Dr. Peter Fadde made the first pitch recognition app that trains a hitter’s brain. gameSense, is showing a significant correlation between players who practice pitch recognition inside the app and increased on-base percentage (OBP).
Read the Article in Sports Techie Here
Dr. Zaichkowsky talks with Jeremy Schapp of ESPN about the cognitive side of sports performance.
The Ultimate Playmaker – Relying on Cognitive Development in Baseball
By Daniel Peterson and Leonard Zaichkowsky, Ph.D.
Editor’s note: This is a book excerpt from The Playmaker’s Advantage, published by Jeter Publishing/Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster. The hardcover, eBook and audiobook versions are available now online and in bookstores everywhere.
As co-founder and director of sport science for GameSense Sports, Dr. Zaichkowsky is a pioneer in athlete performance and, specifically, cognitive training using the science of occlusion. Many of the ideas and research included in The Playmaker’s Advantage form the foundation for the concepts and design of GS Pitch-IQ and FastpitchIQ.
Mark Newman has watched a lot of baseball but he had never seen anything like this. “Over the twenty-six years, I was with the Yankees, we trained shortstops, at every level in the organization, to be there on that play,” Newman, the team’s recently retired senior vice president of player development, said in an engaging conversation. “[Derek Jeter] was. Many others weren’t. I’m not sure if he was trained any differently than the other twenty-five shortstops. His ability to pay attention, be in the moment, and respond to his environment was superior. That play’s an example of it.”
That play is, of course, “the Flip,” which defined Derek Jeter as the quintessential playmaker. Down two games in the 2001 American League Division Series, the Yankees were protecting a 1–0 lead in the seventh inning on the road at the Oakland Coliseum. With two outs and Jeremy Giambi on first, Yankees pitcher Mike Mussina gave up a sharp line drive down the right-field line. Outfielder Shane Spencer chased the ball into the corner and heaved it toward home plate, over the heads of both of his cutoff men. “I let it go and it took off on me,” said Spencer. “I had a little too much on it.”
Surprisingly, Ron Washington, the A’s third-base coach, waved a charging Giambi home for a play at the plate. Jeter instinctively knew where he needed to be. Sprinting to the first-base line, he fielded Spencer’s overthrow with both hands and then
made a forty-foot backhanded flip to catcher Jorge Posada, who tagged Giambi a split second before his right foot touched home plate. The Yankees held on to their 1–0 lead to win the game and then the series.
“It was my job to read the play,” said Jeter after the game.
“The kid has great instincts and he holds it together and that was obviously the play of the game,” said manager Joe Torre about his twenty-seven-year-old shortstop.
Newman has seen thousands of ballplayers in his career, not only with the Yankees but in eighteen years as a college coach at Southern Illinois and Old Dominion. He likes the label of “playmaker” to describe that something extra that differentiates the Jeters of the world from players with talent alone.
“Derek is an extraordinary example of a playmaker, someone who takes talent and skill and is able to use them in game situations,” he told us. “There’s a big difference when you’ve scouted and signed as many good players as we did with the Yankees. Many players who we thought were gonna be good and weren’t. You become acutely aware of the difference between talent and performance. That bridge is the link of all those skills that allow a young player to go from being a prospect to a performer. That’s what distinguishes the playmaker from the one who aspires to be a playmaker.”
Newman joined the Bronx Bombers in 1989 as an instruction coordinator, then was promoted to vice president of player development and scouting in 1997. During his tenure the Yankees made the playoffs eighteen times, appearing in seven World Series and winning five of them. Beyond the well-known “five tools” of baseball talent—hitting for average, hitting for power, speed, throwing, and fielding—Newman and his scouts were always looking for that sixth tool, which was hard to describe but obvious when they saw it.
“In baseball, the old-school guys will call it instinct. As we thought more about it, we knew it’s more than instinct; that term wasn’t good enough to describe it. We wanted something with more specificity. Something to allow us to go out and search for this in the environment. Of course, we’re always trying to identify the things that we need to sign, versus the things we can develop. How much of this stuff is innate or what particular things might be more innate versus what things we can develop?
“That’s a huge part of the effective marriage of coaching and scouting or coaching and evaluations: understanding what the coaches can improve; what’s more easily teachable and what’s more difficult to teach. Beyond that is cognitive development: the ability to mentally and emotionally be tuned in to the environment and respond appropriately to it.”
© 2018 Daniel Peterson and Leonard Zaichkowsky
gS Pitch-IQ™ uses the proven video-occlusion method. Players view video clips of pitches that were shot from a batter’s box point-of-view. The pitch videos are cut off at different points of ball flight. The player identifies the TYPE of pitch and/or the LOCATION of the pitch in the strike zone. The player gets immediate feedback on the correctness of his choices and can view a full ball-flight replay to reinforce “what I see out of the pitcher’s hand” with “what it means at the plate.”
The easy to understand occlusion method relies on repetition, immediate feedback, and progressive difficulty (like a video game) to build players’ pitch recognition. They don’t need to (and should not) mentally “grind” to recognize pitches. Coaches can provide clues (skinny wrist for curveball) or strategies (shift focus from pitcher’s cap to release window), but the work is done inside the mechanism by players’ eyes and brains.
Other systems use staged video of pitchers shot in a studio, or 3D Virtual Reality (VR) modeling of pitchers but gameSense is committed to Real Video (RV) of real pitchers throwing real pitches to real hitters in real games. We can even include video of pitchers you will face next.
Listen to Dr. Fadde discuss pitch recognition and fastpitch softball
gameSense Sports continues to gain recognition in the sports world.
The oft-told standard in baseball is that a 90-mile-per-hour fastball takes four-tenths of a second to reach home plate and, because the act of swinging a bat takes about half the time, a hitter must identify the pitch, its expected location and decide what to do in about 0.2 seconds. Those numbers seem small and impossibly fast, but one can hardly appreciate the reality until seeing a pitcher enter his windup, release the ball and then for the video to stop at the juncture when a decision must be made.
That is the premise behind the work of gameSense, which draws on research that began in the late 1970s into anticipatory behavior based on early visual cues, showing a clear distinction between the abilities of experts and novices at quick-reaction tasks.
Hitting a small round ball moving at high velocity with a thin round stick should be impossible, yet millions of batters successfully hit baseballs each year. The mere act of hitting a ball is well beyond the normal realm of human perceptual cognitive decision-making, which is the process by which the brain combines the various types of sensory information it receives to decide how to behave. A batter that can hit three out of ten is considered good; only Ted Williams hit .400 in a single season.
Batting .300 goes beyond simple reaction time – the hitter’s brain needs to make countless decisions in the blink of an eye.
A baseball or softball pitch is incredibly fast, particularly when thrown by an elite athlete. A mere 400 milliseconds (ms) pass between the moment a pitcher releases a baseball to the moment it crosses the plate. The batter’s decision-making process occurs within the first 175 ms of the pitch – in the blink of an eye, the batter evaluates the movement of the ball then decides if and how he will swing the bat in response. Some hitters begin decision making before the pitcher releases the ball, judging by arm angle and the expression on the pitcher’s face.
While physical training helps give professional athletes the strength they need to hit a ball out of the park and to round the bases quickly, brain training helps batters connect with the ball more often and with more control.
Brain training develops pitch recognition, improves quality at-bats, boosts on-base percentages, and ultimately increases runs. Quality brain training helps batters deflate a pitcher’s strikeout-to-walk ratio (K/BB) by increasing the hitter’s ability to contact every ball that enters the strike zone.
Brain training amplifies performance by practicing cognitive skills that affect athletic performance, such as visual processing speed and reaction time.
The human brain consists of special cells, known as neurons, which connect to one another to create a network. Fibers, known as dendrites and axons, connect the neurons. Dendrites bring information to the body of the neuron, while axons carry the information away from the neuron body. Repetition strengthens these connections to improve the way brain cells transmit information.
“Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.” (Zig Ziglar)
Being good at sports is nothing more than pattern recognition – a batter’s brain looks for patterns in the way a pitcher’s arm moves to predict how the ball will fly through the air. To recognize these patterns well enough to hit a baseball, though, batters must repeat the experience of hitting a baseball thousands of times.
Drill and practice is disciplined and repetitious exercise. Repetition improves speed, increases confidence and strengthens the connections in the brain. Strong connections allow information to move from the eyes to the brain to the rest of the body quickly.
Other types of cognitive training for baseball/softball help players respond to these patterns in ways that improve play. Stimulus response training can help players develop an automatic response to the patterns they see. This type of training improves motor imagery, a state in which the athlete imagines him- or herself performing a movement without actually moving. Stimulus response training can improve movement execution and baseball/softball reaction time. Repetition takes all the thinking out of it.
Training the brain and the body separately allows players to train each up independently. A player that has hit a plateau with physical training, for example, can advance his or her game through brain training.
Technology is now ubiquitous, seeping into every aspect of human health and activity. Since the day Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839 Cooperstown, NY, scientists and engineers have looked for new baseball/softball training aids, techniques and technologies to improve performance. Players have had to learn how to adapt to the evolution of baseball, and many use science to help them do that. The first few batters struggled to learn how to hit Candy Cumming’s curveballs, for example, but training and repetition taught the players how to recognize a curveball long before it leaves the pitcher’s hand. Training drills, particularly hitting and bunting drills, became mainstays in the NBA because they strengthen the fundamental skill sets that set a professional athlete apart from the rest.
Many of the basic training techniques and batting aids developed in the earliest days of baseball are still in use today. Players still use eye exercises, for example, in hopes of enhancing pitch recognition. A number of new technologies try to improve upon these basic training drills. Some add eye tracking to eye exercises, for example, while others offer fastball trainers that show you the dot in the slider. Technologies such as virtual reality (VR), video games and simulations in particular are sweeping through baseball and softball.
Not all tech is created equal, however – much of today’s technology is long on eye-catching graphics but short on substance. More realism does not translate into more learning. In fact, because the professional batter’s brain already has a reliable cognitive map of the batter’s box experience, realism may not even be necessary for effective brain training.
Furthermore, there is scant evidence that eye exercises, virtual reality or other modern training techniques actually improve performance behind the plate. Virtual reality in particular is a very young technology, so while VR is fun, its long-term benefits as batting aids are unclear. It is also expensive. Research may someday substantiate the use of these tools for baseball players, but there is currently no proof that many of the games and apps in use today work.
What researchers do know is that humans do not need to recreate every detail of an experience to learn. Sports specialists also know that tried-and-true testing and training methods, such as temporal occlusion, actually help hitters connect with the ball. These methods come highly vetted for all kinds of sport and non-sport specific tasks.
The long and short of it is, players should stick with those established baseball/softball training aids that work and are efficient, reliable, convenient and much less expensive.
