The Frontal Cortex

The Times has an interesting profile of Johan Santana, perhaps the most effective pitcher in baseball. What's interesting about Santana is that his secret isn't a 98 mph fastball or some wicked new breaking ball. Rather, he strikes out batters because he denies batters the perceptual cues they rely on when making batting decisions:

Whether Santana fires a fastball that zooms in at 90 to 94 miles an hour or flips a changeup that lumbers in at 77 to 80, he does everything exactly the same. He uses the same delivery, the same release point and the same exertion. Then he does it again and again. That repetitiveness helps camouflage which of the drastically different pitches he is throwing.

"You make them guess," Santana said. "That's the whole point. You want to keep them off balance."

When Santana tosses the changeup, his thumb is on the right side of the ball and is the only finger that does not touch a seam. Santana's index finger is across the inside seams, his middle and ring fingers are along the top seams (with the knuckles touching the seams) and his pinkie is on the seams along the left side of the ball (with the knuckle also touching the seams). Santana uses a similar grip for his four-seam fastball.

By using the same type of grip and throwing his fastball and changeup from the same release point, the pitches leave his hand resembling twins.

Baseball fans pay so much attention to the sheer velocity of a fastball - the stat appears on the television screen after every pitch - but the kind of subterfuge used by Santana is even more important. To understand why, it helps to know a little bit about the psychological mechanics of hitting. The numbers make the task look impossible. A typical major league pitch takes about 0.35 seconds to travel from the hand of the pitcher to home plate. (This is about the amount of time in between human heartbeats.) Unfortunately for batters, it takes about 0.25 seconds for their muscles to initiate a swing, leaving their brain a paltry one-tenth of a second to make up its mind. But even this estimate is too generous. Because it takes a few milliseconds for the visual information to travel from the retina to the visual cortex, the batter really has less than five milliseconds to perceive the pitch and decide whether or not to swing. But we can't think this quickly: even under perfect conditions it takes the brain about twenty milliseconds to respond to a sensory stimulus.

So how do major league baseball players manage to hit a fastball? The answer is that the brain begins collecting information about the pitch long before the pitch leaves the hand. As soon as the pitcher begins his windup, the batter will automatically start to pick up on "anticipatory clues" that help him winnow down the list of possibilities. A torqued wrist suggests a curveball, while an elbow fixed in a right angle means that a fastball is coming, straight over the plate. (Santana is effective precisely because he denies batters these subconscious clues.) The batters, of course, aren't consciously studying these signs: they can't tell you why they decided to swing at a certain pitch. And yet, they are able to act based upon this information. A study of expert cricket batters, for instance, demonstrated that the players could accurately predict the speed and location of the ball based solely on a one second video of the pitcher's windup. In other words, the best way to make your fastball more effective is to make sure it looks like an off-speed pitch. Don't give batters the information they depend on when standing at the plate.

If you'd like to learn more about the neuroscience of baseball, I'd recommend Your Brain on Cubs.