OMGAA House and Senior Traveling, Plymouth-Wayzata. The letters keep coming. Every few weeks, Benny Distefano will open his mail and find a letter from a Little Leaguer, or a parent of one, asking for advice. May 2012 Holidays: US Holidays & Common: International Holidays: Christian & Catholic Holidays: Jewish Holidays: Muslim Holidays. The Bonus: Why MLB hitters can't hit Jennie Finch and science behind reaction time. From THE SPORTS GENE, by David Epstein. Reprinted by arrangement with Current, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Not just a slugger, Sanchez brings power behind the plate Owns 5 of top 10 hardest throws on attempted steals of second.The American League team was in a deep hole, and National League slugger Mike Piazza was up to bat. For more than two decades, the annual. The crowd thrummed with excitement as Finch, the 6' 1. The three- quarter- scale version of the Cubs' Wrigley Field was faithful down to its ivy- covered outfield walls. Exton Little League would like to thank all of our sponsors! We are very fortunate to have the support of so many local businesses. Their generosity makes it possible. A runner who is touching a base which he is entitled to occupy may not be tagged out. Runners may attempt to advance from base to base on any fair ball that touches. Purpose: To improve the softball throwing mechanics and throwing accuracy of the infielder. Procedure: The catcher, first baseman, and third baseman are at their. In softball, consistently getting runners out when they try to steal bases requires speed, agility and power. You've got to be able to quickly transition from a. I agree with your comment that the training in various runners magazines categorizes older runners as late 40’s, 50’s, I want to seen some recommendations for. Even Wrigleyville's brick apartment buildings were there, in the desert at the foot of the Santa Rosa Mountains, depicted on near- life- sized vinyl prints created from photographs of Chicago. That is, until the American League stars went down 9- 1 in the fifth inning. Yankees infielder Aaron Boone took off his glove, lay down in the dirt and used second base for a pillow. Rangers All- Star third baseman Hank Blalock took the opportunity to get a drink of water. They had, after all, seen Finch pitch during batting practice. Thrown from a mound 4. A 9. 5- mph pitch is fast, certainly, but routine for pro baseball players. Plus, the softball is larger, which should make it easier to hit. When Albert Pujols, one of the greatest hitters of his generation, stepped forward to face Finch during that practice, the other major leaguers crowded around to gawk. Finch adjusted her pony- tail nervously. A smile stole across her face. She was exhilarated, but she was also afraid that Pujols would hit a line drive right back at her. A silver chain dangled over his expansive chest; each of his forearms was wider than the barrel of the bat. She fired the first pitch just high. Pujols lurched backward, startled by what he saw. Pujols spun defensively, turning his head away. Behind him, his professional peers guffawed. He twisted his feet into the dirt and stared back at Finch. Pujols uncoiled a violent swing. The ball sailed past his bat, and the spectators hooted. The one after that was another strike, and Pujols whiffed again. With one strike remaining, Pujols moved to the back of the batter's box and dug in, crouching low in his stance. He turned and walked away, toward his tittering teammates. Then he stopped, bewildered. He turned back to Finch, doffed his cap and continued on his way. Just as she had during practice, Finch struck out both hitters she faced. Piazza, the Mets' catcher, went down on three straight pitches. Padres outfielder Brian Giles missed so badly on the third strike that his momentum spun him through a pirouette. But she was not nearly finished befuddling major leaguers. You gotta face the best. He then told Finch to bring a protective net because, he said, . I take my challenges direct.. We'll televise it too, on national television. I want the world to see. He insisted that the cameras not film him batting against her. Finch shot pitch after pitch past Bonds as his Giants teammates pronounced them strikes. Not until Finch began to tell Bonds what pitches were coming did he tap a meek foul ball a few feet. The catcher missed three of the first five throws. Before Rodriguez stepped into the batter's box, he made it clear he wouldn't dare swing at any of Finch's pitches. He leaned forward and told her, . The intuitive explanation is that the Albert Pujolses and Roger Federers of the world simply have the genetic gift of quicker reflexes, which give them more time to react to the ball. Except that isn't true. That is about the minimum time it takes for the retina at the back of the human eye to receive information, for that information to be conveyed across synapses - - the gaps between neurons, each of which takes a few milliseconds to cross - - to the primary visual cortex in the back of the brain, and for the brain to send a message to the spinal cord that puts the muscles in motion. All this happens in the blink of an eye. The entire flight of the baseball from the pitcher's hand to the plate takes just 4. And because it takes half that time merely to initiate muscular action, a major league batter has to know where he is swinging shortly after the ball leaves the pitcher's hand - - well before it's even halfway to the plate. Humans don't have a visual system fast enough to track the ball all the way in. A batter could just as well close his eyes once the ball is halfway to home plate. Given the speed of the pitch and the limitations of our physiology, it seems to be a miracle that anybody hits the ball at all. So why are they transmogrified into Little Leaguers when faced with 6. It's because the only way to hit a ball traveling at high speed is to be able to see into the future, and when a baseball player faces a softball pitcher, he is stripped of his crystal ball. Her lasting influence on sports, though, would come off the court, from the work she started as a graduate student at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. Her research was to try to figure out why good athletes are, well, good. The reaction times of elite athletes always hovered around one. She had heard of research on air- traffic controllers that used . And she decided that conducting studies like these, of perceptual cognitive skills that are learned through practice, might prove fruitful. So in 1. 97. 5, as part of her graduate work at Waterloo, Starkes invented the modern sports . In many photos, the orientation and movement of players' bodies were nearly identical regardless of whether the ball was in the frame, since little had changed in the instant after the ball exited the picture. The glance was too quick for the viewers actually to see the ball, so the idea was to determine whether some of the athletes were seeing the entire court and the body language of players in a way that allowed them to figure out whether the ball was present. Unlike in reaction- time tests, the difference between top volleyball players and novices was enormous. For the elite players, a fraction- of- a- second glance was all they needed to determine whether the ball was present. And the better the player, the more quickly she could extract pertinent information from each slide. The setter was able to deduce whether the volleyball was present in a picture that was flashed before her eyes for 1. One woman's blink of light was another woman's fully formed narrative. It was a strong clue that one key difference between expert and novice athletes is not in the raw ability to react quickly but rather in the way the expert has learned to perceive the game. At the time, coaching orthodoxy in field hockey held that innate reflexes were of primary importance. Conversely, the idea that learned perceptual skills were a hallmark of expert performance was, as Starkes puts it, . I was astounded that they had no idea that reaction time might not be predictive of anything. This held true among basketball and soccer players too. It was as if every elite athlete miraculously had a photographic memory when it came to her sport. And there's no better place to look for an answer than in a type of competition in which the action is slow, deliberate and devoid of the constraints of muscle and sinew. This is true when skilled players are compared with complete novices. He enlisted another master to come up with different chess- piece arrangements taken from obscure games and then did something very similar to what Starkes would do with athletes 3. The differences that emerged, particularly between the two masters and the two non- masters, were . The master was able to accomplish the same feat twice. Neither of the lesser players was able to reproduce any board with complete accuracy. Overall, the grandmaster and master accurately replaced more than 9. In five seconds the grandmaster understood more of the game situation than the club player did in 1. Simon, the latter a future Nobel Prize winner - - repeated the De. When the players were given five seconds to study the random assortments and then asked to re- create them, the recall advantages of the masters disappeared. Suddenly their memories were just like those of average players. Chess masters and elite athletes alike . In other words, rather than grappling with a large number of individual pieces, experts unconsciously group information into a smaller number of meaningful chunks based on patterns they have seen before. Whereas the average club player in De. Where the novice is overwhelmed by new information and randomness, the master sees familiar order and structure that allows him to home in on information that is critical to making the decision at hand. Experts swiftly discard irrelevant input and cut to the data that are most important in determining their next move. While novices dwell on individual pieces or players, experts focus more attention on spaces between pieces or players that are relevant to the unifying relationship of parts in the whole. Abernethy started out using Super. He would show batsmen the film but cut it off before the throw and have them attempt to predict where the ball was headed. Unsurprisingly, expert players were better at predicting the path of the ball than novice players. Abernethy has moved his studies from the video screen to the field and the court. He has equipped tennis players with goggles that go opaque just as an opponent is about to strike the ball, and he has outfitted cricket batsmen with contact lenses that produce varied levels of blurriness. Elite athletes chunk information about bodies and players' positions the way grandmasters chunk arrangements of rooks and bishops. A Muhammad Ali jab took a mere 4. Without anticipation based on body movements, Ali's opponents would have been beaten in Round. Without that database, which can be built only through rigorous practice, every athlete is a chess master facing a random board, or Albert Pujols facing Jennie Finch: He is stripped of the information that allows him to predict the future. And Pujols's simple reaction speed is downright quotidian. When scientists at Washington University in St.
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