By the time this is posted, the baseball season will be virtually over. OK. There will be playoffs and the World Series. But, to anyone but the lamest, the season for the Philadelphia Phillies will be long over.

(I admit that I probably will be making my father turn over in his grave this year. Because the Brooklyn Dodgers (oh, I know they moved to the West Coast- I was at one of  their last games at Ebbets Field) play in the World Series, because they now have more than a few of my beloved Phillies- Chase Utley, Carlos “Chooch” Ruiz, and Joe Blanton; they had traded Jimmy Rollins last year to the Sox- who dumped him early on.)

I always found baseball intriguing. Since my first visit to Ebbet’s Field some 60+ years ago. When I played catcher for years in Little League. When I coached Little League. Through the years as a Phillies Phanatic.

My son (and my stepson) also loves baseball.  My son actually did a science fair project about baseball. He studied the effect of temperature and altitude on the number of home runs hit by players. (There is one.)

But, to hit a baseball at the major league level is pretty astounding. The distance from the pitcher to the batter is 60.5 feet. And, if that baseball is thrown so it’s reaching home plate at 95 mph, that means it left the pitcher’s fingers 430 milliseconds before it reached the plate.

Which means the batter had to make the decision to hit- and where to swing at that pitch- in about 50 to 150 milliseconds.

You see, that’s all the time the batter has. Because it takes about 100 ms for information from our eyes to reach our brains. (That’s the signal that the pitch was released.) And, it takes about 150 ms for the batter to activate his muscles to move the bat from the magical spot over his shoulder over the plate to contact the ball.

So you can now understand why a batting average of 300 (which means only 3 times out of 10 the batter hits the ball successfully) is so darned good. And, if deCervo has anything to do with it, there are going to be a slew of better batters coming down the pike.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymCanyh_7yw

deCervo’s technical team (Drs. Jason Sherwin and Jordan Muraskin)  monitors the batter’s brain activity during the act of hitting- and the milliseconds before that. They hope to map out the neural processes that provide the batter’s skill. Because it IS a neural activity more than a muscle capability.

Interestingly, this started out as a research project to discern how the brain of a musician differs from the rest of us. Until Muraskin (and his advisor Dr. Paul Sajda of Columbia University) convinced Sherwin to examine the same factors for baseball sluggers. That research led to the formation of the firm, deCervo. (It’s a deliberate misspelling of ‘de cerveau’, French for “of the brain”.) (Dr. Sajda is an advisor to the firm. Which means the developers must argue about the Yankees, Cubs, and Mets, since they each root for different teams.)

Their studies involved the new kid on the block- fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance imaging), as well as EEG (electroencephalograms). And, these two instruments provide measurements every 2 ms (500X a second).

The team are fairly certain they know which pattern of brain activation is critical for professional baseball players. The region of interest is the fusiform gyrus, which effects object recognition (this is the region at the bottom of the brain). It turns out that baseball batters have better connections between the fusiform gyrus and the motor cortex (the part of the brain that controls movement)- and also involve their frontal cortex (decision making part of the brain) more than non-experts- and at a much quicker rate than others.

It is possible that there is also involvement of the supplementary motor area (at the top of the brain). This involvement helps the batter during windup and as the pitch reaches the plate. (That means the batter is better prepared to swing at the ball!) But, it may be this region is more important in telling the batter NOT to swing at the ball they thought they would hit. Because not swinging at a bad pitch gives them a better shot of connecting with the right one and getting on base- or even hitting that coveted home run.

And, no, de Cervo doesn’t expect to be relegated just to baseball. It has merit for anything that requires quick decisions- other sports, the military, and the stock market.

Batter up!

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