This is from a wonderful web site entitled Science of Baseball:
“A major league pitcher can throw a baseball up to 95 miles per hour — some can move it even faster. At this speed, it takes about four tenths of a second for the ball to travel the 60 feet, 6 inches from the pitcher’s mound to home plate, where the batter, with muscles as tense as coiled springs, like a predatory animal about to pounce, waits for the precise moment to swing at the ball. Baseball is a game played at the edge of biological time, just within the limits of a human’s ability to react.”
Well, are you fast on your feet? Me, I think I’d start swinging before the pitcher was done with his or her wind up.
Batters can sense or perceive what the pitch may be, or correctly guess, and you often hear “He was thinking…. slider… curve ball… fast one.”
Hitting is part science, and part “What the hay? Are you kidding me?”
I want to know why some players are better hitters than others, and why some are much better than most. When we here at KindredBlue.com reveal our findings, just be sure we will have secured all rights and entitlements to the secrets because we will have become extraordinarily well-to-do.
My current conclusion: Some players are just more skillful than others, and God, you know the very great manager in the ball park sky, long ago decided (before even the first line-up card) that’s how it’s going to be.
Drum roll please… The wind up and the pitch!
