The Mental Approach to Baseball Hitting-Big Data to Analyze Hitters Brain Function

Considered one of the most difficult tasks in sports, hitting a thrown baseball, especially at the professional level is something only the most gifted athletes on the planet can do. The issue is that performing this task requires a complex interaction between the brain and muscles in the body. Even the most physically gifted athletes are unable to hit a baseball if their mental prowess is subpar. According to this article, http://baseballanalysts.com/archives/2009/09/unraveling_the.php, a professional-level batter has approximately 50 msec (.05 sec) to react after a pitch is thrown in order to hit it. After that .05 sec, the batter is not able to alter his swing in any way from what he has decided to do. For comparison purposes, the average human eye blinks between 300 and 400 msec. This means the batter must decide whether to swing or not anywhere from 6 to 8 times faster than someone can blink, not an easy task. Making things even more difficult is that most pitchers throw three or four different pitches, many of which move in the air. So now, the batter must identify the type of pitch, decide whether it is a ball or strike and send electrical signals to their muscles to react in time in order to successfully hit it. No wonder failing 7 times out of 10 is considered an elite level of hitting performance (a .300 average). The paper at this link from the 2013 Sloan Sports Conference details research done on the subject of batter brain function in determining pitches: http://www.sloansportsconference.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/A-System-for-Measuring-the-Neural-Correlates-of-Baseball-Pitch-Recognition-and-Its-Potential-Use-in-Scouting-and-Player-Development.pdf

The study was done using three Division 1 college baseball players. Each player looked at 468 simulated pitches and was asked to identify the pitch type using a keyboard as soon as the simulated pitch was thrown. An fMRI and EEG scanner were used to study the subjects’ brain activity while they were identifying pitches. A linear equation was formulated to try and determine which independent variables were related to the time it took to recognize a pitch and whether it was correctly identified or not. The brain scans were used to evaluate brain activity in different areas as time passed after the pitch was “thrown”. The studies found that for all pitch types, brain activity peaked around 400 msec and 900 msec. As a reference, 400 msec would be approximately the time the pitch would cross the plate at a normal pitch speed, while the researchers speculated the second peak was a type of post-decision thinking about their choice. This study found that different regions of the brain are active for different pitch types and different regions are active for incorrect vs. correct pitch identification within a pitch type group (an example being one area is active for a correct fastball ID while another is active for incorrect fastball ID).

Some application of this research may lie in the scouting future of baseball. Players are long coveted who have the physical tools necessary to hit a baseball, but perhaps this research could better enable scouts to find out who has the mental abilities to identify pitches properly, which is key in hitting the ball. The researchers also hypothesize the information could be used in scouting reports by being able to identify what pitches batters are bad at recognizing. If a team knows their hitter is bad at recognizing curveballs mentally, they could work with them to try and correct that. Conversely, if a pitcher knows a batter has difficulty recognizing a pitch he could try to use that particular pitch more often or in a particular situation to try and get them out. The amount of data which could be generated by this research is vast and untested, but it could have an important impact on how the value of baseball players is determined in future.