
What Can Hitters Actually See Out of a Pitcher’s Hand? - how-about-this
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/what-can-hitters-actually-see-out-of-a-pitchers-hand/
======
jnordwick
The statistical and scientific nature of baseball is incredibly deep, far
deeper than any other sport I can think of. You not only have the one-on-one
of pitching that many other sports can rival (think cricket for example which
is mostly about this match up), but once you start including men on base and
positional state, it becomes absolutely beautiful to analyze.

This isn't to say other sports don't have action (basketball, soccer, etc) or
chess like transitional strategy (football), but the scientific wealth of
information in baseball is fairly unrivaled because of discrete nature and
very calculable states. These qualities make it assaultable mathematically and
scientifically in ways other sports that have more flowing nature cannot have
done to them.

It's good to see the article give a nod to a cricket bowling study though.
Cross-pollination is good. But for mathematics geeks, baseball is the
Beautiful Game.

~~~
sandworm101
It's the thinking man's game because it;s boring. Baseball is unique in that
play is limited to brief bursts of activity rarely lasting more than a few
seconds. Then the actors return to fixed positions. During these extensive and
predictable downtimes everyone has time to calculate and plan. It's like a
group of bits all sitting at known energy states waiting for that one random
bit to set everything in motion, that being the batter-pitcher outcome. In no
other sport are so many of the players physically locked into place every few
seconds. In no other sport can observers see and measure them all so
regularly. It's the thinking mans game because there is so much downtime in
which to ponder so many known values.

Give me the fluidity of soccer, hockey or basketball. That's a very different
type of thinking. The great players in those sports are the ones able to keep
track of all the motions without the downtime between plays.

~~~
adventured
> It's the thinking man's game because it;s boring

A very obviously subjective view. What you mean is, it's boring to you. Major
League Baseball managed 74 million in total attendance in 2015. Given the 162
games, it manages a remarkable attendance figure per game average (30k).

~~~
sandworm101
Something can be boring and popular. In fact, I'd say that the regularity and
slow pace of the game allows for a host of activities to occur around it.
Chatting, eating, _drinking_ can all be done without missing anything. And it
is very suited to broadcast. In the days of radio the downtime allowed the
commentator to keep everyone up to speed with everything on the field. Today,
television broadcasts display all the stats and the role of color commentator
fills the silence. But take all that away and the core game is very slow in
comparison to other sports.

~~~
omegaham
I agree - for me, baseball is great as background for other activities. For
example, say that you're at a party with your friends. You have conversations
that are happening, maybe some beer pong or cornhole or similar party games,
and you have the Red Sox in the background. If you hit a lull where your
conversation partner goes off to the bathroom or you just lost at beer pong,
you can walk over to the TV and relax for a few minutes.

Similarly, bars often have baseball games on for the same purpose.

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danso
Immediately reminded me of this NYT interactive about Mariano Rivera's cutter,
back from 2010:
[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/06/29/magazine/river...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/06/29/magazine/rivera-
pitches.html)

If the NYT did that interactive today, they'd probably try it as VR, and I
would definitely re-download the app to look at it.

------
yes_or_gnome
One of my favorite moments from Michael Lewis' Moneyball is how Billy Beane's
introduces Lenny Dykstra:

> Physically, Lenny didn’t belong in the same league with him. He was half
> Billy’s size, and had a fraction of Billy’s promise—which is why the Mets
> hadn’t drafted him until the thirteenth round. Mentally, Lenny was superior,
> which was odd considering Lenny wasn’t what you’d call a student of the
> game. Billy remembers sitting with Lenny in a Mets dugout watching the
> opposing pitcher warm up. “Lenny says, ‘So who’s that big dumb ass out there
> on the hill?’ And I say, ‘Lenny, you’re kidding me, right? That’s Steve
> Carlton. He’s maybe the greatest left-hander in the history of the game.’
> Lenny says, ‘Oh yeah! I knew that!’ He sits there for a minute and says,
> “So, what’s he got?’ And I say, ‘Lenny, come on. Steve Carlton. He’s got
> heat and also maybe the nastiest slider ever.’ And in. Finally he just says,
> ‘Shit, I’ll stick him.’ I’m sitting there thinking, that’s a magazine cover
> out there on the hill and all Lenny can think is that he’ll stick him.

\---

A little backstory. Billy Beane was a phenomenal baseball prospect that only
ever flirted with the major league. As opposed to Lenny Dykstra -- who had
very little in expectations as a prospect -- became a 3x All-Star Outfielder,
won a Silver Slugger (1993, OF), MVP Runner-up (1993) and a World Series
Champion with the 1986 Mets during a 14 year career.

Of course the, Beane\Lewis caricature of Dykstra is merely anecdotal, but it
falls in line with the anecdotes at the end of this article. I won't further
perpetuate the characterization, but it does seem like there's a _je ne sais
quoi?_ ability that allows someone to focus on a task by eliminating all
distractions and situational qualifications. Maybe ignorance helps out, but I
get the feeling that it has very little to due with long term success.

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s0uthPaw88
I played baseball at the collegiate level and definitely agree that color was
the biggest indicator of pitch type for me. Curveballs were very red,
fastballs were a mix of red and white, and splitters were almost completely
white. Before a pitch, I would visualize what color and location I was looking
for and if the pitch looked like it matched, I swung and hoped for the best.

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zbik
If you like the idea of working on this kind of research project, you might
check out a local Baseball Hack Day (held annually at the beginning of the
season in March or April).

[http://www.baseballhackday.com/](http://www.baseballhackday.com/)

I keep thinking it'd be nice to do one the weekend before the World Series as
well.

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rmason
I was told growing up that Ted Williams, the last 400 hitter in baseball, had
vision so great he could see the seams on the baseball as it approached him.

While that turned out to be false it is a fact that when he became a fighter
pilot during the Korean War and was tested he had vision only one person in
100,000 possessed.

[http://www.esquire.com/sports/news/a23050/ted-williams-
seams...](http://www.esquire.com/sports/news/a23050/ted-williams-seams/)

------
mwsherman
Really interesting documentary on this:
[https://www.netflix.com/search/fastball](https://www.netflix.com/search/fastball)

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protomyth
I cannot find the article right now but there is an article about Greg Maddux
discussing how he practiced making his motion the same for all his pitches.
This cut down on the hitter's ability to judge what to do.

~~~
hluska
Greg Maddux was one of my baseball heroes growing up!! I'm not sure if this is
the article you're talking about, but it has a few paragraphs about what
you're talking about:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nationals/greg-
maddux-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nationals/greg-maddux-a-
hall-of-fame-approach-that-carried-an-average-arm-to-
cooperstown/2014/01/07/fdd7ae82-77d3-11e3-af7f-13bf0e9965f6_story.html)

(If you don't want to click, here are the relevant passages.)

 _First, Maddux was convinced no hitter could tell the speed of a pitch with
any meaningful accuracy. To demonstrate, he pointed at a road a quarter-mile
away and said it was impossible to tell if a car was going 55, 65 or 75 mph
unless there was another car nearby to offer a point of reference.

“You just can’t do it,” he said. Sometimes hitters can pick up differences in
spin. They can identify pitches if there are different releases points or if a
curveball starts with an upward hump as it leaves the pitcher’s hand. But if a
pitcher can change speeds, every hitter is helpless, limited by human vision.

“Except,” Maddux said, “for that [expletive] Tony Gwynn.”

Because of this inherent ineradicable flaw in hitters, Maddux’s main goal was
to “make all of my pitches look like a column of milk coming toward home
plate.” Every pitch should look as close to every other as possible, all part
of that “column of milk.” He honed the same release point, the same look, to
all his pitches, so there was less way to know its speed — like fastball 92
mph, slider 84, change-up 76.

One day I sat a dozen feet behind Maddux’s catcher as three Braves pitchers,
all in a row, did their throwing sessions side-by-side. Lefty Steve Avery made
his catcher’s glove explode with noise from his 95-mph fastball. His curve
looked like it broke a foot-and-a-half. He was terrifying. Yet I could barely
tell the difference between Greg’s pitches. Was that a slider, a changeup, a
two-seam or four-seam fastball? Maddux certainly looked better than most
college pitchers, but not much. Nothing was scary._

------
kinofcain
"This experience of “blacking out” probably speaks to the lack of frontal-
cortex activity during the moment — hitters aren’t using the part of the brain
that’s best for mapping out complicated, deliberate decisions, so maybe it’s
not surprising they bypass the frontal cortex and use deeper, darker parts of
the brain."

That sounds a lot like descriptions of the "flow state" from other domains.

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mynegation
Can somebody explain what is going on in the video? I understand that swinging
at this kind of ball is some kind of a loss, but what if he saw it is going to
hit the ground and did not swing? Would it be a lost round for the pitching
team?

~~~
MaxLeiter
It depends what you mean by 'round.' The batter has a 'strike zone', that is,
if the ball is pitched there, it's considered a strike. Generally, this zone
is from the knees to the mid-chest.

A batter has two numbers: balls and strikes. When the batter gets 3 strikes,
they're out. If they get 4 balls (pitches that aren't in the strike zone),
they walk (advance towards first base).

If a batter swings and misses at a pitch that would normally be a ball, it's
considered a strike. If he hadn't swung, it would have been considered a ball.

The point of the video is that at the professional level, batters should be
able to tell quickly when a pitch will be as 'off' as the one in the video -
so why wasn't the batter able to?

~~~
mynegation
I see, thank you! So, not immediate loss probably, but wrong decision that
added to the tally of strikes instead of tally of balls. A follow up question:
do pitchers intentionally throw this kind of ball, or was it most likely
unintentional and the swing was a saving grace?

~~~
MaxLeiter
Sometimes they do - it ultimately depends on the current pitch count (balls
and strikes), the batter, and the pitcher. There are certain situations when
"off-speed" (non-fastball pitches, like the one in the video) are usually
better.

In this case, the pitch was probably further off than the pitcher wanted, but
the pitch thrown is generally less accurate and moves a lot, making it
difficult to hit.

For example, when a better has 2 strikes they need to "protect the plate" \-
swing at any pitch that could -possibly- be a strike (while if they had 0 or 1
strikes, they may let a pitch go hoping it's a ball).

If you're interested in the amount of strategy that goes into a pitchers
strategy, I recommend watching this[1] 30 second video of an MLB announcer
predicting a pitchers pitches. (Notice the pitch count in the bottom right -
"1-2" reads as "1 ball, 2 strikes"

[1] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Do1l8itr6E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Do1l8itr6E)

~~~
dionidium
That's a fun video and it definitely hints at the strategy involved, but it's
worth noting that in-game announcers routinely get these sorts of guesses
wrong. Which is just to say it's not quite as predictable as this video
implies in isolation.

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ezequiel-garzon
Is the ball thrown in the first video "valid" even though it bounces on the
floor? If so, how is the hitter supposed to hit that? If not, does his attempt
to hit it result in a penalty for him? Thanks in advance!

~~~
dionidium
Reading the other responses here it occurs to me how remarkable it is that so
much needs to be defined to fully understand this one pitch. Minimally, you
need to know what an "out," a "run," an "at bat," a "ball," a "strike," a
"base," a "base hit," and a "walk" are.

First of all, let's understand what the objective is. The offense, that is to
say, the batter, is attempting to advance around each of the four "bases" in
counter-clockwise order (i.e. score a "run") without being eliminated from
play (i.e. make an "out"). The offense is trying to score as many runs as
possible before making three outs. Teams alternate turns attempting this.

The batter most typically advances by striking a pitched ball within play such
that they are able to safely reach base without making an out. This is called
a "base hit." An out is made on balls in play when the ball is caught cleanly
off the bat in the air, when the runner is tagged by the ball while not on a
base, or when the ball reaches a base ahead of the runner in a situation where
that runner is not allowed to retreat to the previous base. This happens when
another runner from the same team occupies the base behind the runner (and
always on any play between home plate and first base). This last case is
called a "force out." (Existing runners also must not attempt to advance on
balls hit in the air until they have been caught by a fielder. This rule
prevents a runner from setting off on a sprint while a high fly ball lazily
floats through the air and into a fielder's glove.) [0]

A given play ends when all runners are accounted for -- that is, when each
runner is either safely on a base or has been eliminated.

A batter has limited opportunity to put the ball in play each time he goes to
bat (an "at bat"). A zone is defined -- the "strike zone" \-- through which
any pitched ball not swung at results in a penalty for the batter -- a
"strike". This area stretches from left to right over home plate and
vertically from roughly the batter's knees to the letters on his chest.
However, any swing that misses the ball also results in a strike, no matter
where that ball was pitched. Finally, a batted ball that lands out of play --
a "foul ball" \-- can also result in a strike. However, such a batted ball can
never result in an out (unless, as with balls in play, it is fielded cleanly
in the air). It can never be the final strike in an at bat. [1]

Any pitched ball that does not result in a strike is counted as a "ball". A
hitter receiving three strikes is called out (i.e. he "strikes out"). A hitter
receiving four balls is rewarded first base -- a "walk." In either case, his
time at bat is complete.

The batter may also be rewarded first base when a pitched ball strikes his
body. However, provided he does not hit the batter, the pitcher is free to
throw the ball anywhere he pleases, with the obvious incentive to either make
the batter swing and miss or to place the pitch within the strike zone without
him swinging (thus (hopefully) generating a "called strike" from the umpire).

So, this pitch is legal and the batter in this case is indeed penalized. He
swung and missed, which is always a strike, no matter where the pitch was
located. However, it is a minor penalty. This was the first pitch in this at
bat and therefore his first strike. He remains at bat with two more strikes
remaining to attempt to reach base safely in one of the ways described above.

[0] The runner is actually free to start toward the next base on balls hit in
the air, but he must return to his starting base if the ball is caught. He is
out if the defense can tag his starting base with the hit ball in hand before
he is able to return.

[1] A ball fouled directly back into the catcher's mitt is indeed a third
strike (and, thus, an out). It is treated the same as a swing and a miss.

~~~
ezequiel-garzon
Thanks to everybody for the replies. Yours in particular feels like a whole
introduction to the sport! There are multiple rules in this game! Thanks a
lot.

------
xefer
Would hitters benefit from more practice against "game situation"-level
pitching?

It occurs me that they get a lot of practice against decent batting-practice
pitching and pitching machines, but how often do they get reps against high-
caliber pitching outside of actual games?

~~~
MaxLeiter
Probably not.

MLB teams play 162 games a season, you can probably consider pre-season games
to be practice for game-sitation pitching.

The players get plenty of out-of-game practice from spring training and
experience (minors, college, etc).

~~~
sigusr1
I don't see how they could not benefit. How many pitches a game are they
seeing? Like 15? If you had the pitches for it (I don't think they do), it
seems like you could do a few hundred a day if you were deliberately
practicing.

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mef
Assuming situational pitch prediction being one of the biggest batter
advantages, one wonders how well a pitcher would perform if they threw a truly
random progression of pitches.

~~~
dmoy
Would be funny if they tried that - give the catcher some form of RNG, don't
let the pitcher disagree with catcher's first signal. Probably hard to test
properly though, since pitchers would be used to not doing it that way for so
long.

~~~
jnordwick
The problem is some batters are much better at certain locations and some
pitchers are much better at certain pitches and locations. The batter could
probably lay off until he gets what he's looking for.

But you might be able to get a club like the A's to try it in spring ball or
something for a few games a year and gather some stats on it.

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SubiculumCode
fangraphs has good, data driven baseball articles.

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XCSme
Anyone else read the title as "What can Hitler actually..." ?

~~~
olh
More than once: even after knowing the full title from a previous read but
glancing and reading it as "Hitler" anyway multiple times. I think it's a
result from the uppercase first letter on each word: it's common to read
Hitler with uppercase h but not Hitters with uppercase h. And as word
recognition is a function of the peripheral letters of the word it gives a
cognitive mishap.

Edit: This could very well be a textbook example on why not use uppercase
first letters when not needed on UIs.

