A major league pitcher can throw a baseball 95 miles per hour--some throw faster than that.

At 95 miles per hour it takes about four-tenths of a second for the ball to travel the 60-and-1/2 feet from the pitcher's mound to home plate. What does a batter do during the less-than-half second that it takes the ball to reach the plate? By the time the ball has traveled just 12 feet from the pitcher's mound, the batter's eyes have seen the ball, and the batter's brain has analyzed its speed and other characteristics, then calculated whether the pitch is a fastball, curveball, slider, knuckleball, screwball, or whatever. And all of this happens automatically! Charley Metro: "The good hitters get their tip-off from the pitchers. And there are many, many ways that a pitcher tips off his pitches. He grips it like that [fingers straight over top of ball]; there's your fastball. When he throws a curveball, he chokes the ball [wedges it between his thumb and forefinger, gripping it on the side so it sticks out]. Now see how much white of the ball shows on a fastball? And how much more white shows on a curveball? . . .

Walter Johnson (1887-1946) There were no sophisticated measuring devices in the early 1900s, but Walter Johnson's fastball was considered to be in a class by itself. Using a sweeping sidearm delivery, the "Big Train" struck out 3,508 batters during his 21-year career with the Washington Senators.

"Another thing is when they bring the ball into the glove, when they come in with a flat wrist like that, that'll be a fastball. When they turn their wrist like that, it's a breaking pitch. There are many, many ways, and the good hitters pick out these things . . . facial expressions . . . human habits and characteristics will tell."

During the middle portion of the baseball's flight, the batter must time the ball and decide where to swing. If the batter decides to swing, the batter must start the bat moving when the ball is about 25 to 30 feet in front of the plate. The ball will arrive at the plate about 250 thousandths of a second later--about the limit of human reaction time. The bat must make contact with the ball within an even smaller time range: A few-thousandths-of-a-second error in timing will result in a strike or a foul ball. Position is important, too. Hitting the ball a few millimeters too high means a grounder. Hitting it a few millimeters too low causes a popup.

Exactly how humans are able to estimate the expected position of a quickly moving ball is unknown. Obviously, this remarkable skill is learned through long practice. Eye-brain-body coordination is acquired only by going through the motions over and over; even so, the batter misses most of the time. Getting a hit three times out of ten at bats is considered an excellent average. It's interesting that George Schaller and other behavioral scientists have observed that lions and cheetahs are also successful only about a third of the time in capturing their prey.