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 DURHAM, N.H. — It looks so simple – catching a fly ball.
But of all of the balls hit into the outfield, the straight shot is the
most difficult to catch. And if it’s twilight, it’s even worse.
Ken Fuld, professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire, studies
visual psychophysics. A former assistant baseball coach at UNH with a son
playing for one of the Chicago Cubs minor league teams, Fuld says there’s
more than meets the eye to catching fly balls and hitting pitches for the
boys of summer.
"An outfielder is computing a collision course between the ball and
the fielder in much the same way as a bird of prey tries to intercept another
bird also in flight for its meal or an insect tries to contact a member
of the opposite sex for the purpose of mating. These are all forms of what
vision scientists call visually guided behavior. Fielders must figure out
the trajectory of the ball and combine that with information about their
own movement in a way that requires a quick initial calculation of this
information and then constant updating of information to correct for slight
errors," Fuld says..
from a University of New Hampshire press release
The Dowbrigade, back in his Little League days,
used this incredible cognitive ability to quickly analyze the trajectory
of fly balls to predict where they would come to earth AND THEN AVOID
THAT SPOT LIKE THE PLAGUE, as even a casual familiarity with the laws
of physics shows that a falling object accelerates at 9.8 m/s/s until
reaching a terminal velocity equal to 2 times the weight divided by the
drag coefficient times the density of the air times the frontal area
of the object, and even a casual familiarity with a baseball shows
that they are HARD…….
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