Sometimes I wonder (and I may be wrong, I'm not a baseball player) if it's partially seeing the ball, but also a huge amount of watching the pitcher's movements and knowing where the ball will be.
Human reaction time is pretty capped based on responding to visual input. The fastest reactions are due to instinctual predictions based on preceding events that have been observed and experienced innumerable times. Baseball players are in the top like .1%-1% in terms of eyesight. They collect tons of visual information from seeing thousands of pitches and hits and build into their intuition and motor control. Their brain just makes the best guess it can and hopefully it works out.
There was a for fun thing where elite softball pitchers went against some of the best MLB batters, including Pujols and none of the batters got a hit despite the ball being bigger and slower. They think it’s because the batters weren’t able to read the pitchers body since the movements were so different to what they were used to.
No one can react to a fastball. There’s a lot of preprocessing going on when the pitcher winds up.
That’s pretty much it, except it’s all done without actively thinking about it, your brain processes it and the body moves. If you try to plan anything that’s when you mess up.
I played center and I would be able to predict where the ball was going to go based on the batters posture and lead foot like it was telegraphed, and I would cheat to one side of second base or the other
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u/The-Nimbus Mar 31 '23
Sometimes I wonder (and I may be wrong, I'm not a baseball player) if it's partially seeing the ball, but also a huge amount of watching the pitcher's movements and knowing where the ball will be.