Why Even Great Batters Strike Out

June 25, 2008 — -- Scientists are getting closer to understanding one of the deep mysteries of the human brain, and how a great batter can hit a baseball out of the park.

Here's the scene: Alex Rodriquez is in the batter's box and the pitcher fires a fastball over home plate. It takes only about a third of second for the ball, traveling at 100 miles per hour, to travel from the pitcher's mound to home plate. Yet somehow A-Rod manages to swing his bat around and blow the cover off the ball.

But there's a problem. The human brain doesn't work fast enough for even the "best player in baseball" to recognize that it's a fastball, crossing over the outside corner of the plate, in exactly 37 milliseconds. By the time he figures out where the ball is, it will be in the catcher's mitt.

That's probably why even the best batters fail most of the time, hitting only about once every three times they're up.

"The batter can't actually react to what he sees, because [the ball] would be past him" by the time he reacts, said Richard A. Andersen, professor of neuroscience at the California Institute of Technology. The batter's brain may not be fast enough, but Andersen's research suggests it can make up for that by predicting the future.

The batter picks up visual clues, such as how the pitcher is holding the ball, to predict where the ball will be in less than a second, Andersen said in a telephone interview. And of course the batter probably also knows a lot about the pitcher, including his favorite pitches.

That fits neatly with research by neurologist Steven Small of the University of Chicago, who notes that it takes less than the time between heartbeats for the ball to reach the batter, so the batter has to figure out what the pitcher will do even before the ball leaves his hand.

The two scientists are approaching the problem with different tools. Small uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to see what parts of the brain are activated during fiercely competitive events. His research shows that as a player masters a skill, like batting, the athlete requires less and less "brain power" to accomplish the task. A-Rod doesn't need to worry about how to hold the bat. All he has to think about is the pitcher. For us common folk, it's a lot more complicated.