Pitching perspective

jbo911

Super Moderator
Staff member
I'm not bashing these guys, but I wanted to give some perspective on pitching. At the current distance, a 75 mph hit gives the pitcher 1/2 second to react. That means that anyone that hits harder than these swings that register 75 mph gives us less than half a second to react.


A 100 mph shot is moving at 146+ feet per second.

Here's a link about how long it takes an MLB hitter to recognize a 90 mph fastball and react for additional perspective on how light hits our eye, etc.

 

ImminentDanger

Up and Over
And the extra 5-6ft pitchers box gives a pitcher 10% more reaction time. Yes, you can still move back off the pitching plate, but it's still making you start to back up from 5-6ft closer than if you pitch from the back of the box (which I do most of the time).

The pitching box and a 12ft arc are safety factors that are under utilized - both by association proscriptions and by pitchers who don't use those factors when they pitch (where they are available).


When a hit is directly at your face (I know first hand), it takes 1/2 the distance before your brain realizes that the ball is getting bigger (visually) because it is headed straight for your eyes. That only leaves 1/2 the distance/time to react with your glove. It's only a little better (to see the angled hit) if the ball is headed for some other part of your body.

I love pitching - Look forward to it every week we have games. But I never look forward to the intentional or uncontrolled hits that threaten me.

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Added: Data from JBO's links. For future reference.
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How Can Anyone Hit a 90 mph Fastball? Science Explains!
Lauren Sommer - May 8, 2013

Ever wonder how a major league baseball player hits a 90-mph fastball? Ask some researchers at UC Berkeley, who have identified an area of the brain that makes it possible.

Look at the numbers alone and hitting a home run seems next to impossible. A fastball takes .4 seconds to reach home plate after it leaves a pitcher's hand, but a hitter needs a full .25 seconds to see the ball and react.

"Light hits our eye and the information needs to get to our brain," said researcher Gerrit Maus of UC Berkeley. "That takes a tenth of a second. After that we make a decision to move, and that signal needs to get to our muscles."

Maus said it's an example of a fundamental problem: "Everything our brain receives is actually already out of date by the time the information gets to the brain."

Luckily, the brain compensates for that lag time. Based on the movement of the object and the background behind it, the brain makes a projection of where the object will be. In a scientific paper released today, Maus and colleagues identified an area of visual cortex where that happens.

"If we didn't have the prediction mechanism going on, then you would see the ball possibly 3 or 4 yards behind where it actually is," Maus said.

"It's not only important for baseball or tennis, but also in everyday life. For example, when we're driving, we would always think we're not as far down the road as we actually are."

While we might think we're seeing the world as it really is, Maus said what we're actually seeing is just a calculation.

"It's really the fundamental question of what we perceive," he said. "We don't see what's coming in through the eye, but we see a story that the brain makes up for us to be able to interact with the world. It's a very sophisticated system, but it doesn't always show us everything as it is."

The ultimate goal of the work is to broaden our understanding of how the visual system functions.

"For one thing, we're trying to build artificial systems that see like a human does," Maus said. "Ever since engineers have tried this, they've understood it's a really hard problem. The other application would be basic medicine – we need to know how something works before we fix it."

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Hit a 95 mph baseball? Scientists pinpoint how we see it coming
By Yasmin Anwar - May 8, 2013

How does San Francisco Giants slugger Pablo Sandoval swat a 95 mph fastball, or tennis icon Venus Williams see the oncoming ball, let alone return her sister Serena's 120 mph serves? For the first time, vision scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have pinpointed how the brain tracks fast-moving objects.

The discovery advances our understanding of how humans predict the trajectory of moving objects when it can take one-tenth of a second for the brain to process what the eye sees.

That 100-millisecond holdup means that in real time, a tennis ball moving at 120 mph would have already advanced 15 feet before the brain registers the ball's location. If our brains couldn't make up for this visual processing delay, we'd be constantly hit by balls, cars and more.

Thankfully, the brain "pushes" forward moving objects so we perceive them as further along in their trajectory than the eye can see, researchers said.

"For the first time, we can see this sophisticated prediction mechanism at work in the human brain," said Gerrit Maus, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at UC Berkeley and lead author of the paper published today (May 8) in the journal, Neuron.

A clearer understanding of how the brain processes visual input – in this case life in motion – can eventually help in diagnosing and treating myriad disorders, including those that impair motion perception. People who cannot perceive motion cannot predict locations of objects and therefore cannot perform tasks as simple as pouring a cup of coffee or crossing a road, researchers said.

This study is also likely to have a major impact on other studies of the brain. Its findings come just as the Obama Administration initiates its push to create a Brain Activity Map Initiative, which will further pave the way for scientists to create a roadmap of human brain circuits, as was done for the Human Genome Project.

Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Gerrit and fellow UC Berkeley researchers Jason Fischer and David Whitney located the part of the visual cortex that makes calculations to compensate for our sluggish visual processing abilities. They saw this prediction mechanism in action, and their findings suggest that the middle temporal region of the visual cortex known as V5 is computing where moving objects are most likely to end up.

For the experiment, six volunteers had their brains scanned, via fMRI, as they viewed the "flash-drag effect," a visual illusion in which we see brief flashes shifting in the direction of the motion, as can be seen in the videos above.

"The brain interprets the flashes as part of the moving background, and therefore engages its prediction mechanism to compensate for processing delays," Maus said.

If the brain didn't compensate for our visual processing delay, we would get hit by balls and other moving objects.

The researchers found that the illusion – flashes perceived in their predicted locations against a moving background and flashes actually shown in their predicted location against a still background – created the same neural activity patterns in the V5 region of the brain. This established that V5 is where this prediction mechanism takes place, they said.

In a study published earlier this year, Maus and his fellow researchers pinpointed the V5 region of the brain as the most likely location of this motion prediction process by successfully using transcranial magnetic stimulation, a non-invasive brain stimulation technique, to interfere with neural activity in the V5 region of the brain, and disrupt this visual position-shifting mechanism.

"Now not only can we see the outcome of prediction in area V5," Maus said. "But we can also show that it is causally involved in enabling us to see objects accurately in predicted positions."

On a more evolutionary level, the latest findings reinforce that it is actually advantageous not to see everything exactly as it is. In fact, it's necessary to our survival:

"The image that hits the eye and then is processed by the brain is not in sync with the real world, but the brain is clever enough to compensate for that," Maus said. "What we perceive doesn't necessarily have that much to do with the real world, but it is what we need to know to interact with the real world."

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jbo911

Super Moderator
Staff member
Same, I love pitching and will till I can't. People don't realize how long it takes the brain to process that one right at your face.

Switching from classic ms to 52s, I've closed my glove before the ball got to me. That one article is interesting as it talks about how your brain paints a picture of what's happening to undo the lag of the actual nerve signals going from eye to brain, etc.
 

ilyk2win

Addicted to Softballfans
Not only are you further away, but your pitch takes longer for the ball to get to the batter. It all adds time. I generally pitch from the rubber anyway, but use the box to be able to change speeds and timing of the batter - different looks. Anything that helps it look like it's not a kickball sitting on a tee helps a pitcher not get drilled IMO.
 

blakcherry329

Well-Known Member
I find it comical that nobody ever addresses the fact that pitchers need to wear catcher's gear, basically, to be safe out there.
Then they're asking are the bats good enough(didn't click on the link yet, just going off of the title). I also hate when non-pitchers complain about the balls because it's not an automatic HR every swing. smh
Bat technology is akin to sabermetrics in sports. it's making the game not as enjoyable with the yellow balls.

I play mostly in NY, nowadays. They use Clinchers for most of the leagues, so I don't need to gear up.
When I play in the random Charity tournament, I wear my LAX helmet and shin guards. I almost always pitch from the rubber and just change eye angles with the height and location. You can usually tell what pitch will be coming back atcha.
 

basilray

Active Member
My situation is a bit weird: I largely became a pitcher because I'm slow and not good at fielding fly balls. I was born cross-eyed, and spent nearly all my life without proper depth perception, so pitching became my spot. I spent over a year working w/ a therapist to actually develop some functional depth perception recently, and it's made a big difference.

That being said, I took a laser to the forehead this fall. I suspected it might come back based on the team, batter, and pitch location, but I never really saw it come off his bat. Fortunately, I wear an ST1, or I wouldn't have gotten up off the field under my own power. It was the second time I got hit in that game, both of which were intentional. There will always be hits that even the best players can't field or even get a glove on. That's just how it is. Go watch middle compliations on YT if you don't think so.

The bats are too good, regardless if we're talking 220's or 240's. Leagues should mandate some sort of head protection, and I'm honestly surprised they aren't. I'm even more surprised at the guys that stand there and wear nothing, not even a cup. It's just a game, I'd rather look ridiculous and not get my life blown up than risk it.
 

jbo911

Super Moderator
Staff member
Not only are you further away, but your pitch takes longer for the ball to get to the batter. It all adds time. I generally pitch from the rubber anyway, but use the box to be able to change speeds and timing of the batter - different looks. Anything that helps it look like it's not a kickball sitting on a tee helps a pitcher not get drilled IMO.
The only problem I have with them pitchers box is it throws of the bad umps something fierce. If you're for feet back, it begins about a seven foot ceiling because everything over that they think is too high for some reason. I know that's the opposite of what it should be, but that's how it is.

Everything else amen. Anything to change it up.
 

blakcherry329

Well-Known Member
My situation is a bit weird: I largely became a pitcher because I'm slow and not good at fielding fly balls. I was born cross-eyed, and spent nearly all my life without proper depth perception, so pitching became my spot. I spent over a year working w/ a therapist to actually develop some functional depth perception recently, and it's made a big difference.

That being said, I took a laser to the forehead this fall. I suspected it might come back based on the team, batter, and pitch location, but I never really saw it come off his bat. Fortunately, I wear an ST1, or I wouldn't have gotten up off the field under my own power. It was the second time I got hit in that game, both of which were intentional. There will always be hits that even the best players can't field or even get a glove on. That's just how it is. Go watch middle compliations on YT if you don't think so.

The bats are too good, regardless if we're talking 220's or 240's. Leagues should mandate some sort of head protection, and I'm honestly surprised they aren't. I'm even more surprised at the guys that stand there and wear nothing, not even a cup. It's just a game, I'd rather look ridiculous and not get my life blown up than risk it.
I'm more worried about bad hops off of crappy fields than line drives. My first move is glove up. ;)
 

ilyk2win

Addicted to Softballfans
The only problem I have with them pitchers box is it throws of the bad umps something fierce. If you're for feet back, it begins about a seven foot ceiling because everything over that they think is too high for some reason. I know that's the opposite of what it should be, but that's how it is.

Everything else amen. Anything to change it up.
I get the opposite too. The further back you are the "flatter" a 6' pitch "looks" so the whole other teams yells and cries FLAT....and it IS flatter than a pitch thrown from several feet closer that is also 6' high. What's funny to me is the same batters who ***** the most about a borderline strike are the same one watching MLB and criticizing an ump who called a ball on their favorite team's pitcher that just barely touched that white box.....but underhand stuff should be right down the middle or it's a ball.
 

blakcherry329

Well-Known Member
Never wore a cup, even in little league unless I was catching.
Never even came close to getting hit there either.
 

jbo911

Super Moderator
Staff member
I've had my cup cracked once by a line drive and I slipped in a charity tournament a couple of years ago in the rain, and got blasted. I was falling backwards and it was like those skaters that rack themselves on handrails. It wasn't hit hard enough to be too bad thank goodness.

That's the thing for me about a cup and pitching in general. It's like we're walking a tight rope hoping we don't get killed so Joe schmo can feel like a big man. It's those tiny things, a slip, a bad hop, a knuckle ball, etc that get you hit. A rocket at hip height where you have to decide glove up or down, but that extra decision is the difference.

Pitchers will get hit, it's just how often and to what degree.
 

ImminentDanger

Up and Over
The further back you are the "flatter" a 6' pitch "looks" so the whole other teams yells and cries FLAT....and it IS flatter than a pitch thrown from several feet closer that is also 6' high.
The very fact that batters complain (or that umps have issues) illustrates the effectiveness of giving pitchers the option of pitching from different distances. But batters everywhere are against giving the pitcher effective options.

As to flat pitches - I can't understand why umpires have difficulty with that. From the eyes of the ump to the top of the pitcher's head has to be at least 5ft. If the apex of the arc of the ball is at least 1ft higher than that line of sight, it meets the minimum height of 6ft. In watching game video, from almost any angle, you can draw a line between the top of the ump's head and the top of the pitcher's head and see that 80% of the pitches called flat are actually above the 6ft minimum.

If you can get that 6ft height called correctly, then double that height & you have a 12ft height maximum. But I've seen lots of video where the ump won't call illegal until the pitch is close to or over 14' high. There really needs to be some training done for this - with usable tips for assessing the actual height of various pitches. Maybe a training session with called pitches on video that each ump could review their own calls to see if they are getting it right.

I'll adjust my pitching to what the ump is calling. But having different calls every other pitch is extreme frustrating. Consistency in calling illegal pitches goes a long way toward minimizing the complaints about those calls.

On the other hand, I intentionally throw illegal pitches just to knock the timing of the batter, especially fast and straight across the chest. The ump calls illegal and tells me to bring it up or down - or calls it DEEP! - as though I need that guidance to get it right. But I won't let on that it was intentional - that would defeat the effectiveness of the pitch.

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jbo911

Super Moderator
Staff member
A percentage of umpires don't try and establish a floor and a ceiling. Teaching them math isn't enough. They don't have bad depth perception. They don't just think seven feet is six.

They base their floor and ceiling on how much people are complaining about their calls. If you pitch for a year, you'll definitely be in a game where the umps already inaccurate strike zone starts shrinking because of the other team complaining. It's so annoying when we all know that about 60% of players will complain when they know they're wrong just to try and set up more favorable calls later. Almost 100% of teams do something like this.
 

blakcherry329

Well-Known Member
I did pitch ASA slow pitch, but in NNJ, the wasn't much, if any, UTrip leagues. ASA, back before 2010 was anywhere from a 10-15 foot arc. (always hated hitting that nonsense:mad:). But I played more modified than slow pitch.
When I started pitching UTrip, I was always called out for Flat pitches because I was coming from Modified pitching. The 3-10 foot was tailor made for my pitching.
When you have the other team complaining, you're doing something right;)
 

jbo911

Super Moderator
Staff member
As long as the umps aren't buying it I 100% agree. That's why it's so frustrating. Everything about pitching is frustrating because no association has the balls to do what's right. Instead we just have to wear hockey goalie equipment.

Don't pump fake me, I'll hit you.

Don't get the other team complaining, the ump will adjust the strike zone to shut them up.

Don't pitch me outside, I'll hit you.

Sorry I hit you, your pitch threw me off.

Sorry I missed that strike call, your pitch threw me off. I've thrown that pitch at least 20 times already.

A good pitcher doesn't care about getting hit, but it does go to show why the game is shrinking. Not everybody is as crazy as we are. Every responsibility is just laid
on the pitchers, and the associations literally do nothing until pitchers start dying. Started with titanium, and still continues today.

And they've even started the victim blaming to add just that much more. Why wasn't he wearing a helmet? We are a fielder, not a batter trying to hit 99 mph fastballs thrown near us. Why don't you do what we pay you to do and regulate the freaking game?
 

jbo911

Super Moderator
Staff member
I did pitch ASA slow pitch, but in NNJ, the wasn't much, if any, UTrip leagues. ASA, back before 2010 was anywhere from a 10-15 foot arc. (always hated hitting that nonsense:mad:). But I played more modified than slow pitch.
When I started pitching UTrip, I was always called out for Flat pitches because I was coming from Modified pitching. The 3-10 foot was tailor made for my pitching.
When you have the other team complaining, you're doing something right;)
How much fun would it be to pitch 4'-15' though? You just sold me on it when you said you hated hitting it lol.

4-15 with the plate as a strike would be pretty freaking difficult to hit. I think we'd all have to two step.
 

blakcherry329

Well-Known Member
As long as the umps aren't buying it I 100% agree. That's why it's so frustrating. Everything about pitching is frustrating because no association has the balls to do what's right. Instead we just have to wear hockey goalie equipment.

Don't pump fake me, I'll hit you.

Don't get the other team complaining, the ump will adjust the strike zone to shut them up.

Don't pitch me outside, I'll hit you.

Sorry I hit you, your pitch threw me off.

Sorry I missed that strike call, your pitch threw me off. I've thrown that pitch at least 20 times already.

A good pitcher doesn't care about getting hit, but it does go to show why the game is shrinking. Not everybody is as crazy as we are. Every responsibility is just laid
on the pitchers, and the associations literally do nothing until pitchers start dying. Started with titanium, and still continues today.

And they've even started the victim blaming to add just that much more. Why wasn't he wearing a helmet? We are a fielder, not a batter trying to hit 99 mph fastballs thrown near us. Why don't you do what we pay you to do and regulate the freaking game?
Exactly, but since we started pitching when the balls were rocks and Ultra II's and 2k swing Flexes and Extendeds were around, and we were out there "naked and afraid", it's kinda hard to intimidate us when we're suited up for battle. It's funny to me when they try. If you can be intimidated, pitching isn't for you, imo.
 

EAJuggalo

Addicted to Softballfans
The bats are too good, regardless if we're talking 220's or 240's. Leagues should mandate some sort of head protection, and I'm honestly surprised they aren't. I'm even more surprised at the guys that stand there and wear nothing, not even a cup. It's just a game, I'd rather look ridiculous and not get my life blown up than risk it.
The reason the leagues won't mandate it is that it would then be on them to check it and keep it compliant. Only one helmet has a NOCSAE approval. If they allowed other masks/helmets that weren't certified and someone still got hurt they would be opening themselves up to litigation. IIRC you are in the MPLS area, I know the top umps there are very good, and the bottom umps there are very bad, you really expect some of those guys to pay attention, some of them can't even describe the strike zone correctly. I played in Eagan and Apple Valley for 10 years and umped in the south metro for 5 before I moved to WI.
How much fun would it be to pitch 4'-15' though? You just sold me on it when you said you hated hitting it lol.

4-15 with the plate as a strike would be pretty freaking difficult to hit. I think we'd all have to two step.
Come up by me for a carney tourney. It's all unlimited arc plate and mat, some of those guys can get it consistently up to 20' and still hit the mat. Once they get that first strike you know the next one is going up 30 and just hoping to get it close. I call "ASA" league here that is allegedly 6-12, in reality no one calls illegal until it's 15. But boy they will ***** that 6'6" is flat.
 

basilray

Active Member
The reason the leagues won't mandate it is that it would then be on them to check it and keep it compliant. Only one helmet has a NOCSAE approval. If they allowed other masks/helmets that weren't certified and someone still got hurt they would be opening themselves up to litigation. IIRC you are in the MPLS area, I know the top umps there are very good, and the bottom umps there are very bad, you really expect some of those guys to pay attention, some of them can't even describe the strike zone correctly. I played in Eagan and Apple Valley for 10 years and umped in the south metro for 5 before I moved to WI.

I hadn't thought through the logistics. Good point on not having a real standard for umps to go by. I'd rather see some sort of standard for masks/helmets on pitchers than talk of pitching from behind a net, so until then...I'll keep my dome protected on my own! :)

I've bounced around the S Metro a bit the last couple years, but at this point, I'm pretty much just playing church ball in Lakeville and D ball in Burnsville. There's a few in Burnsville that are atrocious, but I'd still rather have them than a couple of the ones I saw last time I played in Bloomington (I know, I know...UTrip vs USA).
 
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