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Study: Baseball players track pitched ball with head
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Coaches have advised batters to “keep their eyes on the ball” for decades, but a new study suggests that baseball players use their heads to track pitches.
Fogt and Zimmerman constructed a study to assess the movement strategies players use in tracking pitched balls and the consistency in those strategies.
"Hitting a baseball is a remarkably difficult task,” the authors wrote in Optometry and Vision Science. “Pitches can reach linear velocities of 90 miles per hour or higher. If a pitcher releases the ball 5 feet in front of the pitching rubber, a pitch averaging 90 miles per hour will reach home plate in about 420 milliseconds. In that case, because the swing requires 160 to 200 milliseconds, the batter has only about 220 to 260 milliseconds to decide when and where the ball will arrive and whether to swing the bat."
They developed a method to track both head and eye movements for 15 college baseball players: eye movements were monitored with a video eye tracker and head movements with an inertial sensor. Both movements were synchronized with the movement of the pitches using an analog recording device. The researchers had the players look at tennis balls pitched by a machine and call out the number and color of the number on each ball.
"On average, subjects tracked the pitched ball with the head throughout the pitch trajectory, while the eye was moved very little until late in the pitch trajectory," the authors reported.
The researchers derived that more studies should be done on the subject.
"Studies in which eye, head and gaze tracking strategies of elite baseball batters who are attempting to bat balls under game conditions (unpredictable stimuli) are required to determine whether anticipatory saccades are common in baseball. Furthermore, studies in which baseball players swing at pitched balls would aid us in determining whether the behaviors found in this study and the variability in these behaviors apply to on-field performance. If the measured behaviors while viewing pitches are similar to those behaviors during batting, then subjects could practice gaze tracking even when hitting is impractical," the authors concluded.
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