Keep Your Eye On The Ball

For now ... own thread. After a little while you can feel free to merge with MLB Discussion.

According to SportScience, the amount of time a hitter has to make a decision on whether or not to swing at a 90 mph fastball is .09 seconds, when you account for the amount of time to find the ball, calculate the velocity, and for the signal to swing to reach the muscles.

Oh, and when the pitch is actually close to the plate, you can't actually "keep your eye on the ball", it's practically invisible.

For a Strasburg 100 mph fastball, the reaction time goes down to .04.

Here's the video: http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=5311306

Here's other SportScience clips: http://search.espn.go.com/sportscience/

I wonder what an 80 mph fast-pitch softball would be. I've faced that before in a state league I was in after high school.

I would imagine slightly easier to find, but slightly more difficult to estimate velocity (if it was rising). Obviously more time to react, but not by too much. Taking a rough hack at the physics, you'd probably have about .15 seconds to react, and the relative size of the ball might give you an extra .01 or .02. But not much more than that.

We faced this in high school. Though nobody was hitting 100 that we faced, some of us were topping 90 on the radar. The better question, what is the reaction time of the pitcher getting a ball hit back to him off of an aluminum bat? 0.0 seconds? It sure as hell seemed that way. I ended one of our pitcher's high school career in practice one time by lining a ball off of his knee cap.

Off of aluminum? Probably about 0.0.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by JeffHCross

I would imagine slightly easier to find, but slightly more difficult to estimate velocity (if it was rising). Obviously more time to react, but not by too much. Taking a rough hack at the physics, you'd probably have about .15 seconds to react, and the relative size of the ball might give you an extra .01 or .02. But not much more than that.

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Yeah some of the shit I faced in fast-pitch with risers and knucklers and curveballs with a good deal of velocity, there was no way I could ever play rec-league slow pitch....I'd uppercut it every time. There were people that tried to switch over and would struggle big time undercutting the ball.

And yet the top college baseball coaches want to keep aluminum despite the safety concerns, huge scores and the "Ping!" They are concerned about costs but if they can pay their football coaches millions of dollars, they can afford some wooden bats.

20 milliseconds, they actually just did the wooden v. aluminum bat comparison on ESPN with SportScience. Pretty interesting.

Man, SportScience is the most interesting thing on ESPN now. I'm really glad that started doing that cause it's some pretty cool stuff.