Good fielders begin their movement just as the ball is hit, without wasting even half a step. An outfielder instantly begins running toward the spot where he thinks the ball will fall. Sometimes, he will make a running catch without losing a stride, thrusting his glove into position at the last second. Charlie Metro: "The great catches are made at the start, not at the end. The end is the net result of the start.
If you pivot [correctly], you've made one step and you're three or five feet, whatever, toward the ball.
But if you do this [leaning the wrong way, stepping across] you've taken three steps and haven't moved out of your tracks.
So the great catches in the outfield are made with the initial move. The ability to accurately predict where the ball will be involves the extrapolative capacities of the brain, but these skills are not completely unique to humans. For example, relatively tiny-brained animals like frogs can spear flies on the wing with their sticky tongues. To do so, their brains must be programmed to determine when the flies are within range and which way they are moving.
Dragonflies and birds of prey are able to dive on and capture small moving animals. Certainly this feat also involves an almost instantaneous ability to estimate trajectories. In the case of the frog, researchers have been able to locate specific nerve cells in the frog retina and in the brain which are excited by small, dark, moving objects.
The frog apparently pays no attention to these objects until their images begin to grow bigger on his retina, indicating that they are moving closer to him. If all other visual cues are right, out goes the tongue. The behavior of frogs and other lower organisms is apparently completely pre-programmed.
But for birds of prey and other relatively intelligent animals, a great deal of trial-and-error learning precedes the ability to dive and capture fleeing prey. Fossil evidence indicates that early humans hunted and ate other animals, and this seems to suggest that our catching and throwing capabilities may well be rooted in our development as hunters and tool users.
Hitting or catching a moving animal requires an ability to estimate its path in advance. These are the basic skills required for every game of catch and throw, but for our ancestors, they may have been requirements for survival. Recent paleoanthropological studies suggest that our ancestors were walking erect four million years ago, long before we developed large brains. So it's just possible that our throwing abilities were already in use even at that early date, and that all possible trajectories for moving objects are already stored in our brains, waiting to be called up for use at any given moment.
Psychologists have observed that human babies as early as eight months of age already have expectations about the movements of objects within their field of view, which they cannot possibly have learned from experience, and which therefore must have been wired into their brains by the processes of evolution. And by the age of one year, human babies already have acquired some ability to catch and throw objects, an ability which improves with practice and neurological development.
I started using stopwatches and everything. I found that it was impossible to throw some guys out. They can go from first to second in 2. It was always 3, 3. Compared to catching a hard-hit line drive on the run, it would seem that catching the pop-up fly would be simple. But it isn't. It may be that, given enough time, the room for error in estimation of flight path actually increases; a player may think himself into an error. This is like trying to draw a straight line freehand. If you look where you want to draw the line and then just draw it there without concentrating, you will probably succeed in drawing a fairly straight line.
If, on the other hand, you worry about how straight the line is, millimeter by millimeter, the task becomes impossible. Thus, finding the right path at which to swing is quite difficult since there is not one given trajectory for every pitch under the sun. In short, the small window of time from when the pitcher releases the ball to when the hitter makes contact paired with swinging at the appropriate trajectory for the given pitch provides one of the most amazing feats in sports: hitting a baseball.
Of course, every sport is difficult in its own rite, but hitting a baseball is in a league of its own. I chose to write about the difficulty of hitting a baseball because I know just how frustrating it is from my experiences of playing since I was four.
Is there a more challenging feat in the sports world? Are there better ways to understand how hard it is to hit a baseball? Is every sport equally as hard as the rest? There is certainly an argument to be made that baseball is the hardest sport to play.
Whereas a good baseball player may have success in playing other sports, it is very rare for a world class basketball or soccer player to also have the ability to hit a baseball or pitch at a major league level.
In this article it mentions that a batter only has a third of a second to swing the bat, giving them even less time to decide whether to swing. Interestingly, most times the ball is hit harder than it is thrown, making fielder equally difficult. A fastball in the Major Leagues can rotate at up to rpm. As a thrown baseball rotates, it creates differential pressure around the ball, which exerts a force that changes the path.
A forward-upwards spin causes lower pressure above the ball, exerting an upwards force that slows the descent of the ball. On the flip side, a forward-downwards spin causes a ball to drop towards the ground. Spin to the side will cause a ball to cut left or right, and can confuse the batter.
By using different grips and different throwing mechanics, a pitcher can generate many different kinds of pitches. Good eyesight. All of these are needed to hit a baseball at the Major League level. The average hitter needs about 50 milliseconds to instinctively assess the speed and location of an incoming pitch. To squarely hit a fastball, everything has to be perfect. The sweet spot can vary depending on how each bat is gripped. When a ball is hit squarely, the bat compresses it to around half of its normal thickness.
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