Every hitter goes through a thought progression on every pitch and most aren’t even aware they’re doing it. It almost a subconscious evaluation of each pitch but they do it. I believe it is important to discuss this evaluation or progression because it plays a key role in vision training as we will discuss in the next video.
Every hitter, whether conscious about it or not, goes through the following checklist on each pitch:
- What is the pitch? (fastball, curveball, slider, changeup)
- Where will the pitch be in the swing zone? (i.e. up & in, low & away, down the middle at the knees, etc)
- Do I swing?
- Do I have time to swing?
The constant in all this is that the order of the above checklist cannot change. A hitter can’t know where the pitch will end up unless they correctly recognize the pitch, because until the hitter recognizes the pitch, they won’t know the movement of the pitch, hence, the anticipated location of that pitch. Furthermore, the hitter cannot make an educated decision to swing or not until they know where the pitch will end up. And finally, the first 3 questions need to be answered very quickly or there will be no time to take a decent swing.
Let’s now look at a practical example, using simple math, of how being able to process this information quicker can make a substantial and positive difference for the hitter. In this example, we will use a 90 mph fastball because it makes for nice round numbers. A 90 mph fastball roughly takes 0.4 seconds to travel from the pitcher’s release point to the strike zone. Furthermore, let us make 2 assumptions about the hitter:
- They have never had vision training, and
- It takes this hitter 0.3 sec to progress from 1 (What is the pitch?) to 3 (Do I swing?).
Now if the hitter has made a decision to swing after 0.3 sec, 0.1 sec, in the context of a swing, is still plenty of time to make solid contact. In a different perspective, the hitter has used up approximately 45’ to evaluate the pitch but still has roughly 15’ to actually swing.
Now what if the hitter could go through the progression quicker? Say, for example, they make the progression in 0.25 sec? At this point they have given themselves an additional 50% of time to react or an additional 7.5 ‘. Now what if they can go through the progression even quicker, say in 0.2 sec? Now the hitter has doubled their reaction time and doubled the distance to 30’.
It took awhile to get to this point but this is what our vision training can do. It can give the hitter more time to react. By training with our patented Pitch Recognition System, we can train hitters to make quicker decisions on the ‘What” and the “Where” of each pitch (aka Pitch Recognition). In the next 2 videos we will go over in more detail how the training works and show a live training event with our system, respectively.