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Seeing or Doing?
Pitch Recognition of Batters versus Pitchers: A Preliminary Report
Yin-Hua Chen, Pei-Hong Lee, Yu-Wen Lu and Nai-Shing Yen
Research Center for Mind, Brain and Learning, National Chengchi University
No. 64, Sec. 2, Zhi-Nan Rd., Wen-Shan District, Taipei 11605, Taiwan
Keywords: Baseball, Pitch Recognition, Action Anticipation, Pitcher, Batter.
Abstract: In this study we tackled the question: between the experience of seeing or doing the movement, which one
is more important in understanding the observed movement? We thus asked batters and pitchers, in high and
intermediate skill levels, to identify the type of pitch that was edited in difference lengths. In general, we
found that advanced players showed significant higher accuracy and lower uncertain rate than the
intermediate players, particularly in viewing short pitch sequences. These results reflected the requirement
of fast sports such as baseball, in which players have to make a correct decision quickly rather than staying
uncertain. Moreover, advanced batters showed the tendency of being more accurate than advanced pitchers,
though the difference did not reach statistical significance possibly due to small sample size. In consistency
with the previous studies, all players showed higher accuracy in identifying the strike pitches when they
could see longer sequence of the pitch motion and the baseball trajectory (Paull & Glencross, 1997). In sum,
our results supported the notion that when understanding an observed movement, the perceptuo-motor
experience reacting to it is more important than the actual motor experience of the observed movement.
1 INTRODUCTION
In anticipating the action of the opponent in sports, it
has been shown that the experience plays an
important role (review see Williams, Davids, &
Williams, 1999). That is, due to the accumulated
experience, a skilled athlete knows where to view in
the opponent and then makes the best use of the
information extracted to act or react to the opponent
(e.g., Farrow & Abernethy, 2003; Aglioti et al.,
2008). For example, advanced baseball batters pay
close attention to the pitcher’s motion particularly in
the pitcher’s shoulder, elbow and wrist, and then
switch the focus to the ball trajectory with fewer
fixations than the intermediate batters for making the
batting decision (e.g., Hubbard & Seng, 1954; Shank
& Haywood, 1987; Takeuchi & Inomata, 2009).
In a recent study, it was investigated the ability
to predict the fate of actual or fake soccer penalty
kicks between goalkeepers, kickers and novices
(Tomeo et al., 2012). Goalkeepers showed higher
accuracy for fake actions as compared to kickers and
novices. Kickers were even more confused by the
fake actions than goalkeepers and novices. The
authors concluded that goalkeepers could
outperform kickers and novices due to their visual
rather than motor expertise. However, we thought
that goalkeepers should be considered as “visuo-
motor” experts since they are trained to “perceive
and react” to the penalty kicks. Kickers, instead,
don’t have to intercept the penalty kick even though
they are capable of doing a fool action.
In fact, baseball and football can be considered
very special sports because the players have two
very distinctive roles. Take baseball player for
example: the pitcher is responsible for throwing the
pitch and the batter has to bat and run. The two roles
of players have developed very specialized
perceptual and motor expertise depending on the
task required in the match. Thus, we would like to
investigate whether the pitcher (who possesses the
expertise of performing the pitch motion) or the
batter (who possesses the perceptuo-motor expertise
of intercepting the pitch) could better recognize
whether the pitch is a strike or a ball. We thus asked
elite pitchers and batters to identify whether a pitch
is a strike or a ball and compared their performance
with intermediate players. The pitch sequence was
edited in different lengths to see whether different
amount of the information of the baseball trajectory
could differently influence the pitch identification
17
Chen Y., Lee P., Lu Y. and Yen N..
Seeing or Doing? - Pitch Recognition of Batters versus Pitchers: A Preliminary Report.
DOI: 10.5220/0005144700170024
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Congress on Sports Sciences Research and Technology Support (icSPORTS-2014), pages 17-24
ISBN: 978-989-758-057-4
Copyright
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2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)