UF Researchers Find Difference Between Reactions To Different Pitches

October 16, 1998

GAINESVILLE — When Tampa Bay Devil Rays outfielder Rich Butler steps to the plate, he’s waiting for the type of pitch he hits best.

“I’m always looking for a fastball,” he said. “You have to. If you’re expecting a fastball, you have time to adjust to a curve ball, but if you’re waiting for a curve ball and the pitch is a fastball, there’s no way you can hit it.”

University of Florida researchers can explain why.

A team headed by Robert Singer, chairman of UF’s department of exercise and sport sciences, has proved for the first time scientifically that hitters’ reactions to curve balls are significantly slower than their reactions to fastballs.

“The mental activity is greater for a curve ball,” Singer said. “A fastball is coming faster and you can see its path. It takes more pattern recognition to see if a curve is breaking. In terms of processing, there is a 150-millisecond difference.”

In a game where fractions of a second count, the time lapse is a big one, he said.

“The fact of the matter is, at 60 feet 6 inches, a ball thrown at 90 mph takes less than half a second to cross the plate,” he said. “You’re talking about having less than 0.48 seconds to decide what it is, if you want to hit it and when it will cross the plate.”

Singer measured the brain activities of five former collegiate baseball players while they watched videotaped pitches thrown by a collegiate pitcher. Fastballs and curve balls were randomly mixed up in each video sequence, and the participants were instructed to react to the pitch by pushing one button for a curve ball and another for a fastball.

The varying angles and speeds of the curve ball require more time for recognition than the fastball, which causes the difference in reaction times, Singer said.

“You don’t have a lot of time if you’re a batter,” he said. “You need to pick up more information than just the fact that the ball is being thrown.”

That’s why mental preparation is so important in the game of baseball, Singer said. The more quickly a batter can determine the nature of the pitch, the more time he or she has to react and decide how to swing.

“If there’s any way you can read in advance what a pitcher is going to throw, it’s going to help you tremendously, because it allows you to use the full reaction time to determine your swing,” Singer said.

The study, which will be published in the journal “Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport” in December, has applications for all levels of baseball, said Singer. Little Leaguers and Major Leaguers alike must choose their actions using as many cues as they can pick up.

“The best batters that hit for batting average are the ones who commit the latest and are in control,” he said. “They wait until the last fraction of a second to swing, and they have more time to process the pitch. On the other hand, a pitcher’s game is to have a variety of pitches to keep the batter off-guard. A good batter must not overly commit to one pitch or another. It’s a game between the two different strategies.”

The key to being a better batter, Singer said, is to determine the type of pitch as quickly as possible but wait until the last possible millisecond to react. The closer a batter can come to narrowing the reaction time between a fastball and a curve ball, the better chance he or she will have of hitting the ball.

“The angles of a curve ball make it hard to determine where the ball will cross the plate, and some curve balls can be nastier than others,” Butler said. “On the other hand, a fastball is coming at you at 90 mph. The brain has to register all the elements at once.”