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One of the greatest mysteries of baseball is "how in the world is it possible to hit a major league fastball?" The pitcher stands just 60.5 ft away from home plate, and many major league closers can throw upwards of 100 miles per hour. The record for fastest pitch ever recorded in a game comes from Aroldis Chapman when he was playing with the Cincinnati Reds back in 2011 and stands at 105.1 miles per hour (105.1 mph = 154.1 ft/s). Using the equation speed = distance/time, we can calculate that the time it takes the baseball to reach the strike zone is 60.5 ft / 154.1 ft/s = 0.393 seconds = 393 ms (not accounting for the reach of the pitcher, which shortens the distance slightly). If he average reaction time to visual stimuli is roughly 250 ms, and a normal major leaguer's swing takes about 140 ms for the head of the bat to come through the strike zone, that leaves almost no time for the batter to decide whether he is going to swing or not. So how can hitters put the bat on the ball so consistently? The answer might be in the hitters' spatial and temporal anticipation.

Spatial anticipation requires that the individual knows what kind of stimulus is going to be presented, as well as where it is going to be presented. According to lecture, spatial anticipation can reduce reaction time by as much as 100-150 ms. With all of their years of experience batting and taking batting practice, a major league hitter is very adept at determining where the pitch is going to cross the plate, especially if they can identify the type of pitch and release point of the pitcher early on in the throwing motion.

Temporal anticipation is another factor making hitting a 100+ mph fastball possible. Because all pitchers go through some sort of a windup, and the windup is consistent across pitches, the batter can time when the ball is going to be released and have a better idea of when the ball is going to cross the plate. From there, it is up to the batter's hand-eye coordination to place the bat on the ball and put the ball into play.

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Dodgers Baseball Prodigy Christian Haupt

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Aroldis Chapman fires at Mccutchen with a 106 mile an hour fastball. The MLB discredited the speed as the stadium's Radar gun differed with both the Broadcast's speed and the official speed.

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Hecklers are a serious nuisance to nearly every sport, and baseball is no exception. Hecklers take upon themselves to antagonize and get inside the heads of opposing teams' players in order to distract them so that they are unable to perform at the top of their level. All athletes have varying ways of handling this issue. Some will shout back at them, others will laugh it off or use it as motivation (see below), but some athletes can really be thrown off their game and underperform if they let the hecklers get to them. This year in 361, we learned about several theories of attention and the possible explanations behind the science of heckling.

The theory of attention most relevant to hecklers is the central-resource theory. This theory states that there is a central reserve of resources, or attention capacity, for which all activities compete. Hecklers hope that by introducing new activities in the target's mind, they will be able to take from the attention that the target is allotting to performance tasks, such as swinging the bat or timing the pitch. If they can take up enough of the player's attention, the player will not be able to allocate the attention required to perform the desired task, the player's performance will decrease, and the antagonist will consider it a job well-done.

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Bryce Harper responds to fan who yells “overrated”

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As everyone knows, not all bodies are created equal in terms of athletic ability. One extreme example of this is baseball and football legend Bo Jackson. Bo is the only athlete to be elected an all-star and participate in the all-star game in two different Big Four Leagues (MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL), having done so in the 1989 MLB season and 1990 NFL season. On top of these feats, Bo Jackson was also the Alabama state champion in the decathlon in high school track and field, and ran for Auburn University, in addition to playing football and baseball.

So how can kinesiology explain the differences in motor abilities across individuals?  The general motor ability hypothesis suggests that there exists only one global motor ability "score", analogous to an IQ level, and it can be improved overall success in motor performance. The specificity of motor abilities hypothesis suggests that rather than one general motor ability, there are thousands of specific motor abilities that contribute to performance of each motor skill. If this were the case, it would mean that abilities are independent of each other, so being very strong at one motor ability might not correlate with being good at another.  The general motor ability hypothesis is supported by Bo Jackson's incredible success across multiple sports, and would attribute his successes to his high general motor ability score.

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As a talent scout in the MLB, it is your job to determine an individual's potential in the sport from a young age and from a very small sample size. Often, a scout will only get to see a player perform once before he or she is asked to make a scouting report of that individual. Although baseball statistics are becoming more in-depth and encompassing each year, scouts are still necessary to determine any major flaws in a player's game that can't be picked up by a computer, such as issues with mechanics and attitude.

On the other hand, baseball's stat-tracking system is now working better than ever before. One of the most important stats that scouts will look at is the athlete's WAR, or Wins Above Replacement. This stat uses correlations and projections to determine how many wins each athlete is directly responsible for, or how many wins the athlete earned the team that his next closest replacement (likely playing in AAA ball in the minor league system farm system) would not have secured.

One important aspect that could be analyzed in further detail is the learning curve associated with foreign baseball player from less-developed countries. Latino baseball players make up 32% of the MLB's 25-man rosters, and many of them got their start in countries where baseball resources were not available for everyone. For example, not all baseball players from the Dominican Republic grew up wearing gloves or cleats when playing. One major league pitcher, Bartolo Colón, recalls throwing rocks at coconuts and mangos for target practice to build arm strength, pulping hundreds of crates of coffee beans, and riding his pet donkey to his practices and games each day. There may be countless other gifted athletes who go undiscovered simply because they don't have the resources to play the game at a competitive level, but it would be very beneficial to look into this to better predict the performance of aspiring athletes with financial disabilities.

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There are an infinite number of scenarios that a player has to be ready for in the field and at the plate, and preparing for these scenarios to the best of one's ability is absolutely essential. In 361, we learned about the benefits of random trials compared to blocked trials.

In Hitting:
Practicing hitting in various ways can have many benefits when transferring the task into a game. In a real at-bat scenario, the hitter never know what pitch is going to be thrown next, so he has to be ready for anything. For this reason, it would be beneficial to experience a random variety of pitches when taking batting practice, as receiving 20 fastballs, then 20 changeups, then 20 curveballs does not exhibit contextual interference, as would a mixture of these pitches. This is why live batting practice (batting practice in which another person is throwing the pitches) is generally considered more beneficial than taking batting practice from a pitching machine for transfer to in-game.

In Fielding:
Fielders also benefit from random trials compared to blocked trials in practice. In a game, the fielder never knows when the ball is going to be hit to them, how hard, or what direction, or if it will be coming in the air or on the ground. For this reason, it would be better to get a mixture of ground balls, fly balls, and line drives during practice time than to receive the same in a blocked session.

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30 Clubs in 30 Days: How Mike Trout Approaches Hitting