The Science of Baseball (transcript)
(Excerpted from a radio transcript available in General OneFile.)
You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION: SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow … Let me introduce my guests. Dan Gordon is the editor of "Your Brain on Cubs: Inside the Heads of Players and Fans." Also with us is Howard Zelaznik. He's a Yankee fan and professor of health and kinesiology at Purdue University.
FLATOW: Howard Zelaznik, let's talk about hitting which has been described as the single most difficult act in all of sports, correct? The hitting of fast ball coming in 95, 100 miles an hour of a batter — what's going on in the minds or the head of a batter to be able to make contact and actually hit the ball very well?
Dr. ZELAZNIK: Well, we have to keep in mind that even the best and greatest of hitters are really not very good at the task, and that's why they get so many swings. Imagine a free throw shooter getting five attempts to shoot two free throws. So, it's really difficult. What the batter needs to do is halfway down the pitch - meaning when the pitch is about halfway toward home plate - the batter has to either pull the trigger and swing, or keep the bat on his shoulder, as one might say.
FLATOW: Right.
Dr. ZELAZNIK: And the batter does that based upon some very early information about what he thinks the speed of the ball will be, so he can predict how the ball is going to drop.
FLATOW: Can - does he actually see the ball hitting the bat?
Dr. ZELAZNIK: Only by chance. Most batters do not see the ball hit the bat. There are some very classic studies that have actually filmed the eye movements of batters, and the batter doesn't see the ball hit the bat. And one of the reasons is that the eye can't rotate fast enough to keep up with the angular velocity of the ball on the eye. It's like being in the Indianapolis speedway and trying to see a car that's going by in front of you versus on the other side of the track where it moves relatively slowly across your visual field.
FLATOW: Do we know what part of the brain is working most heavily in this situation?
Dr. ZELAZNIK: All of the brain is working very heavily. I mean, there are motor areas in the brain, but there is not a baseball spot in the brain.
FLATOW: Dan, do you agree?
Mr. GORDON: Well, there are certain spots that are a little bit more active when the hitter is deciding whether to swing. And there's also an aspect of the brain that - we have a chapter on the brain aspect of hitting. And what the contributors talk about is that there's a part of the brain called mirror neurons, and these have been proved in nonhuman primates and monkeys - not yet in humans, but they're pretty sure that we have them, too - so that a hitter can kind of take a look at the pitcher's action even before he throws the ball and have some idea of where that pitch is going to go and whether he wants to swing. So, that makes up for the extremely short time that he has while the ball is in the air to actually follow through on that swing.
FLATOW: Of course, we've always heard that any good Major League hitter can hit a great fastball. It's hitting the ball, the breaking pitchers, that are hardest, and it's the great pitchers who can change speed and be more wily than the batters. I mean, you know, even not throw it that fast but have you guessing - how much of guessing, Dan, is about baseball?
Mr. GORDON: Well, there's an aspect for the pitchers. Their goal is to kind of fake the hitter out. The hitter is taking his knowledge of the wind-up that the pitcher is going through, but also his memory of past situations maybe with that pitcher, maybe in a similar game situation or in a similar count and is making a decision whether to swing based on those things, the pitcher is looking to do whatever he can to kind of distract the hitter and throw the hitter off.
So if he can throw one -- if he can throw a couple of different pitches, pitches of a couple of different speeds from the same spot or with the same arm motion, that can be what really fakes the hitter out. And as Dr. Zelaznik said, hitters, you know, they're - in the Major Leagues, the hitters are quite good relative to the rest of us but they still miss. Even the best hitters miss about seven times out of 10.