Read Online The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance by David Epstein - Free Book Online
Authors: David Epstein
Tags: Non-Fiction
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and the age when hitters, as a group, begin to decline.)
Mark Kipnis shared with me his first recollection of his baseball-playing son Jason’s visual acuity. It was during a ski vacation when Jason was twelve years old. The Kipnis family was sitting in a large restaurant in a lodge and Mark wanted to see the score of a football game on a television in the far corner. He was tired, so he asked Jason to get up, walk over to the television, and tell him the score. “He just turned his head and told me the score,” Mark says, “and a little light went off in my head.” A decade later, Jason was selected by the Cleveland Indians in the second round of the 2009 draft. By 2011, he was starting at second base.
Ted Williams, the last man to hit .400 over a major league season, used to insist that he only saw ducks on the horizon before his hunting partners because he was “intent on seeing them.” Perhaps. But Williams’s 20/10 vision, discovered during his World War II pilot’s exam, probably didn’t hurt either. *
About 2 percent of the players in the Dodgers organization dipped below 20/9, flirting with the theoretical limit of the human eye. Daniel M. Laby, an ophthalmologist who worked on the Dodgers study and later with the Boston Red Sox, says that he encounters a few players at that level every year in spring training. “I can pretty comfortably say that in twenty years of caring for people’s eyes I’ve never seen someone outside pro athletics achieve that, and I’ve seen over twenty thousand people,” Laby says. David G. Kirschen, an optometrist who also works with professional athletes and is chief of binocular vision and orthoptic services at the Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA’s medical school, says that he has seen a few patients outside of elite sports with 20/9 vision, “but you can count them on one hand over thirty years.”
So while major league hitters might not have any faster reactiontime than you or I do, they do have the superior vision that can help them pick up the anticipatory cues they need earlier, making raw reaction speed less important. *
Baseball players have to know before the final two hundred milliseconds of a pitch where to swing, so the earlier they pick up anticipatory cues the better. One such cue, as psychologist Mike Stadler writes in
The Psychology of Baseball
, is the “flicker” of a pitch, or the indication of the spin of the ball by the flashing pattern of rotating red seams. Two-seam fastballs and curveballs are foretold by signature red stripes on the side of the ball. A four-seam slider shows the batter a bright red dot in the center of a white circle. “That circle right out of the [pitcher’s] hand, you identify in your brain, ‘Oh, okay, slider,’” Keith Hernandez, the five-time All-Star first baseman, once said in television commentary of a Mets game. “If you didn’t have those little red seams on the ball, you’d be in a world of trouble.”
The importance of picking up ball rotation has been demonstrated in virtual-reality batting studies in which baseball players were asked to identify or to swing at digital pitches. When players picked up the rotation of the ball, they identified pitches more accurately and executed more precise swings. Hitters performed better when the red seams of the ball were accentuated, and worse when the seams were covered with white paint.
•
It’s easy to understand why an athlete with outstanding visual acuity but without the mental database of what to look for is as useless as Albert Pujols facing Jennie Finch. But once the data is downloaded into the brain, it’s advantageous to see those signals as clearly and as early as possible, all the better not to have to rely on pure reactionspeed. * Al Goldis, a longtime major league scout who studied motor learning in grad school, says: “If a player has better visual skills, he can pick up the pitch while it’s five feet or ten feet closer to the pitcher. If he
Mark Kipnis shared with me his first recollection of his baseball-playing son Jason’s visual acuity. It was during a ski vacation when Jason was twelve years old. The Kipnis family was sitting in a large restaurant in a lodge and Mark wanted to see the score of a football game on a television in the far corner. He was tired, so he asked Jason to get up, walk over to the television, and tell him the score. “He just turned his head and told me the score,” Mark says, “and a little light went off in my head.” A decade later, Jason was selected by the Cleveland Indians in the second round of the 2009 draft. By 2011, he was starting at second base.
Ted Williams, the last man to hit .400 over a major league season, used to insist that he only saw ducks on the horizon before his hunting partners because he was “intent on seeing them.” Perhaps. But Williams’s 20/10 vision, discovered during his World War II pilot’s exam, probably didn’t hurt either. *
About 2 percent of the players in the Dodgers organization dipped below 20/9, flirting with the theoretical limit of the human eye. Daniel M. Laby, an ophthalmologist who worked on the Dodgers study and later with the Boston Red Sox, says that he encounters a few players at that level every year in spring training. “I can pretty comfortably say that in twenty years of caring for people’s eyes I’ve never seen someone outside pro athletics achieve that, and I’ve seen over twenty thousand people,” Laby says. David G. Kirschen, an optometrist who also works with professional athletes and is chief of binocular vision and orthoptic services at the Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA’s medical school, says that he has seen a few patients outside of elite sports with 20/9 vision, “but you can count them on one hand over thirty years.”
So while major league hitters might not have any faster reactiontime than you or I do, they do have the superior vision that can help them pick up the anticipatory cues they need earlier, making raw reaction speed less important. *
Baseball players have to know before the final two hundred milliseconds of a pitch where to swing, so the earlier they pick up anticipatory cues the better. One such cue, as psychologist Mike Stadler writes in
The Psychology of Baseball
, is the “flicker” of a pitch, or the indication of the spin of the ball by the flashing pattern of rotating red seams. Two-seam fastballs and curveballs are foretold by signature red stripes on the side of the ball. A four-seam slider shows the batter a bright red dot in the center of a white circle. “That circle right out of the [pitcher’s] hand, you identify in your brain, ‘Oh, okay, slider,’” Keith Hernandez, the five-time All-Star first baseman, once said in television commentary of a Mets game. “If you didn’t have those little red seams on the ball, you’d be in a world of trouble.”
The importance of picking up ball rotation has been demonstrated in virtual-reality batting studies in which baseball players were asked to identify or to swing at digital pitches. When players picked up the rotation of the ball, they identified pitches more accurately and executed more precise swings. Hitters performed better when the red seams of the ball were accentuated, and worse when the seams were covered with white paint.
•
It’s easy to understand why an athlete with outstanding visual acuity but without the mental database of what to look for is as useless as Albert Pujols facing Jennie Finch. But once the data is downloaded into the brain, it’s advantageous to see those signals as clearly and as early as possible, all the better not to have to rely on pure reactionspeed. * Al Goldis, a longtime major league scout who studied motor learning in grad school, says: “If a player has better visual skills, he can pick up the pitch while it’s five feet or ten feet closer to the pitcher. If he
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