Visual-Motor Control in Baseball Batting

With margins for error of a few milliseconds and fractions of an inch it is not surprising that hitting a baseball is considered to be one of the most difficult acts in all of sports. We have been investigating this challenging behavior using a virtual baseball batting setup in which simulations of an approaching ball, pitcher, and field are combined with real-time recording of bat and limb movements. I will present evidence that baseball batting involves variable pre-programmed control in which the swing direction and movement time (MT) are set prior to the initiation of the action but can take different values from swing-to-swing. This programming process utilizes both advance information (pitch history and count) and optical information picked-up very early in the ball's flight (ball time to contact TTC and rotation direction). The pre-programmed value of MT is used to determine a critical value of TTC for swing initiation. Finally, because a baseball swing is an action that is occasionally interrupted online (i.e., a “check swing”), I will discuss experiments that examine when this pre-programmed action can be stopped and the sources of optical information that trigger stopping.