I attended the US Open Tennis tournament this past Saturday with one of my sons and my daughter. We watched great tennis, saw two upsets and watched a 21 year old Belgian serve regularly at 135 mph while returning virtually everything coming his way. Whatever sport these amazing athletes were playing, it wasn't anything like the sport we called tennis when I was a teenager. I could barely follow a serve to see where it landed, and we were sitting no more than 50 feet away for the entire match.
What did I learn from watching tennis at this level?
Two things actually.
First, every every professional baseball hitter in is a unicorn.
This time of year, everything relates to baseball -- even tennis.
I complain as much as the next guy about the decline in batting averages across baseball. While I was extremely pleased to learn that 70 is the new 50, I have not been as happy about a .250 BA becoming the new .300. Soon enough the Mendoza line will drop to.100.
I hate strikeouts and often comment in ways that suggest I believe that every major leaguer should be able to put the bat on the vast majority of pitches they face. Upon reflection, these criticisms -- all of which come very easily to those of us who have never faced even a soft tosser barely able to get his fastball up to the low 90s -- are largely unwarranted.
To see why, consider the following:
The distance from the rubber to home plate is 60''6". In addition the rubber also sits ten inches higher than home plate, and pitchers actually release the ball about 10% closer to home plate than when they went into their motion.
A 90mph pitch travels over 130 feet per second, which means that the pitch reaches home plate in less than half a second: in fact, closer to .4 of a second or roughly 400 milliseconds.
The average major league swing takes about 150 milliseconds, or .15 of a second.
It takes the brain about .1 of second to identify the pitch, leaving the batter with less than .150 of a second to start a swing and to direct it in a particular direction where he thinks the ball will be when it gets to the hitting zone.
Let's think about this situation for a moment.
During a swing the batter's body does all of the following:
*recruits energy from the ground (which involves a movement into the ground)
*shifts pressure laterally from the heel of the trail foot into the ball of his front foot
*pushes into the ground diagonally from the ball of his front foot which pushes his lead side hip back and around and extends his front leg which acts as break and also adds to the force of his upper trunk and shoulder/arm structure bringing the bat into the hitting zone ultimately releasing his wrists.
All in about .15 of a second.
Just for comparison, the average downswing in a professional golfer's swing is roughly .25 to. .3 of a second. And the ball is just sitting there waiting to be hit.
Any serious golf instructor will tell you that most of commentary you hear from announcer's talking about how a player worked to save the shot by changing his swing path or holding off the club face or... is NONSENSE. It takes .2 seconds for any brain command to reach the muscles that would be capable of doing any such thing, and more time than that for your brain to recognize that you need to hold off the clubface or more rapidly close it, or whatever. Forget it. It's not going to happen.
Golfers have more than 3x the time to execute their swing and hit the golf ball that isn't moving than do hitters who not only have to execute a swing, they have to figure out whether to swing at all and what they are swinging at is moving towards them with spin and is doing absolutely everything other than sitting up on a tee waiting to be hit.
It is amazing that baseball players ever square up a pitch and do damage. Literally amazing.
Try to remember that next time you consider booing when someone from our side swings and misses, or worse yet, strikes out.
Oh and the second thing I learned was also basically a question. How in the world can you teach people how to hit a baseball at the level at which they must in order to have a successful career?
This is something I have thought about a lot in both baseball and golf. And what I strongly believe is that learning complex motor skills has been done by teachers who by an large teach the wrong things. I'll explain what I mean some other time. The following gives you a sense of how I think about it.
You can teach someone what the kinematic or kinetic sequences are, but you can't teach them how to do it. It has to happen naturally instinctively, no matter how complex the skill you are teaching is.
Here's a way to understand my basic approach which turns out to be very different from the way coaching goes on both in baseball and in golf, the two sports I know best and in which I have done the most coaching of skills.
Give your body a goal expressed as a general intention to perform something and your body will organize itself in an effort to do it. If the intention is to hit a nail with a hammer, there is a decent chance an adult will be able to accomplish it without first being taught that you have to bend your elbow, which is a lever and your wrist as well which is also a lever; and then you unlever the levers you have created.
And if you instruct someone to hit a baseball on a tee, it won't go so well for a five year old, but may prove to be no problem for one of us. It is enough for the person you ask simply to intend to hit the ball and his or her body will organize itself sufficiently well to do so. Again there is no need to explain how the body moves in order to get the player to hit the ball on a tee.
Now when it comes to teaching someone how to hit a baseball that is moving or a golf ball that is not, I assure you that the vast majority of instructors explain to their students how to stand to the ball, how to start the swing, how to shift their pressure, how they should load their spiral lines, how to ......
The one thing I assure you they do not do is tell their student to form an abstract but directed intention to complete an action and then let their body organize to see if it does so effectively. And if not, to keep doing it and also to give the body similar tasks in the same neighborhood so that it can get more information that will impact how it organizes itself; and so on.
I do the latter. Most instructors are in the business of staying in business.
Me, not so much. Here's my working hypothesis. We wouldn't play golf or baseball if we didn't already develop a set of skills, in this case, the skill of throwing, which we have done forever, whether spears or javelins or stones or balls.
Evolutionarily, we have developed this basic skill set and then we have been able to adapt the skill to different environments in which the basic skill is already instinctive. If we didn't have a body that already could organize itself to perform the basic skills that are involved in hitting a golf ball that isn't moving or a ball that is, we wouldn't have developed these sports, and they sure as hell would not have lasted as long as they have!
Coaching in these sports is really a matter of identifying the basic skill that's needed then giving prompts to your student to get them to learn how to adapt that skill that makes it work for them to perform the task at hand. All of us pretty much can adapt the general skill we have developed evolutionarily to hit a ball off a tee, but far fewer of us can adapt the skill at the level we have it to hit a ball thrown our way at 80 miles an hour; fewer still at 90 and very very few, a ball thrown at a 100 mph by a pitcher who also throws an indistinguishable (upon leaving his hand) change up at 85 mph; and so on.
How will I change my behavior as a fan now that I have learned that all the baseball players I have booed when they strike out in a big spot are unicorns who are basically magicians with a bat in their hands?
I'm an not going to stop being disappointed when my guys' strike out or fail to make good contact. But sure as hell I ain't going to boo or treat them as failures.
They ain't failures; they're unicorns. I'm lucky I get to watch them
Labor Day and the Collective Bargaining Agreement
It's Labor Day as I write this post and so that brings to mind the need for the Players' Association and the Owners to negotiate a new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA).
I will do a series of posts on the Bargaining once the season ends. I hope to be able to get some inside information, but most of what I will discuss will not depend on details, but on the issues on the table and the degree to which there is solidarity within the two bargaining groups. What I will report on will be based on my own work on rational bargaining theory and group decision making.
Just to make a few points that will highlight what I will be looking at.
Both the Players Association and the Owners are made up of subgroups. In the simplest terms, all owners, rich or not so rich, share some common interests, but there are many issues on which their interests diverge -- sometimes significantly. The same is true of the many more players represented by the Players' Association. There are many issues on which they all agree (more or less), but others on which they surely have different perspectives. There are those who are most concerned about the floor. Their focus is on raising the floor. There are others who are worried about the ceiling. Their natural focus is making sure the ceiling is not lowered.
So we have a very complex situation. Both the owners and the Players Association have an incentive to strke a deal. There is too much money at stake not to. So there is a sense in which they each need the other side to come to hold a unified position. If the other side cannot get agreement among its constituents, they become a very difficult party to negotiate with.
On the other hand, both sides have incentives to exploit the divergence of interests within the subgroups of the Group across the table. They just can't exploit differences too much and throw the entire process into doubt. This is the nature of game both sides are playing -- from a structural point of view; and I will endeavor to show how it is playing out once real bargaining begins.
I am quite confident that we are nowhere near the stage of real bargaining. Right now we are at the stage of pre-bargaining information gathering. There is a big difference between market transactions and bargaining. In a market, price typically reflects thousands if not millions of discrete transactions having occurred. With rare exceptions everyone knows what the price is and there is little haggling to be done. Not so in a bargaining case.
The first thing the parties want to know is what the other sides' reservation price is -- what they will not accept any lower than. And once reservation prices and aspirations are identified the bargaining space is well defined more or less. And that's where you want to be able to figure out whether a serious offer is on the table or instead just one designed to elicit information about the relative importance of various issues to one or the other side. So you will often see an offer that elicits some info which is then followed up by another that is designed to confirm whether what you have learned is real or a fake.
This is the kind of activity that takes time, and you can bet that both sides will have a way of blaming the other for not being serious. They both know that the other will do this regularly and will have ways of signaling to the other side that their complaints of bad faith are really designed to keep their own side behind them. Remember the representatives at the table are in a very awkward potentially vulnerable position.
The people they represent are anxious to reach a deal but one that is favorable to them; and they also have to stay fairly united. So a lot of PR and posturing may look like it is directed at the other side of the table, but it's not. It is actually directed at the group you are representing so that you can keep them unified behind you and the easiest way to do that -- up to a point -- is to complain that the other sides is not being serious.
My hope is that the approach I take to this kind of activity -- looking at strategy, incentives and structural and collective action issues proves entertaining and educational, and not just depressing and exhausting.
We'll see. Till then, count me as cautiously optimistic!
