You Can't Think and Hit at the Same Time - Who you gonna believe?

A study was published in Pub Med (whatever that is) with that specific title which mimics Yogi Berra's famous quote and it got me thinking a bit about coaching theories and approaches.

You basically have to pick one of two choices -- the Yogi Berra, baseball traditionalist, empirical evidence approach ( they have been promoting this 'theory' since 1947 or thereabouts ) or the Bill Nye, The Science Guy, scientific evidence and proof approach.

I suppose you could pick and choose from both approaches as you wish, but that seems like it would leave you hopelessly confused

So do we go with Yogi....

from quoteinvestigator.com
You Can’t Think and Hit at the Same Time |:

How can you think and hit at the same time?” Yogi Berra once said, which like many of the quotes attributed to the former Yankees catcher, even the malapropisms, contains an essential truth. You can’t think and hit because there’s not time for both.

The evidence is not completely clear because Yogi himself has made confusing pronouncements about this saying. The earliest citation located by QI is an Associated Press newswire story dated August 1, 1947 [MCYB]:

'via Blog this'



...or The Bill Bye the Science Guy crowd -- who will not act until something is scientifically proven, peer  reviewed and accepted by the pocket-protector crowd.

from PubMed:
You Can't Think and Hit at the Same Time: Neu... [Front Neurosci. 2012] - PubMed - NCBI:

Abstract

Hitting a baseball is often described as the most difficult thing to do in sports. A key aptitude of a good hitter is the ability to determine which pitch is coming. This rapid decision requires the batter to make a judgment in a fraction of a second based largely on the trajectory and spin of the ball. When does this decision occur relative to the ball's trajectory and is it possible to identify neural correlates that represent how the decision evolves over a split second?

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It seems to me that if you relied too much on science (not that there's anything wrong with that) you would have wasted 65 years waiting for an answer. To break the tie, we went to the two smartest guys we could find.

Both are also a scientists by nature so neither one would appear to have a built in pro-baseball guy bias.

from wikiwuote:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman

A great deal more is known than has been proved. 

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy — and when he talks about a nonscientific matter, he will sound as naive as anyone untrained in the matter. 

Thanks Messrs. Einstein and Feyman. CASE CLOSED. Yogi wins.