Ahhh, baseball. It’s that time of year again, time for the fall classic. What follows is an excerpt from “The Thinking Fan’s Guide To Baseball” by Leonard Koppett. Enjoy.
‘Fear.
Fear is the fundamental factor in hitting, and hitting the ball with the bat is the fundamental act of baseball.
The fear is simple and instinctive. If a baseball, thrown hard, hits any part of your body, it hurts. If it hits certain vulnerable areas, like elbows, wrists, or face, it can cause broken bones and other serious injuries. If it hits a particular area of an unprotected head, it can kill.
A thrown baseball, in short, is a missile and an approaching missile generates a reflexive action: Get out of the way.
The act of hitting encompasses what seems like an emotional contradiction (which is not so unusual, psychologists tell us). It is simultaneously pleasurable and dangerous. The batter’s primary desire is to hit the ball as hard as he can, and this requires “stepping into” the approaching ball with the rear foot very firmly planted. But self-preservation demands that the body move away from a ball that is going to hit it, or that seems to be going to hit it.
This interplay between executing a productive swing and resisting the built-in desire to dodge is the reality of every time at bat.
And the tactical consequence is, at bottom, rudimentary: Throw close, and drive the batter back; then throw over the outside part of the plate. Then, if you can alternate pitches that seem to be headed for the batter but aren’t (curves) with pitches that have a straighter trajectory, you can keep the batter off balance most of the time.
But if it all begins with fear, it doesn’t end there. That is merely the beginning.
The second fundamental fact about hitting is so self-evident that it is mentioned only as a cliché, when clichés are being derided. It’s a round ball and a round bat.
Yet this unique problem in physics is what gives baseball its particular character. It doesn’t come up in any other widely played game.
In all the tennis-family games (including squash and even handball), a moving ball is struck by some flat surface that is large in relation to the ball. In hockey, a sliding or rolling disk is hit or guided by a flat blade. A cricket ball has three plane surfaces (and the ball may be hit in any direction). In golf, the striking surface is flat and, what’s more, the ball is stationary. Even in billiards (where balls are stationary), the striking tip of the cue is relatively flat.
In all these other games, therefore, the margin for error is much greater than in baseball. A hockey or tennis shot can be reasonably effective even if the point of contact is not quite centered on the blade. But to hit a baseball into fair territory, hard enough to have any reasonable chance of the ball falling safe, one must connect almost perfectly. A line drive can result only if the line from the center of the ball through the point of contact to the center of the bat cylinder is practically straight. The height of the area in which the bat and ball can meet squarely is something less than half an inch.
Consider the dimensions: A baseball’s diameter is 2.868 inches; the bat’s diameter, as its fattest part, cannot exceed 2.75 inches. A major-league fastball can approach 100 miles an hour, which means that the distance from the pitcher’s hand to home plate (less than 60 feet, since the ball is released in front of the rubber) is covered in something less than half a second.
To hit the ball, of course, the batter must begin swinging his bat before the ball arrives. In other words, he must decide on the basis of the first portion of the pitch’s trajectory what its final path will be, and he has approximately one-quarter of one second in which to make this decision. Then he must start the bat, judge height, lateral placement, and velocity, adjust the swing, and make contact no more than a quarter of an inch above or below the center of the ball. And while doing all this, he must keep his body from flinching if the ball seems to be coming too close.
Put that way, hitting seems impossible. It would be impossible if it were a conscious process. By and large, it is a trained reflex, the product of hundreds of thousands of swings taken from childhood on. But it is easy to see why the pitcher has so big an advantage, and why outstanding batters are so few, and why even the greatest of all never succeeded in hitting safely as much as 40 percent of the time (Ted Williams- .344 lifetime). And that’s why, at major-league levels, batting ability is considered an inborn gift.
Each time up, and often after each pitch, the batter must find his “right” spot all over again- not only the right spot for his feet, but for his whole body position. It is easy to lose the rhythm of one’s own best swing in such circumstances, especially since being ready to dodge can be a mental distraction as well. And it doesn’t matter much whether the pitch comes close unintentionally (if the pitcher is wild) or intentionally. The result is the same, and the batter must be “ready”.’
And THAT is why my YANKEES haven’t won a World Series since 2000 (but still have 25 MORE championships than the Angels…)
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Originally Posted by Shwing
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