Mapping the Mind

A pair of scientists are busy mapping the brain’s decision to swing at or take a pitch:

Statistics such as batting average or on-base percentage have been used to assign value to players for decades. But these, deCervo likes to point out, are post hoc variables. They come only after the player has finished his at-bat. Now deCervo could produce graphs that pinpointed when the batter decided to swing versus when he decided to take, along the time line of the pitch, down to the millisecond. A hitter stands at the ready, sees a 90-m.p.h. slider come toward him, and makes no movement of the bat. DeCervo could still delineate the moment he made that choice to look at the pitch, rather than go for it. It registered as activity on the EEG. It registered as tiny explosions of neural action.

Sherwin and Muraskin did not care so much how the hitters developed their talent. They cared about describing it, in digestible data bites.

The idea is to be able to measure this in young players and determine who are going to be good at making the decision.

The article does not make clear if the researchers believe this is an innate talent or a learned quality. If you put a normal person at the plate for 10,000 pitches, I suspect they will build a good pattern recognizer for strike, not a strike, even if they never develop the physical qualities that allow them to hit a ball.

from baseballmusings.com https://ift.tt/2H0OVZO