April 24th, 2009 | 
Author: Everyone watches baseball on TV, and it looks much too easy to be as difficult as it apparently is. Some things are better in real life, and pitches are one of them.
The standard over-the-right-shoulder camera view on the pitcher tracks the ball brilliantly as soon as it leaves the hand. Seemingly, we would pick up everything thats going on, but this is far from the truth.
Countless times have I heard, “how did he miss that pitch? It was right there. Maybe it was, or maybe it wasnt. Thing is, what the baseball does when being thrown 85+ mph is crazy, especially by the Major League pitch-smiths. Ever watched Greg Maddux pitch? If you have, you have probably watched his fastball start at a lefty’s hip and mozy on back over the inside corner of the plate. That is how it is shown on television.
Reality? Maddux’s fastball darts, sharply and lately. Imagine a bird flying directly at you and then suddenly changing direction right before slamming into you. Thats the kind of movement he has on his fastball.
Fastballs from most pitchers look pretty much straight, or have a nice gently tail to the arm side, but this is, again, a deception by the camera. Very few major league pitchers throw straight, and the ones who do (and are successful) throw in the upper 90s.
Sharp movement on the fastball is crucial to success, and it makes sense when you consider that the difference between a long fly ball and a homerun is maybe an inch on or off the barrel. The batter barely misses that pitch that moves off his barrel at the last moment. This is how Mariano Rivera has made living throwing nothing but cut fastballs, ones that the TV camera really doesnt even display. Think about how late breaking and sharp his cutter must be if he can throw it every single pitch over 15 years, and every hitter knows it.
Human eye reaction time is such that a hitter cannot watch the ball travel the last 6 feet or so to the bat, and so his swing is really just a well-vectored guess. So, if a pitcher can make his pitch move in that last 10% of its travels, then the batter’s barrel won’t contact the ball where he intends. Thats why Mariano Rivera gets everyone out, even when they know what pitch is coming. It’s beyond their perceptual abilities to square it up.
And its not just the fastball. Changeups look straight, curveballs look loopy and round. Good curveballs even in college baseball literally spike themselves into the ground when viewed from the plate. The round, looping curves that the camera shows us are really some of the most diabolically sharp-breaking, physics-defying pitches you will never get the (dis)pleasure of facing.
This is all stuff that fans who have unfortunately never played at a high level may not understand about the game. The pop of the mitt and the blur of the ball at the ballpark gives fans part of the picture, but they still only watch as if through a keyhole, never truly seeing the game as it actually is. When you are privileged enough to play against players with that kind of talent and potential you realize how frighteningly difficult it is to have success hitting in the Major Leagues.
OK, so this post is over a year old – I’m going to comment on it anyway !!
Something I learned in physics class about the doppler effect applies to how TV simplifies hitting. You know how a continuous loud noice from a moving source (say a jet or a railroad train) increases in pitch as the source travels toward you and then diminishes in pitch as the source travels away? Same thing occurs visually.
With the TV camera over the pitcher’s shoulder and thus the ball travelling AWAY from the camera’s viewpoint, the pitch will appear on TV to SLOW DOWN pretty dramatically, whereas that same ball from the hitter’s (and catcher’s and umpire’s) viewpoint, travelling TOWARD their viewpoint, will appear to them to SPEED UP.
So even a 100 mph fastball on TV will appear more and more fat and hitable, with less and less movement, as the ball approaches the batter because of the distortion from the doppler effect. As you wrote, only by stepping into the batter’s box yourself will you really appreciate how difficult it is to hit a good pitch.
Thanks for the comment. That’s a good contribution. The one thing that the camera adds to the pitch, however, is lateral movement. I can almost never see my pitches run, and I know a lot of pitchers are the same way. But, if you watch Greg Maddux or Josh Beckett on TV, you can see their pitches run back across the plate dramatically. Out of the hand, thrown in the upper 80s or better, I think the pitcher’s eye doesn’t pick up the ball early enough to really capture the whole flight of the ball. I’ve thrown pitches that look dead straight that my catcher told me started on the white of the batters box and came back to the plate. It’s hard to gauge one’s own velocity as well – 86 looks almost exactly the same as 90 – again, due to the doppler effect you were talking about. The camera has a really unique effect.