It’s Official—the Single Most Difficult Athletic Feat is…

Posted on October 18, 2011 by admin

The oldest argument in modern-day sports is “What is the most challenging and difficult athletic feat?”

Well, now it’s official, according to John Brenkus, executive producer of ESPN’s Emmy Award winning show Sports Science.  Based on percentages, it is –

Hitting a major league baseball pitch.

Which is why we invented The Hitting Jack-It™ System.

Perfection Point

In his book “The Perfection Point,” Brenkus discusses the science of hitting a baseball.  His analysis is truly mind-boggling.

That ANYONE can even hit a big-league pitch at all is a wonder in itself, according to the author. That some people can hit home runs is practically a miracle.

A pitcher starts his windup for each pitch at a distance of 60 feet six inches from home plate. But by the time he releases the ball, he’s about five feet closer to the plate. If he throws a 99-mph fastball, the ball is going to reach the batter in 395 milliseconds. By comparison, it takes 400 milliseconds to blink your eye completely.

A lot has to happen in those 395 milliseconds. It takes the first 100 just for the batter to see the ball in free flight and get an image of it to his brain.  The batter needs 75 milliseconds to gauge the location and speed of a pitch heading toward the plate.

In the next 25 milliseconds, the batter has to decide whether to swing, and then he’s got only 25 milliseconds more to decide if the ball is going to be high or low, inside or outside.

If the decision was made to swing, another 25 milliseconds are needed for the legs to react and begin the fist motions of the swing.

If a decision is made to swing, the batter generally has a grand total of 150 milliseconds to get the bat around and through the strike zone.

And those are only for the gross movements involved. There’s still some fine-tuning to do. If the batter is only seven milliseconds early or late in connecting with the ball, he’s going to send it foul.

And even if his timing is perfect, he still has to put the “sweet spot” of the bat within one-eighth of an inch of the correct spot on the ball. To give you an idea of the margin of error, the width of an average pencil is TWICE as big as the margin of error on a major league bat.

To top it off, the batter has to swing hard.  If he’s going to hit a home run, he has to swing very hard, and – as every golfer, tennis player, and place-kicker knows – the harder you try to hit, the tougher it is to hit with accuracy.

In baseball, the best pitch to hit for distance is the curveball because its collision with the bat combines velocity and backspin

Hitting an ‘Invisible’ Ball

Making the task of hitting a major league pitch even more difficult is the fact that the ball is literally invisible to the batter when it’s within the final fifteen feet in front of the plate.
The ball is traveling so fast that the brain simply can’t process the image
quickly enough.

No batter has ever actually seen a major league fastball hit the bat. His brain only thinks it did because it extrapolated the remaining trajectory. This explains why even great hitters completely miss so many pitches. If the ball’s actual path over the last fifteen feet doesn’t match their mental extrapolation, the ball isn’t going to end up where they think it will.

Add to these scientific challenges the Pitcher, who is trying to throw curves, sliders, split finger fastballs and change ups to get the ball by the hitter.

As John Brenkus summarizes, “If you told all of this to an alien freshly landed from Mars, he’d refuse to believe that anyone has ever hit a baseball—let alone hit a Home Run.

But these is now a training system available that can help hitters reduce the margin of error by increasing their bat speed, strength and power.

It’s called The Hitting Jack-It™ System, the only variable weighted hitting system on the market that lets you practice against live pitching. If you want to be successful at the Most Difficult Athletic Feat – then Swing the System!

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