How hard is to hit a baseball?
Hitting a baseball during a game of America's favorite summer past-time is not an easy mission. Some players are good at it right of the bat, but even those great hitters only get to hit safely three times out of ten and also fail to put the ball in play two times out of that same ten opportunities.
According to Ted Williams, arguably the greatest baseball hitter of all-time hitting a baseball is no easy task. When asked about the difficulty of hitting safely Williams stated that " I think without question the hardest single thing to do in sport is to hit a baseball.”
This comes from one of the most successful hitters not only of his time, but in the history of the game, and he still considers hitting the hardest thing to do in sports. Taking this into account, and the information stated previously, it just generates one simple, basic and obvious question: What makes hitting so difficult? And the answer to this question is simple, the answer is timing.
According to Robert Adair, a Yale physicist who has studied the science of baseball, a batter takes 100 milliseconds for the eye of the batter to see the ball, 25 milliseconds to identify the speed and location of the pitch, 25 milliseconds to decide whether to swing or let the ball go by, another 25 millimeters to decide to swing high or low, inside or outside, 15 millimeters to start and finish the swing, as a result, the batter must hit the ball within an eight of an inch of dead center and at precisely the exact millimeter. In conclusion, it is pretty hard to hit a baseball, but with the correct timing you may find yourself in the MLB.
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