Throwing a Curve -- It's a Mind Game?

Researchers have concluded that curve-ball pitchers are master illusionists, tricking batters the same way magicians always have. In the experiment discussed below, scientists studying the curve ball decided to look at the batter's brain rather than the actual movement of the ball.

Though they may be right about ways in which the brain is fooled, it would have been a lot more useful if they had studied the movement of a ball thrown by a curve-ball pitcher. Surely it's possible to plot the movement of a baseball in three dimensions as it travels from the pitcher's hand to the catcher's glove.


Baseball Curveballs `Break' Only in Batters' Minds, Scientists Suggest

Oct 13, 2010 5:00 PM

San Francisco Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum’s curveball, which helped him win two Cy Young awards, doesn’t break near home plate. It just appears to move when the batter switches modes of seeing, scientists suggested.

The break, which appears to be a sudden change from the ball’s curved path, may come from the way the human eye shifts between central and peripheral vision, according to the research, released today by the journal PLoS One. The scientists explained the “rise” in a fastball the same way.

The work is the first to explain the break and rise as illusions, according to the authors. Previous explanations include the idea that the hitter underestimates a ball’s speed, said Zhong-Lin Lu, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

“The brain is tricked,” Lu said in a telephone interview.

He and his group used a flash animation of a descending circle with a moving shadow that mimicked spin. When five observers stared directly at the circle, it fell straight, and when they focused their vision on something else, the ball appeared to move to the side of the screen. That’s because the brain couldn’t process both the spin and the vertical motion, Lu said.

The researchers used the observers’ reports to figure out the size of the break. If the eye is off the curveball by about 10 degrees, the size of the break is about a foot, Lu said.

A fastball “rises” for the same reason, even though in reality, the ball is dropping, he said.

Middle Two Degrees

The illusion is possible because the eye is structured to best perceive the middle two degrees of an image, using so- called central vision. The area covered is about the size of a thumb when a person holds their arm directly in front of them, Lu said.

Anything outside that is peripheral vision. Most distortion that appears when objects go from central to peripheral vision isn’t something people notice; the shift is usually seamless, the authors wrote in their paper.

“When we look at a big field, everything looks continuous, you don’t see a break between the two visions,” Lu said. “That’s an illusion.”

Many batters tend to switch to peripheral vision when the ball is about two-thirds of the way to the home plate. That type of vision isn’t as good at sensing motion, and the brain gets confused by the combination of velocity and spin, and doesn’t track the ball’s trajectory well, according to the scientists. When the batter switches to central vision as the ball arrives back at the plate, the ball is in a different spot than the batter expected, Lu said.

“What happens in baseball is that the curveball comes out of the pitcher’s hand and gives the batter two motion signals,” Lu said. “If you take your central vision of the ball, the periphery vision gets confused and can’t separate the signals. You combine them.”

The Break

The perceived abrupt change when the central vision focuses again on the ball is the break, Lu said. Batters can be trained to keep their central vision on the ball for the entire pitch, so they aren’t vexed by the shift in vision, Lu said.

Lincecum, 26, is listed as the probable starter for the Giants against the Philadelphia Phillies in the first game of the best-of-seven National League Championship Series on Oct. 16. He won the last two Cy Young awards, the highest honor for pitchers, in Major League Baseball’s National League.

The Perfect Pitch

Chad Harbach is lucky. His writing obsession paid off. Big. And he's still young. Here's to hoping he can do it again. And I truly hope his baseball book is as good as the editors believe it to be. This country loves to read about baseball when it's done right. The memory of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the romance of the Durham Bulls. The Natural, The Boys of Summer and The Summer Game. Should be room for one more.

Unemployed Harvard Man Auctions Baseball Novel for $650,000

March 31 (Bloomberg) -- Five months ago, Chad Harbach was an out-of-work copy editor with an unpaid position at a literary journal and an unpublished novel: 475 pages centering on a baseball team at a fictional Wisconsin college.

A few weeks ago, Hachette Book Group’s Little, Brown agreed to pay about $650,000 for it, according to two people briefed on the sale. It was one of the highest prices for a man’s first novel on a topic appealing to a male audience, said Jon Baker, a book scout who advises non-U.S. publishers.

Nine years in the writing, Harbach’s novel, tentatively titled “The Art of Fielding,” sold after a two-day telephone auction of eight publishers.

“If you don’t have a vampire, you don’t expect that kind of money,” Baker said, referring in part to Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series. Those books were the basis of two feature films and sold more than 50 million copies in the past two years, according to Publishers Weekly.

Baker called Harbach a “fantastic writer,” based on the manuscript. “He certainly took his time and made it perfect,” Baker said. “And I hate baseball.”

A soft-spoken 34-year-old, Harbach met a reporter at the one-room 500-square-foot Brooklyn office of n+1, a nonprofit literary magazine he helped start in 2004. He isn’t paid as executive editor.

Brooklyn Share

In October, he lost his part-time copy-editing gig with the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., he said. He scraped together rent for the Brooklyn apartment he shares with two roommates from short-term copy editing and money borrowed from a friend.

“I wasn’t excited about finding a new job,” he said, wearing blue jeans, a black shirt and Puma sneakers.

He grew up in Racine, Wisconsin. His father is an accountant, his mother ran the Small World Montessori School, for children 6 and under. He read prodigiously as a child, starting with Roald Dahl. In high school, sports -- basketball, golf and baseball -- temporarily trumped reading and writing as priorities.

“What fascinates me about baseball is that although it’s a team game, and a team becomes a kind of family, the players on the field are each very much alone,” he said. “Your teammates depend on you and support you, but at the moments that count they can’t bail you out.”

David Foster Wallace’s sprawling 1,088-page novel “Infinite Jest,” published in 1996, made a strong impression. He read it the week he graduated from Harvard, where he majored in English. What he called the “central American novel of the past 30 years” taught him that “you could write a beautiful and important novel, now.”

Odd Jobs

After college, he lived around the country doing odd jobs. He began his novel in the winter of 2000, and used early drafts of two chapters to apply to graduate-school writing programs. He was widely rejected, and accepted by the University of Virginia, where he earned a master of fine arts.

“I didn’t think it would take nine years,” he said of the novel. “There’s a fair amount of anxiety to devoting so much time when you don’t know how it will turn out.”

He avoided full-time work so he could write. He composed in spiral notebooks, usually taking months off when he was putting out n+1, a thoughtful twice-a-year journal.

It has a print run of about 8,000 an issue. Among its readers is Chris Parris-Lamb, a 28-year-old literary agent who now represents Harbach. Parris-Lamb pitched the manuscript to publishers before e-mailing copies.

‘Emotional Experience’

“The enthusiasm in my voice is reflected in how quickly people read it,” Parris-Lamb said from his office on East 57th Street. “These are busy people. I want them to drop what they’re doing.”

Michael Pietsch, the publisher of Little, Brown, called reading “The Art of Fielding” a “deeply emotional experience.”

“The writing seems effortless but makes you care desperately about its characters,” he said, adding that it appealed to women in his office as well as men.

Little, Brown didn’t have the high bid, Parris-Lamb said. Harbach wanted to work with Pietsch, the editor of “Infinite Jest.”

Of the five n+1 founders, Harbach is the third to publish a novel. Benjamin Kunkel’s “Indecision,” sold 48,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan, which covers about 75 percent of U.S. retail sales. “All the Sad Young Literary Men,” by Keith Gessen, sold 7,000 copies.

Rights for “The Art of Fielding” have recently sold in Japan and throughout Europe. It’s expected to be out in the U.S. in the fourth quarter of 2011. Accustomed to living on the cheap, Harbach said he’s in no rush to move into his own place. But another copy-editing job isn’t in the offing.

“I haven’t thought about what I’ll do next,” he said.