Pitchers and Hitters

Baseball fans pay so much attention to the sheer velocity of a fastball - the stat appears on the television screen after every pitch - but the kind of subterfuge used by Santana is even more important. To understand why, it helps to know a little bit about the psychological mechanics of hitting. The numbers make the task look impossible. A typical major league pitch takes about 0.35 seconds to travel from the hand of the pitcher to home plate. (This is ... Full Story »