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Jet Lag Drags Down Baseball Performance In Specific Ways

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In the 2016 MLB postseason, on the way to their first World Series appearance since 1945, the Chicago Cubs had to face Clayton Kershaw, 3-time Cy Young award winner and arguably the best pitcher in baseball, not once but twice in six games. In the Game 2 win for the Dodgers, Kershaw was his usual dominant self, pitching seven shutout innings while allowing only two hits at Wrigley.

After three games in L.A., the teams returned to Chicago and Kershaw was back on the mound for Game 6 following a single travel day. After five runs allowed, including two home runs, he was pulled in the sixth inning but the damage was done, sending the Dodgers home and the Cubs to their historic World Series with the Indians.

Dr. Ravi Allada, neurobiologist and a circadian rhythms expert at Northwestern University, believes the LA to Chicago travel had something to do with it. “Jet lag does impair the performance of Major League Baseball players,” said Professor Allada. “While it’s speculation, our research would suggest that jet lag was a contributing factor in Kershaw’s performance.”

To study these effects more closely, Allada, along with fellow researchers, Alex Song and Thomas Severini, dug into twenty seasons of MLB data (1992-2011) including over 40,000 games, to analyze both offensive and defensive performance against their travel schedule. Whether they were home or away, traveling east or west and how many time zones they crossed, the players showed several revealing patterns.

  • Home teams that were jet-lagged (defined as traveling more than one time zone per 24 hours) after traveling eastward had lower offensive output than away teams after the same travel (i.e. the Yankees coming home from a West Coast trip versus the Dodgers visiting Yankee Stadium).

  • These negative effects were primarily seen in base running, including stolen bases, fewer doubles and triples and more “ground into double plays.”

  • Both home and away pitchers gave up more home runs, especially after eastward travel.

“The negative effects of jet lag we found are subtle, but they are detectable and significant,” said Dr. Allada. “And they happen on both offense and defense and for both home and away teams, often in surprising ways.”

But why would a jet-lagged team returning home perform worse than an away team after the same travel duration and direction? Dr. Allada chalks it up to a more structured daily schedule when teams are out on a long road trip, versus a reunion with family, friends and a more independent lifestyle back home.

“Another possibility is that the away team may already be sufficiently impaired that the additional jet-lag effects are difficult to detect,” suggested Dr. Allada.

Their research was recently published in the journal PNAS.

To prepare teams for cross-country travel, Dr. Allada recommends extra days for starting pitchers, “If I were a baseball manager and my team was traveling across time zones — either to home or away — I would send my first starting pitcher a day or two ahead, so he could adjust his clock to the local environment.”

Dan Peterson is a writer/consultant specializing in the cognitive skills of athletes. 

Baseball Pitch Backspin Can Play Tricks On Batters

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Hitters have a lot to think about when they’re at the plate. Game situation, pitch count, pitcher tendencies and even the last few at-bats. Picking out the fast ball versus the off-speed pitch is hard enough but what if a pitcher could vary not only his speed and location but also the ball’s backspin? The visual illusion of the rising fastball depends on backspin to counteract gravitational forces during the trajectory to the plate. So, playing with different backspins would directly affect the vertical dimension of the ball flight.

Researchers at Japan’s Waseda University designed an experiment to mess with a group of pro, semi-pro and college hitters by asking them to hit pitches with varying backspins but constant speeds. Their research appeared in the Journal of Applied Biomechanics.

According to the laws of the Magnus effect, the rise and fall of a spinning ball depends on its backspin or topspin, respectively. Just as a curve ball is thrown with topspin, causing the “roll off a table” effect, a fastball is delivered with a two-finger release on the seams and a downward flick of the wrist causing backspin.

Hitters are fooled when their anticipated trajectory does not match the actual trajectory. They expected the ball at the plate to be an inch lower but the backspin kept it up slightly, producing the appearance of a “hop” at the last second.

“Therefore, this study was conducted to test the hypothesis that an increase in ball backspin rate of a fastball would result in a greater distance between the sweet spot to ball center at the moment of ball-bat contact,” wrote Takatoshi Higuchi, Ph.D. and his colleagues. “To test this hypothesis, elite batters attempted to hit balls launched from a pitching machine at a constant speed, but with different backspin rates.”

They recruited 13 experienced baseball players to hit 30 pitches each from a two wheel pitching machine. The researchers randomly changed the backspin rate from 30 revolutions per second (standard for most pro pitchers) to 40 rps and 50 rps. While there is no record of a human pitcher throwing at 50 rps, it served as an endpoint on the spectrum of difficulty. All pitches were delivered at a constant 81 mph, a relatively easy speed for experienced batters.

With high speed cameras on the ball and the player’s bat, the impact point was recorded then measured for the deviation (in mm) in the vertical plane from the sweet spot. Using only four-seam fastballs, the hitters performed as expected. With every 10 rps increase in backspin, the hitter’s average variance from the sweet spot would increase by 14.2mm.  

“What makes a four-seam fastball hard to hit is not only its speed but also the degree to which it is difficult for the batter to predict its trajectory,” wrote the researchers. “An increased ball backspin decreases the drop of a fastball, and a pitched ball with backspin that deviates from the norm produces an unexpected trajectory which decreases the batter’s hitting accuracy.”

This slight change in elevation can be the difference between a clean hit and a ground ball or pop-up. Batters who can see a wide variety of pitchers during pitch recognition sessions will benefit from seeing different backspins and trajectories to train their eyes and brain to deal with it when facing real pitchers.

Dan Peterson is a writer/consultant specializing in the cognitive skills of athletes. 

gameSense Tests the Cincinnati Reds’ Pitch Recognition Skills in Spring Training

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Reds players taking the Pitch-IQ test
Reds players taking the Pitch-IQ test

gameSense Sports recently had the opportunity to work with the Cincinnati Reds during Spring Training. Like every MLB team, the Reds are exploring all the potential technologies that can help them win more games. Everything from accelerometers and heart rate monitors to virtual reality (VR) and ball tracking. The Reds, however, are at the forefront of pitch recognition (PR) testing and training. They recognize the importance of PR and trust scientific research and experts, like us. That’s why the Reds brought us in to test all their minor league players, as well as some major leaguers.

We used our standardized PR Pitch-IQ™ test to see which players can accurately pick up the type and location of pitches. And as expected, we found some of their players are very good at this task, while others were not so good. A player’s PR score also tends to correlate with a player’s on field statistics. Good PR bodes well for a batter and provides the attributes teams are looking for. The better your recognition skills the less you strike out, the more you walk, the more extended at bats you have and the higher your slugging percentage is.

We’ll retest after the season to see how each player’s PR scores have changed. We predict that most players will improve their PR over the season.  Why? Because the only way to train PR is to see pitches. These guys will see hundreds, some thousands of pitches, before the season ends. Our prediction gets to the heart of all this. PR is not something you are born with. No one comes out of the womb with the ability to pick up a curve or a cutter. You can only acquire this skill through practice….seeing quality pitches. So a player may have a pretty swing, but without the ability to accurately anticipate where and when a ball will be to hit it, they have little chance. High PR is not always essential to success, but sooner or later their ability to see pitches propels them to the top or drags them down.   

Lack Of Pitch Recognition Affects Swing Mechanics

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“Hitting is timing. Pitching is upsetting timing,” said the winningest left-handed pitcher in MLB history.  “A pitcher needs two pitches, one they’re looking for and one to cross them up.” Consistently crossing up hitters is what kept Warren Spahn in the big leagues for 21 seasons, amassing 363 wins including a Cy Young award and World Series championship in 1957 with the Milwaukee Braves, where he spent all but one season. To which Ted Williams is known to reply, “Hitting is 50% above the shoulders.”

It’s a Catch-22 at the plate; if a hitter doesn’t try to anticipate a specific type of pitch, he typically won’t be able to make a decision quick enough after release to make contact. But if he preloads an expected pitch into his brain, he has half a chance of being fooled. The necessary biomechanics to begin a swing take valuable milliseconds during the half second the ball is traveling to the plate.

If a batter is able to correctly predict the pitch type, his swing movement will be timed in unison with the pitcher’s throwing motion. Tomohisa Miyanishi and So Endo of the Graduate School of Sports Science at Japan’s Sendai University set out to actually measure the correlation of the mirrored movements.

“Previous biomechanical studies of baseball have investigated separately the pitching and hitting motions, and they have provided useful findings,” in the paper they presented at the 34th International Conference on Biomechanics in Sports in Japan. “However, an actual match-up between a pitcher and a batter forces the batter to predict what the pitcher is going to do before swinging the bat with correct timing to hit the ball successfully. There has never been a study that investigated the batting motion in an actual match-up against the pitcher.”

So, they designed an experiment to examine the changes that batters make to their swing kinematics when they are told the pitch type coming versus when they are not informed of whether the pitch will be a fastball or an off-speed pitch (curveball or slider). With nine college pitchers and nine hitters, they set-up motion capture cameras to record the synchronized motions of both during a pitch/swing sequence.

In Figure 1 below from the paper, each motion sequence is broken down into phases, so that the timing and duration of each segment can be measured and compared.

Flgure I: Definitions of each phase for (a) the pitchlng and (b) the batting motions. Flgure I: Definitions of each phase for (a) the pitchlng and (b) the batting motions.

After recording and comparing the sequences across 185 pitches where the batter was told the pitch type, then with 185 pitches where no pitch tip was given, the researchers noticed a significant difference. Across the five different phases of pitching and hitting, including the total time, the two sequences were statistically correlated when the batter knew what was coming. This makes sense as the hitter knows the speed and trajectory of the pitch so can time his swing almost perfectly with the arrival of the ball.

However, when the pitch was unknown to the hitter, this paired timing was not seen.  

“Batting is probably more difficult in the unknown situation than in the known situation, and the unknown situation possibly makes the batter spend more time deciding how to hit the ball, which in turn forces him later to use an increased speed for the bat swing,” explain the researchers. “In other words, in contrast with the known situation, in the unknown situation the batter waits a relatively long time to hit the ball, until the ball is close to the batter, and then uses greater rotation speed of trunk and bat.”

In fact, this hesitation causes a big change in swing mechanics as the legs and trunk have to hold back until the last possible millisecond while waiting for instructions from the brain.

“Thus, controlling the bat not with the legs but with the arms would be important in order to address the pitched ball in the unknown situation,” wrote the researchers.

By training pitch recognition skills, hitters gain back those milliseconds so their swing can maximize rotation and bat speed, not to mention accuracy of contact. By first anticipating a pitch type from the game situation, then confirming their guess with early visual perception, their mechanics can remain consistent.

Dan Peterson is a writer/consultant specializing in the cognitive skills of athletes. 

Visual Perception Tests Help Explain Poor Hitting By Baseball Pitchers

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During the 2014 MLB season, according to Baseball America’s editor Matt Eddy, pitchers put up historically low batting stats. Since the DH era began, those pitchers, mainly in the NL, who did visit the plate created an out 86.2% of the time. Their on-base percentage was 48% worse than non-pitchers while their slugging percentage was 39% less productive.

While the calls for the National League to adopt the DH rule get louder, the effect of over four decades of most pitchers not hitting has entrenched itself throughout all levels of baseball. “I think much of the reason for (the declining production of pitchers hitting) is the increased specialization at the youth levels,” one NL farm director said. “As amateurs, many pitchers focus entirely on that craft and don’t play a position when they’re not on the mound.

Despite the debate, this dichotomy of one set of players not practicing hitting for years while everyone else takes daily batting practice has created an opportunity to see what all of that time in the cage can do for sensorimotor skills. Are pitchers just guys who could never hit? Does seeing thousands of pitches sharpen the core visual skills of everyday hitters? Do pitchers and non-pitchers all start with the same level of perceptual cognitive abilities, (i.e. the same “hardware”) and then diverge based on hours of deliberate practice (improving the “software” of the brain)?

To find out, a team of researchers at Duke University dug into a treasure trove of data on over 500 baseball players who had been tested using the Nike Sensory Station (now Senaptec) between 2010 and 2014. Their research was recently published in the Journal of Sports Sciences.

The data set included 112 high school, 85 college and 369 professional players as they completed nine sensorimotor skill tests independent of any baseball context. Also collected prior to the testing was information on age, height, handedness, eye dominance, occurrence of eye surgery, and lifetime number of concussions, so that any other variables could be controlled to isolate just the pitcher versus non-pitcher question.

Using a large HD touchscreen and a remote input device, the system included these tasks:

  • Visual clarity
  • Contrast sensitivity
  • Depth perception
  • Near-Far quickness
  • Target capture
  • Perception span
  • Eye-Hand coordination
  • Go/No-Go
  • Response time

Each of the three playing levels, (high school, college and pro), were considered separately. First, for both high school and college, there were no significant differences across the nine tests between pitchers and non-pitchers. This seems somewhat logical as pitchers are still hitting at the high school level and just beginning to diverge in the relatively new DH world of college baseball. The research team concludes that these athletes have not specialized as much to allow deliberate practice effects to take hold.

“First, these younger and less experienced athletes may not yet have accumulated sufficient deliberate practice experience to engender such differences. Secondly, among high school and

college baseball players there is less position fidelity, with many athletes devoting time to both hitting and pitching activities. Lastly, it is possible that the smaller numbers of pitchers, relative to hitters, in the high school and college sample may have reduced power and sensitivity to differences in performance scores at these levels.”

However, when looking at just professional players, there were statistically significant differences between pitchers and non-pitchers in two of the nine tests, visual acuity and depth perception.

“Visual acuity and depth perception, the abilities to extract visual details at distance and determine disparities in depth, are two domains of vision that aid batters in spotting the movement of a pitch,” explain the researchers. “That enhancements in these abilities, among the nine tested, differentiate hitters from pitchers speaks to the underlying capabilities that are learned by extensive practice in professional baseball players, and more broadly implicates the importance of these visual skills in high-level athletes.”

So, all players could be taught to hit well, the limited practice time available forces choices.

“It’s really a question of time and value,” said an NL assistant GM. “We don’t have much time for our guys to practice, so we choose to make sure they practice the pitching side of things rather than the offensive side of things.

New technologies to help train baseball-specific hitting skills can leverage this limited time by allowing players to see video clips of hundreds of pitches and fine tune their pitch recognition skills without swinging a bat.

“Such training programs have been advanced greatly in the past few years by sports-specific training techniques that target anticipation and decision-making abilities of athletes, as well as new digital technologies that train general visual, perceptual, and cognitive skills critical for sporting performance,” concluded the researchers.

Dan Peterson is a writer/consultant specializing in the cognitive skills of athletes. 

Study Examines Baseball/Softball Hitting Movement Through Use Of Tee-Batting

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Despite plenty of baseball pitcher film study, situational analysis, pitch recognition training, and visual perception improvement, the bat still needs to hit the ball. In the three dimensional space around home plate, one moving object needs to be maneuvered at a precise height, angle, depth and timing to make contact with another object traveling through the same space with deceptive speed and flight.

A study from researchers in Japan digs deeper into understanding how hitters anticipate a pitch’s location and coordinate their body movements to be sure the sweet spot of the bat arrives on target and on time to connect.

Teaching the brain and body what it feels like to make contact at different locations around the plate is the goal of most tee-batting practice drills. Set the tee up higher and closer to the batter to experience that inside fastball, then lower and further away to simulate a slider.  These three dimensions, height, depth (a point from home plate to the pitcher) and course (a point across the width of home plate, close to or away from the batter) must be calculated by the batter for each pitch if contact is to be made.

Anticipating a pitch type and location triggers this estimation process (i.e. expecting an inside fastball). The hitter’s brain preps his eyes and body to start the swing on time and at the right angle. If you’ve set-up the brain-body code to swing high and tight, the slider away won’t give you enough time to adjust the program and initiate an alternative bat swing.

“With numerous hitting experiences in both practices and games, batters develop the visuomotor process of perceiving how a pitch approaches them and how to modulate a bat’s movement depending on pitch trajectories,” wrote the sports science researchers of Daito-Bunka University in the Journal of Sports Sciences. “Therefore, improving one’s ability to respond to flight paths of different pitches is accompanied by learning how the impact location should be shifted depending on pitch trajectories.”

Using a computational model, batters learn to combine muscle movements to reach the different impact points of different pitch flights. These internal models, stored in the brain, are accessed as needed either pre-pitch and/or during the flight of the ball.

“In this sense, the mental representation, which is based on the intention and decision regarding how to hit the ball, corresponds to an internal model in the computational process. From this perspective, the batter’s preferred impact locations in tee-batting reflect corresponding mental representations regarding ball–bat impacts for different pitches.”

The researchers recruited ten experienced college players to participate in a two-part experiment. First, they stood at the plate and were asked to place their bat at the preferred impact point given nine different pitch trajectories (high/inside, middle/middle, low/away, etc.) Next, a tee with a ball was placed at each of their nine impact points. The players were asked to take a full swing at the ball while their movements were captured with a high-speed motion capture camera.

After analyzing the players’ movements, the researchers discovered some interesting details about how approach angles were modified slightly to reach certain impact points.

“Batter decisions regarding the impact locations for different heights and courses and their modulation of movements were revealed to be systematic so as to utilize biomechanical characteristics of body and bat movements,” they concluded. “However, according to the duration of bat movement, such an advantage of systematic change in impact locations can be a drawback due to the fine timing adjustments required for inside or outside pitches. This result implies that to produce a batting movement, batters put more emphasis on the spatial coordination of movement for gaining mechanical effect rather than on the timing aspect of movement.”

Of course, hitting a stationary ball off of a tee is much different than one in flight. The point of tee-batting is to allow the brain to learn how to organize the limbs to reach certain impact points.

“There are more movement parameters that we can analyze, such as the stepping movement of the front foot, the hand and wrist movements to manipulate a bat and more details regarding joint movements of limbs, including the right arm and lower extremities.”

Combining a pitch recognition video training system with actual swings would move players towards a more realistic learning environment without the wear and tear on muscles from actual batting practice.

Dan Peterson is a writer/consultant specializing in the cognitive skills of athletes. 

Righties vs Lefties – The Importance Of Handedness Training In Hitting

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It happens in the late innings of just about all close games. To exploit the ideal pitcher-batter match-up, opposing managers play a cat-and-mouse game of lineup changes for pinch hitters and relief pitchers, all designed to get the statistical advantage of handedness.

Most batters would prefer to face an opposite-hand (OH) pitcher, righty vs lefty and vice versa. With the dominance of right-handed pitchers in the game, the left-handed hitter comes to the plate with a built-in advantage. But what exactly is that advantage? What would happen if the pitcher population in the league was more balanced, righties to lefties? Two sets of researchers set out to dig a little deeper into this phenomenon of visual perception.

While studies of handedness show that only 10% of the general population are left-handed, the proportion of left-handed MLB players is closer to 39% of hitters and 28% of pitchers, according to 2012 data. This surprising abundance of lefties in baseball is even more pronounced when compared to the NBA (7%) and NFL QBs (7%).

In a 2016 study, 1.3 million play-by-play data points were analyzed from MLB games covering the 2000 to 2012 seasons. Looking at on-base plus slugging (OPS) percentages, a complete measure of at-bat productivity, left-handed batters (LHB) enjoyed a .787 pace against right-handed pitchers (RHP), while sinking back to a .698 percentage versus left-handed pitchers (LHP).

Similarly over those thirteen seasons, when right-handed batters (RHB) faced opposite-hand pitchers, their OPS was .781 but still were able to hit .723 versus RHP pitchers.

So, the tactical moves to take advantage of OH is clearly shown in this data. But the researchers had one dilemma, “we are unable to explain why the left-handed batters have a larger OH advantage,” not to mention a lower performance against same-hand (SH) pitchers.

Thinking about possible reasons why OH match-ups favor the hitter, there are two main arguments, self-defense and the breaking ball. With a right-handed release to a right-handed batter, the ball seems to be coming right at him. This slight hesitation to stand in against a 90 mph heater may be enough to disrupt the reaction time needed to hit it. The same pitch coming from the opposite side provides a better view across the body. Also, a curve ball from a same-handed pitcher will typically break away from the hitter, causing a reach across the plate.

See More Pitches right on your phone! 

Available for Baseball and Softball

Still, why would RHBs hit 25 percentage points higher versus SH pitchers than LHBs? Enter a study by Dr. Ethan D. Clotfelter of Amherst College where he collected and sorted MLB data across 49 years from 1957 to 2005. Hitters and pitchers were sorted by batting average and earned runs average, respectively. He noted that there was no significant difference in using batting average versus OPS or other offensive stats.

When sorting by handedness in pitchers, he counted the number of innings pitched by either righties or lefties. So, comparing at-bat performances of hitters vs pitchers was closer than just counting the number of RHPs or LHPs in the league.

To his surprise, he found that, “both right- and left-handed batters were significantly more successful, and conversely pitchers were less successful, in years with a high ratio of right to left-handed pitchers.” In other words, when there were significantly more innings pitched by righties, all hitters, from both sides of the plate, performed better. In the same way, in seasons with a more balanced number of innings pitched by both righties and lefties, hitters had a lower batting average.

As we saw in the first data set, the OH advantage is still there but when hitters saw more RHPs, they hit better, even from the right-side, then when the balance of pitchers was more even.

Dr. Clotfelter has an explanation for this, something he calls cognitive representations.

“A useful analogy for the interpretation of these data comes from biological predator-prey systems. Predators are thought to form cognitive representations, called search images, of specific prey types to maximize detection and capture efficiency.”

“Baseball batters may form cognitive representations analogous to search images, and these representations are likely to be strengthened by sequential priming. Such representations may be essential for successful hitting at an elite level, as direct visual information regarding the ball’s trajectory is insufficient or incomplete, particularly for batters facing pitchers of the same handedness.”

In other words, seeing a righty delivery over and over, game after game, builds and strengthens the visual cues necessary to recognize different pitch types. Seeing a more balanced mix of righties and lefties doubles the perception workload, even in OH situations.

This learning curve can be shortened by using technology tools that allow pitch recognition training using video of actual pitchers, both RH and LH. If a player can’t get enough reps in batting practice, they can tailor a virtual pitch recognition session to get just the right ratio of RHP to LHP to improve on their weaknesses.

Dan Peterson is a writer/consultant specializing in the cognitive skills of athletes. 

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Research Finds That Pitch Recognition Skill Is Linked With Season Walk Percentage

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“Yeah, but will it transfer out to the field?” It is the most asked question about any type of sports training. Tools, techniques and technologies all seem logical in their theory and approach but the bottom line is, well, the bottom line. It’s no different in baseball. Coaches, parents and most of all players would like some empirical evidence that there is a transfer of learning from drills to statistical performance at the plate.

That’s why we were excited to see the results of a recent study, the first of two by Dr. Sean Müller and Dr. Peter Fadde, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer at gameSense Sports, that found a significant link between the visual anticipation skills of hitters, also known as pitch recognition, and their actual statistical performance during a season.

The researchers gathered 34 professional baseball players, single A minor leaguers from an MLB organization with at least 100 plate appearances, to participate in a pitch recognition test using a technique called visual occlusion. They were shown video of a pitcher from the perspective of just behind the batter’s box, looking over the catcher’s shoulder.

At four different time intervals, the video was stopped or occluded so that the remainder of the ball flight could not be seen. It would be like standing in the batter’s box and closing your eyes before the pitch arrived at the plate.

Three pitch types (fastball, curveball and change-up) were shown and occluded at four different time intervals (when the pitcher’s front foot landed, when his shoulders were squared to the plate, ball release and a no occlusion control condition.)

The players were asked to identify the pitch type in each situation. Their overall accuracy was then compared with their 2013 full season statistics, including batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, walks, strikeouts and walk to strikeouts ratio.

The overall results showed that a player’s pitch recognition at the pitcher’s front-foot impact was significantly correlated with their walk percentage, meaning the better the anticipation the better the walk percentage. Also, for recognition between fastball and change-up at ball release, often cited by coaches as the most important anticipation skill, the batters’ performance was correlated with walk and on-base percentage.

“What this study did, which hadn’t been done before, was to correlate hitters’ scores on the video Pitch Recognition test with their batting statistics for the season,” said Dr. Fadde. “It’s not really surprising that the strongest correlation was with walk rate.”

“What’s remarkable is that professional hitters can pick up information about pitch type before the ball is even released. That’s been shown in a previous study using this same video test with Australian Baseball League hitters and also other sports skills such as return-of-serve in tennis.”

“The implication for talent identification is that scouts could give a video test on an iPad that could predict a hitter’s “eye”. The test can also help with coaching. If a hitter lacks plate discipline (low walks, high strikeouts) but is OK on the PR test, then you work on his approach. If he scores low on the PR test, then a coach needs to work on his pitch recognition.”

To get an idea of how this pitch recognition training works, register for free and try it out!

Dan Peterson is a writer/consultant specializing in the cognitive skills of athletes. 

Study Confirms That First Third Of Ball Flight Is Key For Baseball Hitters

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A baseball hitter relies more on pitch information during the first third of ball flight than the final third. Nothing new there as coaches have been teaching pitch recognition that way for years.

But sometimes a well-designed academic study comes along to confirm what may be obvious. That’s exactly what a group of Japanese sports scientists did when they incorporated occlusion glasses, a pitching machine and a group of college baseball players.

“Previous studies on elite batters have reported their superb ability to use the early part of the ball trajectory to successfully hit the ball,” wrote the researchers in a paper published in PLOS ONE. “Moreover, it seems that it would be difficult to correct the trajectory of a moving bat once the bat head has reached a certain speed. Therefore, we hypothesized that a longer visible time improves the hitting accuracy except visual information about the 150-ms period before ball-bat contact, because this is approximately the time required to react to a visual stimulus.”

In other words, if we divide the ball’s path from pitcher’s hand to home plate into thirds, we can examine segments of about 150ms adding up to the total of about 450ms for the full flight. In their experiment, the researchers identified the first third as R+150 or “Release plus 150ms” and the final third as A-150 or “Arrival at the plate minus 150ms”.

First, the pitching machine was set to two speeds, a fastball at 90.7 MPH and a changeup at 71.8 MPH, both with backspins of 1,836 RPM. Next, a pair of liquid-crystal occlusion eyeglasses, similar to the old Nike strobe glasses, were customized to receive instructions from a remote software app. Before each pitch, a random instruction was sent to the eyeglasses for three different conditions; no visual occlusion (the batter sees 100% of the ball flight), R+150 or A-150. 

With this set-up, the college players, with an average of nine years of playing experience, stepped into the batter’s box. In the first set of 36 pitches, each hitter saw the fastball under a random but equal number of occlusion scenarios (12 pitches at each setting).

Then, each player hit a second set of 36 pitches with the same occlusion scenarios but now the changeup.  While they did know what pitch was coming, they did not know how long they would see it before the occlusion glasses would block it out. 

Of course, making contact is good but quality contact at the bat’s sweet spot will result in line drives and higher on-base percentages (OBP). So, the researchers marked the bats with the sweet spot’s target and asked the hitters to make contact there. Using high-speed cameras, they then measured the distance between the target and the actual point of bat-ball contact.

Missing the target on the horizontal plane or along the length of the bat will affect the horizontal direction of the batted ball. If you swing too early, you’ll most likely make contact towards the end of the bat, pulling it to left field. Not terrible from an on base perspective unless its a foul ball. However, making contact above or below the sweet spot in the vertical plane will force pop-ups or ground balls, often lowering OBP. 

So, how did the college hitters do?  Take a look at Figure 1, a scatterplot of all of the pitches and points of contact (or misses) for both the fastballs and changeups.

Figure 1:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0148498 Figure 1:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0148498

At first glance, the data points are much wider and distributed in the R+150 occlusion than the A-150 setting. But then notice that the A-150 plot is very similar to the no occlusion setting.  In other words, there was very little improvement seeing the last 20 feet of the pitch versus seeing the entire pitch. This tells us that the accuracy of the “no occlusion” condition was gained during the first third of ball flight not the last third.

Think about standing on the side of a freeway. As you watch cars approach in the distance, going 70 mph, your eyes are better able to focus on and track them than when they zoom past you horizontally in the last few feet. In the same way, this angular velocity perception applies to tracking a baseball approaching at the same speed.

This study confirms that pitch recognition training needs to focus on the first third of ball flight, picking up cues of arm angle, ball spin and early trajectory.

This is exactly what the gameSense system accomplishes through occlusion-based learning.

Dan Peterson is a writer/consultant specializing in the cognitive skills of athletes. 

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