I want to start this by saying, I am not so idiotic as to think I actually would be able to hit a major league pitcher.
But when presented with the “do you think you’d be able to even make contact on 1 out of 100 pitches by a pitcher”, I’d like to understand why.
Like if they did nothing but pitch breaking stuff, couldn’t I just overcorrect? Same deal with fastballs? I’m sure they would mix it up, but out of 100 straight pitches, if you were a major-league pitcher, what would you do to make sure that they never made contact?
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Unless you have near perfect vision and near perfect reactions you’re not even going to *see* a major league pitch before it hits the catchers glove. It’s easy to underestimate just how fast these things are going from up in the stand, but if you’re standing at the plate, with it coming at you.
Let’s do the math.
Will give you a generously slow 80mph pitch. Thats ((80*5280)/60)/60)=117.3 feet per second the ball is covering. The distance from the mound to the plate is 60.5 feet, giving you just over half a second (specifically 0.52 seconds) from the time the pitcher releases the ball till you have to hit it.
Now consider that it takes the average person 300ms for their brain to process the light coming into their eyes. Roughly 1/3 of a second for you to even see that the ball is headed your way. You now have 210 milliseconds to react if you’re even going to swing before the ball is in the catcher’s mitt. The average reaction time is 250 milliseconds, and 210 would put you somewhere around the 80th percentile, meaning 80% of people wouldn’t even be quick enough to swing at the ball, let alone hit it.
Of the 20% of people who would be able to react quick enough to take a swing, you still face the very significant challenge of actually hitting that small, fast moving target.
And remember, this is among the *slowest* major league pitches, and we’re not even accounting for things like curve balls or sinkers. If we pump the numbers up to the average major league fastball speed of 93mph, we get 144ms that you have to react by the time your brain realizes that the pitch has been thrown, which would put you in the 95th percentile.
In short, there are only 5% of people on the planet who would *even be able to swing* at an average major league fastball before it hits the catcher’s mitt. And of those 5% even fewer would have the hand-eye coordination to have a chance of hitting the ball on anything more than pure, dumb luck. And of those people? Most of them are getting paid to play baseball.
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