[shadowbox] Why is it difficult to catch a poorly thrown or kicked football? A perceptual perspective With the NFL preseason underway I thought I would turn my eye to the gridiron. For a football quarterback or punter it is advantageous to throw (or kick) the ball so that it travels in a perfect spiral for…

[shadowbox] Eye & Head Movements in Batting: Challenging the “Truths” Having considered what a batter should do with their eyes before the ball is released in my previous post, I now want to move on to look how a batter tracks the ball from the pitcher’s hand to the plate. In reviewing what we understand…

[shadowbox] “Soft Focus” or Visual Pivot Point: Which Should Baseball Batters Use? The Challenge: In order to hit a baseball you obviously need to be able to “see it” first.  Evidence has shown that good hitters can follow the ball’s flight via eye and head movements and can pick up subtle information from the ball’s…

[shadowbox] Visual Information about Horizontal Pitch Movement: Sensitivity, Release Points & Eye Separation Following up on my post on pitch tunneling which examined pitch movement in the vertical plane, I want to now consider visual information available to a batter about the trajectory of pitch in the horizontal plane (e.g., whether it will cross on…

[shadowbox] The Psychology of Quick Pitching & Altering Deliveries In recent years some prominent MLB pitchers have begun altering the timing of their delivery in an attempt to mess with batters (although it is not a new practice).  A few examples of how Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Marcus Stroman does this can be seen in…

[shadowbox] A Baseball Batter’s Perception of Spin & How it Relates to Hitting Performance One of the most interesting measurements that has come from the “Pitch f/x – Statcast Era” in baseball is pitch spin rate.  While there has been a lot of discussion of how spin influences the flight of the ball, how it…

[shadowbox] Pitch Tunneling & Perceptually Equivalent Pitches Recently I have become fascinated with the topic of pitch tunneling, not only because I am a big baseball fan but because it bears a striking resemble to some of the psychophysical experiments I did during my PhD (and since).  Specifically, one’s designed to measure discrimination thresholds for…

Just wanted to share the abstract for a new paper I am writing up over the summer looking at transfer of training from real to virtual baseball batting. This is a labor of love based on over 10 years of data collection! Gray Frontiers VR Training baseball For those that have access, this was also…

Recommended: Listen to the Podcast Episode that accompanies this analysis Bayes Theorem allows us to predict the probability of a particular event (A) occurring given that we know that another condition (B) has already occurred. There are two basic formulations of the theorem that can be used Example 1: What is the probability that the…

Recommended: Listen to the Podcast Episode that accompanies this analysis Goal: To determine whether there is a decline in batting performance after a “choking” event in baseball relative to pre-event performance. Also, to determine which factors influence this effect. Data sources: http://www.baseball-reference.com/play-index Event definition: 9th inning, 1 out, leverage index >= 1.5, batter hits into…