Baseball and the Brain - Pitching

As promised, we begin our look at the three most important technical skills of baseball: Pitching, Hitting and Catching. Each of these skills apply to other sports as well, but I thought we'd stick with the current season of baseball as the sport du jour. Again, my focus for "80 Percent Mental" is to look at sports cognition in a generic sense across all sports, occasionally digging deeper into individual sport specialties. The practical side of this is to understand how our brains and nervous system perform these skills that we often take for granted, so that we can brainstorm (yuk-yuk) on new ways to teach, practice and perfect these skills.

Pitching a 3" diameter baseball 46 feet (for Little League) or 60 feet, 6 inches over a target that is 8 inches wide requires an accuracy of 1/2 to 1 degree. Throwing it fast, with the pressure of a game situation makes this task one of the hardest in sports. In ad

Questions that come to my mind regarding pitching/throwing skills and baseball include:
- Why
can't a pitcher control ALL of his/her pitches? Why do some not only miss the strike zone, but are wild?
- Is the breakdown physical in the muscle sequence of the throw or is it in the connection between eyes, brain and body?

Again, one the best references I have found on this is "The Psychology of Baseball" by Mike Stadler, published by Gotham Books. Prof. Stadler digs into many of these topics and I will paraphrase from his findings. I won't do it justice here, so please put it on your reading list.





Game Summary
I've only touched the surface for this topic. We'll see some of these themes in the hitting and catching posts that are coming up. One useful takeaway here for youth coaches is that some players will have a genetic advantage in throwing and may be your "natural" pitchers. As we dig deeper into these topics, we will be able pull out more practical tips for players and coaches.