ON THE CUTTING EDGE: Curveball’s Trajectory Not What It Seems
A new study in PLoS ONE explains that the break of a curveball as it nears a batter is nothing more than an optical illusion created by the batter’s eyes and brain, reports Wired:
The average curveball hurls toward a batter at around 75 mph, accentuated by a 1500-rpm spin. From the moment the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand, it travels a smooth, consistent, parabolic arc. There’s no disjointed change in its motion from beginning to end. …
The human visual system dedicates more of its resources to processing images in the center of our field of view than in our peripheral vision. Larger numbers of photoreceptors and retinal ganglion cells in the fovea - the center part of our eyes - help produce extremely high-res, three-dimensional static images. And as the images processed by our retinas head to the brain, larger numbers of neurons in the visual processing centers (lateral geniculate nucleus and primary visual cortex) are responsible for helping make sense of what we see when looking at something straight on as compared to out of the corner of our eye.
A curveball is a unique pitch, in that the ball exhibits two distinct types of motions. The ball approaches batters, dancing across their field of view — from peripheral to center (or vice versa) — all the while rapidly spinning on its own axis.
So the lesson for batters is: The physics of a curveball is immutable, no matter what their lying eyes are telling them.
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