FINISH LINE: How to catch a fly ball? It’s obvious

Published 7:58 pm Tuesday, January 26, 2010

File this under: Duh!

Apparently that Little League coach that said to keep an eye on the ball was right.

A new study finds the way that baseball outfielders catch fly balls is simple: by keeping their eyes on the ball.

A paper by researchers at Brown University delves into how fielders snag balls batted high in the air — a long-running question among scientists who study perception and a puzzle to sports fans who wonder how baseball greats such as Willie Mays made seemingly impossible catches.

The researchers asked varsity baseball and softball players from Brown to catch virtual balls in a virtual reality lab. Players wore special goggles that allowed them to watch simulated fly balls and ran around the 40-by-40-foot lab trying to catch them.

One theory was that players predict where a fly ball will land based on its trajectory, said professor William Warren, who co-wrote the paper, published last month in the online Journal of Vision.

Instead, the researchers discovered that players watch the ball and position themselves so that it appears the ball is neither speeding up nor slowing down, he said. If the ball appears to be speeding up, the player should move back, and if it’s slowing down, the player should move forward, said Warren, chair of Brown’s Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences.

“It’s actually very simple,” he said.

Warren later deduced that it helps when basketball players look at the hoop when they shoot.

PARTING SHOT

“What? You’ve got to be kidding me. I can’t believe it, The Clydesdales are an American icon.”

— John Antil

The Super Bowl advertising expert and University of Delaware marketing professor’s reaction to news that the iconic Budweiser Clydesdales won’t appear in any of Anheuser-Busch’s nine ads during the Feb. 7 Super Bowl.