How to strike out an MLB all-star

You would assume that Major League Baseball players would have no trouble hitting softball pitches. A Softball pitch travels about 60 mph, about 35 mph slower than a baseball pitch (95mph). The Softball arrives at the batting plate at virtually the same time, as it is pitched from closer to the batter, and travels slower. And the ball is larger and consequently easier to hit. Yet when Olympic Gold medalist and softball pitcher Jennie Finch famously started pitching to All-Star MLB hitters, who crush 95mph fastballs for a living, she always struck them out.

Many assume hitting ability in sports like baseball, cricket, or tennis is in part due to reaction speed, however, this is not the case. First of all reaction speed is pretty consistent across individuals whether or not they are athletes or business people. Albert Pujols, a three-time league MVP placed in the 66th percentile in reaction time compared to a sample of university students. And despite this, he is an all-time great hitter. Secondly, the time in which it takes for a pitch to reach the batting plate is quicker than the time it takes for the human brain to react to the pitch. The ball takes about 400 milliseconds to reach the plate, whilst human reaction time is about 200 milliseconds, so the ball is already halfway to the plate before an athlete can even begin their hitting motion.

What this means is great hitters need to be able to predict where the ball is going to be before it gets there. Great hitters need two things to do this. First, they need learned perceptual expertise and a database of knowledge. Great hitters utilise advanced cues to predict what pitch will be thrown and where it will go. Information such as the pitcher's stance or placement of their fingers on the ball help them determine what pitch is coming. Whatsmore they do this far more efficiently than the average person. Their database of knowledge allows them to rapidly recognise patterns and interpret that information more efficiently than if they processed each piece individually. Called chunking, these athletes see information not individually but in relation to each other, recognising patterns almost instantly. Understanding these patterns allows them to make rapid and accurate situational assessments and then draw on their database of knowledge and experience to predict what will happen next. In many sports, this predictive ability is often called reading the play.

Secondly they need to have elite visual acuity, the ability to detect fine details at great distances. Visual acuity, not reaction time is the biological trait that seems to predict and facilitate hitting success. We often think of 20/20 vision as perfect vision, but that is far from the truth. 20/20 vision is average, which is perfectly good, but it is far from the best vision. The theoretical limit for human visual acuity is about 20/8. A person with 20/8 vision would be able to see the same details at 20 feet away that a normal person could see from only 8 feet away. MLB hitters have visual acuity between 20/13 and 20/10. To put that in perspective an Indian study of over 9000 individuals only found one case of 20/10 vision. What this means is that those hitters with greater visual acuity are far more capable of detecting the fine details that help them predict pitches than those with lower acuity, a near essential trait to be successful in the MLB.

So what does this have to do with hitting a softball? Well, because the softball pitch is an entirely different movement pattern to a baseball pitch, MLB hitters did not have any learned perceptual expertise and stored knowledge to draw on. It is like the softball pitcher is speaking a completely foreign language and the hitter's brain has no way of translating it in plain English. Essentially they can no longer predict their flight path of the ball. And this is why when Jennie Finch pitched to MLB all-stars she turned them back into their little league selves.