After reading this great article (below) from Dan Peterson and "Sports are 80 Percent Mental Blog" regarding pitch recognition and how Greg Maddux foiled many a hitters attempts to gain the early-recognition advantage, I was reminded of a couple of other classic "blast from the past articles" (from ESPN's Buster Olney and Peter Gammons below) about a couple of guys who were famous for just said ability -- Ted Williams and Barry Bonds.
I understand that, given the PED controversy, folks want to say "OK, Ted Williams had the gift naturally but Bonds got it out of a bottle" but that ignores the follow-up query "Well then if everybody was doing it, how come everybody didn't get equally as gifted?" as the "pope of plate discipline" as Olney describes him.
After re-reading Gammons column and cross-checking the dates of publication, doesn't it sounds as if a lot of "Moneyball" (published after the Gammons article) might have been cribbed a wee-bit from "The Science of Hitting"? I guess it wouldn't have made for a good steamy, baseball romance novel otherwise.
Give me "The Science of Baseball" any day. The rest of you can keep the Harlequin romance section of baseball analysis all to yourselves. "Not that there's anything wrong with that".
In so many ways, this is where the rubber hits the road in terms of both hitting and pitching performance and the research and analysis will determine whether the scales in the future tip more towards the hitter or towards the pitcher.
All the plate discipline metrics IMO measure the success / failure to execute pitch recognition.
Theo Epstein echoes Ted Williams when he says he believes 90% of the game revolves around controlling the strike zone.
This is true in terms of both pitching strategy and hitting strategy and invariably it is at this level and no further, where more games are won and lost than ever before.
I'm not sure that Michael Lewis or Billy Beane or any other SABR-metrician "discovered" this -- as much as they re-packaged and re-sold Teddy Ballgame -- any more than Columbus "discovered" the Americas. Somebody else already did it.
Thanks Ted.
In so many ways, this is where the rubber hits the road in terms of both hitting and pitching performance and the research and analysis will determine whether the scales in the future tip more towards the hitter or towards the pitcher.
All the plate discipline metrics IMO measure the success / failure to execute pitch recognition.
Theo Epstein echoes Ted Williams when he says he believes 90% of the game revolves around controlling the strike zone.
This is true in terms of both pitching strategy and hitting strategy and invariably it is at this level and no further, where more games are won and lost than ever before.
I'm not sure that Michael Lewis or Billy Beane or any other SABR-metrician "discovered" this -- as much as they re-packaged and re-sold Teddy Ballgame -- any more than Columbus "discovered" the Americas. Somebody else already did it.
Thanks Ted.
from Sports are 80 Percent Mental Blog:
The Neuroscience Of Pitch Recognition
Jason Sherwin, Jordan Muraskin and Paul Sajda, biomedical engineers at Columbia'sLaboratory for Intelligent Imaging and Neural Computing, specialize in motion perception and high speed decision making but are also baseball fans. Last year, they reported that they had been able to pinpoint the timing of pitch recognition within the brain. Fitted with electroencephalography (EEG) skull caps, test volunteers watched 12 sets of 50 different video pitches that were either a fastball, a curve or a slider. They were asked to immediately identify the pitch they just saw, before the pitch arrived over the plate, by pressing a certain computer key.
Comparing correct answers with the EEG data, the researchers were able to determine the exact millisecond when recognition happened in the brain, or when the hitter locks onto a pitch knowing what's on the way. Fastballs were the fastest to be recognized with curve balls taking the longest. However, sliders had the highest average prediction accuracy at 91% while fastballs were only guessed correctly 72% of the time.
Mapping the response times with the trajectory of the ball, the recognition typically happened in the middle third, between 32 and 40 feet, of the ball's path to the plate.
Their study appeared last year in Frontiers in Decision Neuroscience.
...
Cross-referencing the pitch's trajectory, the "light bulb" recognition moment and the fMRI map of the player's brain, they not only confirmed their earlier research of a pitch-guessing neural network but also a fascinating twist. For correct guesses, the brain logically lit up in its visual and motor cortex areas.
However, for the incorrect guesses, activity moved to the prefrontal cortex of the brain, known to be used for conflict resolution and higher level decision making. As can be seen in Figure 1, red areas indicate regions that have higher activations during correct pitch guesses, while blue areas indicate regions with higher activations for incorrect choices.
So, when the visual information isn't enough for an automatic recognition, it appears that the problem gets escalated to add in other known facts or previous experiences.
This new research was presented at last month's Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.
So, what good would this baseball neuroscience be against today's great pitchers? The authors ask us to imagine a new era of baseball training, where step one is to capture a baseline of each player's neural recognition ability. Realizing when a hitter is able to make a correct prediction of a pitch and seeing first-hand their brain's reaction time will identify specific training opportunities. Step two is to use a pitch simulation tool to see hundreds of pitches, measuring performance improvement in accuracy and speed.
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from boston.com
By Peter Gammons, Special to the Globe, 7/22/2002
''You want to teach hitting right?'' Giambi continued. ''Buy every kid in this country a copy of Ted Williams's book.''
''I've heard it said that we changed the game because of our approach, our deep counts, our discipline and patience,'' said Joe Torre. ''We didn't change anything. There's nothing new to be brought to hitting, because Ted understood it all. What have the Yankees been doing offensively the last six years? What Ted told us to do. In many ways, the Yankee philosophy is simply the Williams philosophy.''
Ironically, the Red Sox did not believe in that teaching philosophy, which is what makes Shea Hillenbrand's rise to All-Star status so remarkable, not to mention admirable. This spring, when Ben Cherrington and Theo Epstein took over the baseball development operation, their first act was to pass out ''The Science of Hitting'' to every player in the system. ''He defines everything that we hope our organizational philosophy will follow,'' said Epstein.
When Wade Boggs was a sophomore at Plant High School in Tampa, he was struggling as a hitter. His father bought him Williams's book, and Boggs said he used to ''stay up all night studying it.'' All the way to Cooperstown.
Plate discipline. Pitch recognition. Command of the strike zone. On-base percentage. Slugging percentage. OPS (On-base percentage plus slugging percentage).
''You take all those terms that we all talk about today, and we apply them to both hitting and pitching,'' said Mets assistant general manager Jim Duquette. ''Ted said that you cannot be a successful hitter or pitcher unless you command the strike zone. My guess is that Ted could teach a lot to pitchers.'' Indeed.
''Commanding the strike zone for hitters and pitchers is our organizational philosophy, and, yes, it's obviously the Ted Williams philosophy,'' said Oakland GM Billy Beane, like Williams and Tony Gwynn a San Diego native. ''Plate discipline is not an option in our organization, it's what we do. When Eric Chavez first signed, we butted heads, and I told him it wasn't an option. This was what he had to do. Like Williams, Chavez is another San Diego guy. Yes, he's learned, and is on his way to stardom.''
''I think,'' Giambi said, ''that Ted would love the fact that Billy doesn't give that option as to whether you can be disciplined or not.''
''Ted,'' said Beane, ''was right, and why argue with genius?''
''I didn't understand that this was Ted Williams's style,'' said McGwire. ''I had the philosophy ingrained in me from the time I signed with the A's. But the longer I was in the game, the more I learned about Ted. When I got to meet him at the All-Star Game in 1999 it was a tremendous thrill, especially because of some of things he'd said about me as a hitter.''
McGwire was a Williams favorite because he was so patient and reduced the strike zone to a finite area. ''Mark was the classic example of doing what Ted preached,'' said Beane. ''But the closest person to Ted is Barry Bonds. He is Ted, 2002. Just watch him. Check the on-base percentage and the walks and the slugging. He never swings at a bad pitch.''
This past spring, Bonds told broadcaster and former Cy Young Award winner Rick Sutcliffe that he had reduced the strike zone to a tiny hitting area, and that's all he looked at. ''It's about the size of a quarter,'' said Bonds. In 1986, Williams told Don Mattingly and Boggs, ''until I got to two strikes, I looked for one pitch in one area, about the size of a silver dollar.''
''All the hitting ideas began with Ted,'' said former Mets hiting coach Dave Engle, who grew up driving every summer from San Diego to Lakeville, Mass., where his father Ted, Williams's high school friend, ran the Ted Williams Camp. ''He understood that all power is generated from the lower half, the hips. He understood that because the ball is coming at an angle downwards, you can't generate power without a slight uppercut to meet the ball squarely.
''It's really been the last 10 years that hitting has been studied the way pitching was studied and taught. If we'd just set up a Ted Williams University the day he retired, we'd have started understanding all this a long, long time ago.''
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from ESPN December 3, 2004
Check out one of the few useful Buster Olney pieces on the matter re: Bond's pitch recognition abilities:
Virtually all hitters identify pitches by the rotation of the ball after it leaves the pitcher's hand. If they see spin, the ball's face turned into a whirlpool of seams, they know the pitcher has thrown a curve or a slider. Otherwise, it's probably a fastball or a changeup. But Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn, who studied his rivals, maintained that Bonds could identify pitches before they were released. As a pitcher's hand reached its apex, Gwynn explained, Bonds could detect in an instant whether the pitcher held the ball with his palm and fingers straight up and down (a fastball), or if he gripped it from the side (a breaking ball). A flap of fingers sticking up from behind the ball meant changeup.
In practical terms, this meant Bonds had a huge advantage on other hitters, who had to wait until the ball was four or five feet into its journey toward the plate – an eternity, by comparison. "They always said it looked like he knew a breaking ball was coming," Gwynn said then. "Well, he did."
Virtually all hitters identify pitches by the rotation of the ball after it leaves the pitcher's hand. If they see spin, the ball's face turned into a whirlpool of seams, they know the pitcher has thrown a curve or a slider. Otherwise, it's probably a fastball or a changeup. But Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn, who studied his rivals, maintained that Bonds could identify pitches before they were released. As a pitcher's hand reached its apex, Gwynn explained, Bonds could detect in an instant whether the pitcher held the ball with his palm and fingers straight up and down (a fastball), or if he gripped it from the side (a breaking ball). A flap of fingers sticking up from behind the ball meant changeup.In practical terms, this meant Bonds had a huge advantage on other hitters, who had to wait until the ball was four or five feet into its journey toward the plate – an eternity, by comparison. "They always said it looked like he knew a breaking ball was coming," Gwynn said then. "Well, he did."
That wasn't exactly news to his teammate, pitcher Jason Schmidt. When Bonds hit his record 73 homers in 2001, Schmidt said, "They would throw him a breaking ball, and he was like a statue. He wouldn't even move. I've never seen anything like that. He knew it was a ball even before it left the guy's hand. He didn't offer. He didn't check-swing. You don't see hitters do that."But by the time Bonds turned 40, Schmidt was used to seeing him do the impossible. Somebody broke out a deck of cards in spring training, and Bonds eyeballed the deck as it was shuffled, then predicted the identity of the bottom card. Four times in a row. You had to see it to understand.---
Hitting coach Jeff Pentland would tell other major leaguers, You don't want what Barry has, meaning they weren't equipped for the challenge of greatness. Pentland, who was Bonds' hitting coach at Arizona State and a lifelong friend, was amazed at how well Bonds coped with his own success. In that kind of spotlight, the more you accomplish, the more that's expected of you, the more you have at stake. Even the smallest failures become enormous. Almost anyone would shrivel from that kind of pressure, Pentland believed, once they understood it. Bonds embraced it.
He was obsessed with correcting flaws. A couple of months into his major league career, Bonds phoned Pentland and explained that pitchers were jamming him with fastballs.
"What do I need to do?" Bonds asked. "Barry, you're the smartest player I ever had," Pentland responded. "You'll figure it out."
In time, Bonds moved closer to the plate, shortened his stride – "Just be slow with your feet," he once explained –and became the best hitter of inside fastballs Pentland had ever seen. And the best breaking-ball hitter. And the most disciplined, period.Swinging a bat is the most basic instinct for ballplayers. They've been doing it since they were toddlers, and after years upon years of backyard games and BP and organized competition, the yearning to swing the bat is ingrained. A player walks past a new box of bats, and invariably he reaches in and pulls one out, hefts it, takes a half-swing, checks out how it feels. It's a blind date with wood, and the ballplayer is looking to hook up. It's what they do. It's who they are.
So other players watched Bonds abstain, refuse to swing at anything out of the strike zone, and they were awestruck. He drew fewer than 100 walks in each of his first five seasons, but late in his career, he was spitting at outside pitches. Bonds wouldn't see a strike for four or five at-bats – hell, for two or three days – and yet, when a pitcher tried enticing him with a fastball just off the corner, he held back. He had the most potent swing in the game, more reason to swing than any of his peers, and yet he had conquered that most basic instinct. He was the pope of plate discipline.
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