30 to 40 rps.

So the ball revolves 15 to 20 times in flight.

My guess is that you wouldn't be able to discriminate features on a ball moving that fast at distances much further than 30 or so feet, still, that's 8 to 10 revolutions in a 1/4 second, which seems unlikely to be seen given speed, time, and distances.

The spin on the ball is to fast to see at around 1200 rpm on a fastball. It is imposible to follow the ball thru it's complete trajectory. The last 6 to 8 feet is beyond human ablilities. The batter uses motion of the pitcher, the hand release and the movement of the ball. All done in about 1/2 second.

I'd say this is a half-truth.

The human eye cannot follow a professionally thrown baseball in flight all the way from the pitcher's hand to the bat. The eye muscles can't track the ball that fast over that entire angular path, nor can the batter's head rotate fast enough to help his eyes track the ball over the whole distance. The ball's position at the plate is estimated from a very short initial glimpse of the ball after it leaves the pitcher's hand.

However, a trained batter's eye can detect that the ball is spinning by the slight change in illumination along the raised threaded seams, and by the streaky pattern of the stains caused by the 'mud' that is rubbed into the ball to remove the glosss, prior to the game. So he can roughly estimate the amount (relative speed) of the spin.

This is, indeed, true.

Dynamic Visual Acuity, the players simply call it having 'Fast Eyes'.

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/778522

It appears that a number of pros can see the spin (so they claim). Those that do tend to have better than 20-20 vision.

I see the link I pasted before takes me to a login page.

To see the article, try this - copy and paste the first sentence of the article into your browser:

Dynamic visual acuity (DVA) is defined as the ability to discriminate the fine parts of a moving object.

The Medscape article comes up #1 on my browser.

I'd imagine one improves with practice too, learning to see it. Most people these days simply look, they don't actually see.. too bust damn texting.

It's like watching the flexing of an arrow as it leaves the bow. I can get a good idea of the bow/arrow tune over the just 10 yards of flight, but it's really an impression of how much it's waggling and other clues.
Del

Slomo clip from my hat cam here

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22942993#

The above link is to a medical research article on soccer players, so there is something related in training visual acuity to the sport at hand.

About the only spin I would be able to see would be the low spin on a knuckle ball.

Could whether the game being played during the day or at night under the stadium lights affect the answer?

Having spent a few years on the mound I can tell you that no, the batter does not see the rotation of the ball. (there is a reason why we cover the ball before the pitch) What the batters look at is the arc of the pitchers arm, the release, and extrapolate from the initial movement of the ball in the first few feet after release. It is as that point you start your swing based on your assessment of what the ball will be doing as it passes through your swing arc. There is a lot more skill involved to that split second when bat and ball come together than most people realize.

If you have ever had a chance to stand at the plate and have a professional pitcher wing one in you won't believe how fast that sucker is moving.

I agree for the most part. When facing a pitcher, that's what I always looked for, for the most part was the arc of the pitchers arm and release. Once in a while I could see the rotation of the ball clearly but that was mostly on the slower breaking ball pitches. Fast balls, you can forget about it.

I threw side arm so most batters were more concerned with the flight path than the rotation. LoL

Given my fastball flew at 80 to 85 mph they only had less than half a second to decide whether it was going to straighten out and hit them or curve and drop into the strike zone. I doubt trying to see the laces was a major concern.

with a real good Eye and if the ball isn't seamless it is possible to watch the spin of the ball!

I think I remember seeing the ball spin back in Pony-League baseball, but I was not a good hitter, and was really too slow reaction time to swing and connect. I remember being a left-handed batter against left-handed pitchers, and wanting to "bail" on nearly every pitch compared to a right-handed pitcher.

Do you think so? Remember the speed of typical ball is over 60 mph

Calculate the time it reaches the batter!

have you ever seen a fast rotating wheel in a movie?

Yes, a fast rotating wheel in a movie can appear to be rotating backward if the rotation period is greater than a frame duration. Humans do not operate that way, so we only see a blur when the rotation (even if clearly marked) is above a certain rate. I think the rate may vary slightly from individual to individual.

Many years ago, I remember reading an article that explained how Ted Williams had told some reporters that were interviewing him, that he could actually see what part of the ball the bat made contact with when he hit it. After the reporters laughed and said no way, the story goes that Williams proceeded to put pine tar on his bat and took batting practice, when he made contact he would yell out what part of the ball he hit by saying 2 laces or one lace. Supposedly after being inspected by the reporters, he was proven to be telling the truth. Before I replied to this thread I did some research, by reading one of the books about the legend and found where he told the writer that this was not true. There goes another childhood fantasy lost. This may be off topic, but I hope it is worth reading.

Yep it's a "lie," or more like a legend. A hitter I know said you have to react to quickly and "guess" where it will be.

There are a number of professional pitchers in the majors that can repeatedly throw a pitch more than 95 mph. I'd like to know the batter who can see the seams at that speed.

For those pitchers, I wouldn't have time to decide whether to swing to bail out of the batter's box. Baseball is a scary thing. Football is a scary thing, because you can be totally blind-sided on a downfield play and it really hurts.

Chemistry research is a scary thing. Your highly unstable organic molecule (propargyl alcohol) reacting with a very nasty inorganic compound like phosphorus trichloride, can get warm enough to undergo a very fast switched on free radical chain reaction and detonate right before your very eyes. It happened to me. I was very fortunate in that I still have my sight, and most of the hearing back that I totally lost for about a month. I only have a 60 decibel hearing loss at the higher band of frequencies in left ear. Convenient for when dodging wife's orders. Less than 25 mL of this stuff picked me up and hurled me over a lab stool.

The solution was initially colorless, then changed to black in an augenblick, then had red "photon torpedo light" being emitted, then a shock wave front that was the whitest thing I have ever seen, then white plasma everywhere. The thermometer (yes, mercury type) was shot upward into a rock slab in the fume hood, making a crater about the size of a silver dollar (~4cm). The glassware disintegrated and turned to sand on the floor of the lab. I had thermal chemical burns, hot oil burns from the flask heater, and three deep lacerations, one on the jaw line just above my jugular vein, on my right cubital vein, and one to my lower right chest wall (did not penetrate to the lungs due to striking a rib. This last one left a thumbnail sized piece of the reaction flask in my chest, and it took 19 years to finally convince a doctor that it was there, and he removed it. There was glass in my eyes from where my safety glasses (prescription ones) were cratered out on the back side from high velocity impacts.

The next day, after the doctors had finish removing glass from me eyes (3 hours under fluorescein dye and tweezers,etc.), sewed up the lacerations and treated the burns, I returned to the lab feeling as though I had been kicked hard by a mule (not that I was ever kicked by a mule).

A good hitter might be able to catch the spin on one pitch in a game, but as most have pointed out, these same good hitters usually have something like 20-10 vision

As was also pointed out, they generally try to estimate where the ball will be at time of contact based on the pitcher's release and the arc of the ball.

If a pitcher can make the ball drop, rise or otherwise do something to affect the path during the last few feet of travel, at the very best the batter will hit a long foul ball.

Although I am an Aussie, and know nothing about baseball, I will relate a story (true) of an Australian cricketer by the name of Don Bradman (The Don).

As a young fellow he practised the art of cricket at home using a ball (tennis I think) and hit it off a corrugated water tank with nothing but a stick. He trained himself to watch the ball from contact with the tank until he struck it back again with his stick.

He could keep this up for long periods. When he became a cricketer, playing against some of the best bowlers in the world, he achieved a batting average of 99.8 over his long career. To my knowledge he has not been bested to this day. (I cannot verify the truth of this figure, but it will be close to accurate). He stated, he could see the balls flight, including spin, all the way to his bat.

I hope other better informed Aussies will correct any mistakes that I have made in this response.

R.J.

If a batter could see the spin on the ball, if it's more than just a glance, it avails him nothing. He will wind up missing the ball, and getting a strike. (Unless the pitcher intentionally throws a spin-less pitch....) because he is not paying enough attention to where the ball WILL BE when he swings his bat.

I played baseball up through 12th grade, maintained a 750 batting average. I opted out for football as my major sport, however.

There is a secret to power batting that I have never seen discussed, or heard discussed. Not many baseball players have this advantage. I had it, but didn't realize what it was until my college years.

It is this: I am right handed in everything, except when shooting a gun. There, I am left handed. Why? Because I am right-handed, but left leading eye. How is that a tremendous advantage to batting? Because as a right-handed batter, but left leading eye, I see the baseball coming first from my forward, closest eye. My perception of the ball's travel is different, in that my depth perception is cued from my left eye (closest to the oncoming pitched ball) and is unobstructed by my nose or eye socket. Most right-handed people are just the opposite: they judge the ball's travel from their right eye, the eye furthest from the ball as it approaches, and have therefore more error when judging the travel of the ball. I was able to perceive the travel of the ball very accurately, quickly, and therefor judge the swing of my bat better. I never knew why I had such good "feel" for the ball, until I learned that everyone has a leading, and following, eye. Our brains perceive depth perception, speed, and make judgements based on how the leading/following eye is wired.

If I had to place a bet, I would bet that Babe Ruth was also right handed, but left leading eye. Something I will look into.

Interesting!

From the 'Correct Answer':

"...your head has to turn at an angular speed of around 500 degrees per second..." And, how fast are your eyes able to swivel within their sockets?

Anyone slinging their head around like that, would not only not make contact with the ball, they would probably seriously injure themselves in the process, notwithstanding, no one has muscular movement that fast, however, focusing the eye takes only an augenblick, or less.

Your head doesn't turn at all and your eyes only a small amount to track the ball. Look at the diagrams in response #9. They show the batter's view during the pitch. The speed of the ball only effects the time the batter has to react to the flight of the ball. If the ball was thrown in a straight line toward the batter's head it would hardly move across his field of view but it would appear to grow in diameter. As far as the rotation, I don't know what the typical rotation in degrees per second would be. Likely it varies with the type of pitch. Being able to discern the rotation direction and speed might help predict the path of the last few feet and be a help in making contact. I never was a good hitter, probably because I didn't put in the effort to practice.

As stated by others, too many dubious assumptions in the "answer"

The angular rate proposed assumes that the batter needs to track the ball almost until it reaches the bat, but in reality he only needs to see it for the first half of the trajectory.

It also ignores anticipation and non-central vision (standard in most sports - tennis investigations have shown that good+ players rapidly transfer the centre of field to where they expect the ball to bounce)

In addition, the head does not need to move, and saccadian scan rates can be up to 900-deg/sec.

If one only tracks the ball for the first half of its trajectory, one will miss the ball with the bat, unless it is a straight fast ball.

The curvature of the ball is not linear. It is NOT a linear function. The last half of the ball's trajectory is very different from its first half. Hence, a breaking curve, sinker, slider, etc., are difficult for most batters to hit, because in most cases the batter IS predicting the path of the ball based on the first half of its trajectory.

No. You see what the ball is doing early, and estimate its arrival. My was a semi-pro and taught me how to hit.

Normally I agree with you, James. On this I disagree. (I do agree with your post below this.)

I maintained a 735 batting average up to my first year in college, then had back problems (car accident). I tracked the ball by sight and "feel", to know how the ball had travelled, and where it would be near my bat. The only explanation I can offer is what I said in an earlier post about being right-handed and left leading eye. My brain computes its 3 dimensional image based on my left eye as master, right eye as slave. That gave me a distinct advantage in tracking and computing the trajectory of the ball since my left eye was/is toward the pitcher when at bat.

I saw MANY guys strike out on curved pitches, where the same pitch was ideal for me. The last 10 feet of ball travel was my clue on when to swing, or if to swing. Many pitched balls make their deceptive moves in the last 15 or so feet of travel. Predicting ball travel any earlier is good only if the ball makes its move earlier than the last 15-20 of travel.

A great many ball players can hit balls in a batting cage successfully over 75% of the time. We have one here that speeds the ball to over 90 mph. So, if they are not intimidated by the pitcher, then why don't batters all have 700 batting averages in games? Especially if the trick is just to anticipate ball travel by looking at pitch delivery, ignoring the last 20 feet of travel?

No, the real "trick" is seeing what the ball is doing the last 15 feet.

Are they really "seeing" the ball, or are they not able to compute what will happen from what it has done up to now? Most great batters, I think, intend to swing on every pitch, or at least are prepared to. It is the last split-second "abort" swing that makes or breaks the great ones. I think the slider is probably the hardest pitch to hit, agree?

I really think a great many batters are unable to compute/see/feel what the ball is doing at the end of the travel. Looking at the video clip at the top of the post, you can see how the batter does the typical "anticipation" of ball travel. He swings his bat where the ball "would have been" had it tracked in a predictable, linear path. Or, should I say, he swings his bat at the last position he was able to see or sense the ball should have been.

Many pitches, by very good pitchers, just flat out break the rules we have in our heads for where the flight path of the ball should take it when we swing the bat.

That is why I think you are right again.....that many great batters are prepared to, or intend to swing on every pitch, because there is a certain amount of guessing about the last 15 feet of ball travel.

I think the slider is the most difficult to pitch for the batter to compute.....anticipate....and hit. Agreed.

And, every batter is guessing about the last 5 feet of ball travel on a pitch. Unless the pitch is a fast ball or just a casual lobbing throw.

The sceheme would be to track, anticipate, and (so far as possible) correct. As my syntax will indicate, I would be an unlikely baseball player, but the principles are quite general: you track and estimate intitally, then you
. either transfer your gaze to a suitable point based on what you have seen, or
. continue sweeping your gaze at the final rate at which you were able to track
Whichever of these strategies matches your sport, you then use the blurred track across your retina for any late fine tuning that is possible.

Unlike may other sports, I doubt that significant post-retinal-tracking fine-tuning is practical in baseball, as the retinal tracking speed is only exceeded for about the last 2-metres, which means the batter can track for all except the last 70-ms or less. Even if we assume a very fast reaction time of 35-ms that leaves at most 35-ms to modify the trajectory of the baseball bat, and this is during a part of the movement where the ability to adjust the trajectory of the bat is at its minimum.

Baseball my well be one sport where the worst (and most often repeated) advice I have heard may actually actually appropriate; by which I mean "keep your eye on the ball".

In baseball (like most things in the Socalist Republic of Amerika), the correct sequence is: (1) ready, (2) fire, (3) aim.

Don't go rocking the boat, the PC police will on you like stink.