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Of all the skills a ballplayer needs to make it in the major leagues, this ability to intercept a fly ball might be the most remarkable. How do outfielders regularly manage such a feat of speed, grace, and coordination? What is the subtle interplay of timing, eye tracking, and navigational calculus that allows them to do the job with such balletic ease? Why do they always pat each other in unpattable places after they do?
The answers to at least the first two questions were provided this year by psychologists Michael McBeath and Dennis Schaffer of Kent State University in Ohio, and Mary Kaiser of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. Working with nothing more complicated than a couple of volunteer ballplayers and a few video cameras, the researchers believe they have finally discovered just how it is outfielders do what they do, at last explaining a skill that made Reggie Jackson more famous than Andrew Jackson, gave the magnificent Mays so many magnificent Mays, and made America—if only for a while—a safe place to be named Mookie.
The first step in learning about McBeath, Schaffer, and Kaiser’s work, of course, was not to talk to McBeath, Schaffer, and Kaiser themselves but to spend some time in a major-league stadium talking to the athletes for whom catching fly balls is both calling and career. For me, the nearest big-league venue was the New York Mets’ Shea Stadium. All major-league teams have suffered a serious decline in attendance this year, but the Mets, it appears, have suffered more than most. Earlier in the season it was reported that Fan Appreciation Day had to be canceled when the Mets’ fan—an 18- to 24-year-old Caucasian male believed to answer to the name Bob—could not be located in time for the ceremony.
The day I visited, despite the forlorn state of the stands, the Mets themselves seemed enthusiastic, going through their pregame workout with playoff-caliber intensity. One of the hardest at work was Brett Butler, a senior member of the major league’s outfielding corps, and after he finished his fielding drills I took a moment to ask him about his singular craft.
“A lot of variables go into fielding a fly ball,” he said. “The time of day is one of the most important. If the game is at night, it’s relatively easy to see the white ball against the black sky. If it’s during the day, it’s surprisingly easy to see it pop out against the blue. The only truly hard time to see the ball is twilight, perhaps because your eyes have a difficult time adjusting to such in-between lighting. Another factor in tracking a fly can be wind. Willie Mays, who used to play at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, taught me to study the outfield fences before I took the field. If there was a lot of trash blown up against the fence, it meant the wind was blowing out. If there wasn’t much, it meant it was blowing in.”
Would an MVP agree with the theories of a Ph.D.? Would a man concerned with RBIs give a second thought to OACs?
Just as important as the wind and lighting, at least the way I’d always heard it told, is the ability of the fielder to gauge the likely trajectory of the ball the instant it leaves the bat. Some players appear to break in the direction of the ball’s flight from the very moment it’s hit, while only a few seem to wait until almost the last possible second before they begin to move. During my brief flirtation with organized high school sports, I adopted this more leisurely approach, often not sprinting off in the direction of a fly ball until I had taken the time to tap my glove, adjust my hat, and bake a Bundt cake to welcome its arrival. Former Met and Dodger and now Yankee Darryl Strawberry took this languid fielding style further still, and even today can sometimes be seen loping off in the general direction of a fly ball hit during the 1986 World Series. Surprisingly, according to Butler, such nonchalance may not be such a bad thing.
“It’s important to get a good jump on the ball,” he says. “But you do have at least a little time before committing yourself. Sometimes it helps to count a full ‘one one-thousand’ after a ball is hit in order to get a clear idea of which way it’s going to go. A second is a long time in a baseball game, but it takes a lot longer than that for the ball to get to you.”
But if patience, a sharp eye, and little wind help explain how an outfielder manages to hie himself over to a fly ball’s general vicinity, they still don’t explain how he positions himself so precisely that he can snare the tiny three-inch-diameter sphere of horsehide in his ten-inch pocket of cowhide with a reliability bordering on 100 percent. When it came to explaining that degree of fielding precision, Butler—as well as some of his teammates—seemed to be as mystified as I.
“You just get a sense of where it’s going to fall,” he said.
“You trust your instincts,” Chris Jones, a rookie outfielder, offered.
“Beats me,” said veteran Oriole and then-Met David Segui.
If this was the best the players could do, I knew science would have to carry the ball the rest of the way.
The puzzle of just how a fly ball is tracked and caught had been explored before—as long ago as the 1960s—by a professor of aeronautics at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo, New York, who had come up with a theory known as the Optical Acceleration Cancellation model, or OAC. According to OAC adherents, an outfielder preparing to catch a fly runs along a path that cancels the apparent acceleration of the ball as gravity pulls it toward Earth. If the ball seems to be accelerating as it approaches, that means it’s following a path that will take it over his head. If it appears to be slowing, that means it will drop to the ground somewhere in front of him. Instantly—and unconsciously—the fielder gauges this apparent change in velocity and begins pedaling forward or backward in an attempt to neutralize it, so that he will be standing in exactly the right position to pluck the ball out of the air when it at last completes its plummet.
