[QUOTE=Belrix]
A bit of a hijack but could you elaborate for this non-baseball doper?
Are you suggesting in the fraction of a second that it takes a pitcher to wind up and deliver a ball, the batter adjusts to the pitcher’s motion and can assume a specific incoming pitch?
What kind of adjustment could the batter make anyway?
[/QUOTE]
Garfield’s answer is essentially right. It’s an accepted truism in baseball that hitting is timing, and pitching is disrupting timing. Any major league hitter has sufficiently good reflexes and bat speed to hit any major league fastball if they know how hard it’s coming in and where it’s located. The challenging part is to be able to identify the type and location of a pitch and adjust to it in the few thousandths of a second available. Even flamethrowers like Ryan, Koufax, Clemens, Gibson, et al. give up their share of hits and HRs. Throw the ball to major league hitters at the same speed and same location every time and they’ll crush it. A big part of effective pitching, then, is keeping the motion and delivery absolutely consistent while changing speeds; if the pitch also moves in flight, so that it arrives somewhere other than where it seemed to be headed (as with a curve, slider, or split-finger pitch), so much the better, but the key thing is to give the batter expecting a 92 mph pitch something at 80 mph (or vice versa). They may adjust enough to make contact, even to get a hit, but they aren’t usually going to drive the ball if their timing is off. Jamie Moyer, still pitching in the majors in his 40s, probably hasn’t broken 85 mph on a radar gun in a decade, if ever. But his change-up comes in at around 60 mph. Even that slow, major league hitters still aren’t successful against him when their swing is timed for 80 mph. And when they gear their swing for 60 mph, 80 mph looks like 100.
The other key part of pitching is location and control. No major league hitter can cover the entire strike zone with equal effectiveness – even Ted Williams, considered by many the best pure hitter ever, estimated that his batting average on pitches at the extreme lower outside corner of the strike zone was no better than about .230, or about .170 lower than the .400 or better he’d expect to hit on pitches down the middle of the plate belt high (he produced a famous diagram of his estimated average for every point in the strike zone in his book, The Science of Hitting). I suspect that even Williams, however, would hit low outside pitches better than that if he could count on the ball being there every time. So successful pitchers vary their location, even when (like Tom Glavine) they’ve made careers out of change-ups low and away. Glavine will come inside with a fastball, or up and away, to batters just often enough to make them look stupid when they gear themselves up for the change-up away. Everyone in the park knows what Glavine’s going to throw, but he’s able to do it with consistency and control and varies the pattern just enough to keep batters off balance. Ditto for Greg Maddux. Without the ability to hit the exact spot intended, however, those strikes at the lower outside extremity of the strike zone become balls, or even worse – home-run balls in the middle of the plate. Another look at Williams’ diagram will show that there’s only two baseball-widths difference between the area where he’d hit .250 and the area where he’d hit .300. Miss your spot to a major league hitter and there’s a good chance you’ll be rubbing up a new baseball.
Batters do indeed sometimes pick up on aspects of a pitcher’s delivery that tip them off on the type of pitch that’s coming, allowing them to adjust to it. But any pitcher that telegraphs their pitches that way isn’t going to be around very long in the majors to feast off of. Pitchers work very hard to ensure consistency in their delivery. As Garfield mentions, good hitters can often pick up the rotational pattern of the seams on the ball as it leaves the pitcher’s hand and determine whether the pitch is a fastball, curve, slider, etc. Good hitters tend to have exceptional eyesight, FWIW – not sure the average joe off the street would see the same thing even with training. And while you or I might not be able to do much with information about the speed and likely location of a pitch, anyone who’s made it to the majors as a position player generally can (and often does). According to the article linked above, to hit a professional fastball a batter’s swing starts when the ball is approximately 19 feet from the plate – in other words, over two-thirds of the way from the pitcher’s hand to the plate (given the 60’6" distance of the pitching rubber from the plate and the fact that the pitcher’s release point is usually a couple of feet in front of the rubber). Plenty of time to see the spin on the ball and adjust the swing accordingly.
