Matsuzaka, FFF & DVA

Here is some food for thought while you soak in the tub and wait for news about Daisuke Matsuzaka. (ESPN's Buster Olney has started a crazy rumor that the Red Sox bid $45 million for the right to negotiate with Matsuzaka. Yikes.)

From your favorite long lost blogger, Boston Dan:

So, I remember learning about they way the human brain perceives light...the way we see, how the eyes work....and at the time, I remember wondering if the best hitters in baseball could somehow "see" the ball better than everyone else. Not in terms of the sharpness of the image....or seeing better than 20/20...but I wondered if some people could have brains that make things appear faster or slower than other people's brains...well turns out it might be true. Check out this article about Flicker Fusion Factor.

Normal humans have a Flicker Fusion Frequency of 60Hz (60 cycles per second). At that frequency, obviously you and I would have trouble (to say the least) hitting a Mariano Rivera fastball or even worse, a Barry Zito curveball. However, what if David Ortiz's genes made him just slightly different so his FFF is 68Hz? Maybe what we see as a 85mph curve would look like 75mph curve to him, and he could see how it moves better and hit a lot more balls out of the park. I really think this might true. Why not?

In addition to FFF, there is another factor in play here called Dynamic Visual Acuity. And for this, I guess people really have tested baseball players. Nantucket Greg dug up some research. From American Scientist:

"A batter's best source of information...is the way the ball is spinning immediately after its release. How much spin a batter can distinguish, though, depends on his dynamic visual acuity, which is the ability to perceive moving objects. (An optometrist, on the other hand, measures a person's static visual acuity, which is the ability to perceive information in nonmoving objects, such as letters on a page. Moreover, a person's static visual acuity is not correlated with his dynamic visual acuity.) A batter needs excellent dynamic visual acuity to track and predict the flight of a baseball. Experienced athletes have better than average dynamic visual acuity, partly because athletes are selected for this ability and partly because it can be improved with training. Nonetheless, our survey of major-league hitters revealed considerable variation in their ability to see the spin on a pitch. Batters with good dynamic visual acuity can see the spin on the ball; those with poor dynamic visual acuity cannot. To get a feel for the range in dynamic visual acuity, consider that most of us can read the label on a phonograph record turning at 33 revolutions per minute, but this would be about the limit of our capabilities. The great Boston Red Sox hitter, Ted Williams, could read one turning at 78 revolutions per minutes, which is far beyond the dynamic visual acuity of the average person."

Interesting.

I think that DDF (Dan's Beer Wing Frequency) is about 10Hz (10 wings per beer) which is more beer per wing than the average human. Maybe that means I can be a professional...umm...baseball fan?

The Flicker Fusion Factor [Originally published in the New York Times]
Predicting a Baseball's Path [American Scientist]

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