Hitting the Baseball
First, there is a lot of new research out on how our brains are engaged in learning and performing motor tasks, as opposed to intellectual tasks. There is a great new book out by Jonathan Lehrer called How We Decide. The book starts off with a very interesting first chapter called “The Quarterback in the Pocket.” Among other things, he uses Tom Brady as an example and explains what is going on in the quarterback’s brain as he decides, after dropping back, whether a receiver is covered or not, and thus whether or not to throw the ball in that direction. In a nutshell, it appears that these micro-decisions are made using the emotional systems in our brains – called the limbic system – and NOT with the cerebral, so-called higher-order processes of the brain with which we engage in intellectual thought and language processing.
I once heard Vin Scully quote a ball player you may remember named Kent Hrbek. Hrbek said “I like to go up to the plate with an empty brain and a full bat.” From the research I’ve read, this is exactly correct. If the hitter is engaging his language centers with such thoughts as “oh my goodness, I hope I don’t swing and miss, and I need to remember to keep my head down like my dad told me and to follow-through like Coach said…” Well, by the time all this language is processed, the ball is in the catcher’s mitt. It is the “flight-or-flight” mechanisms in the emotional centers that must do the work of seeing the ball and hitting the ball. If I am not very clear here, think Manny Ramirez… see the ball, hit the ball… with no apparent need for doing any actual thinking. J
So what does this mean for learning to hit a baseball? Let me take you to another story, which began sadly as an adult man in his 20s struggled with constant epileptic seizures. This occurred back in the 1950s, back when we really didn’t have much clue how the brain worked. Identifying the locus of the seizures, doctors decided to remove a piece of the man’s brain called the hippocampus from both sides of his brain. When he awoke from surgery, doctors felt a sense of success and optimism. The patient could respond and talk, and the seizures were completely gone. Unfortunately, the doctors soon learned the purpose of the now-removed hippocampi… the man had lost his ability to create new memories. He could only remember things that happened in the last six or seven seconds. He maintained all the memories he had created in the first twenty or so years of his life, but could make no new memories because the hippocampus is the bridge from experience to memory. In some manner, the hippocampus “decides” what is worth remembering and passes these matters along to the cerebrum for storage.
Now a somewhat happier aspect of this story is that while the man lived out his life in an institution, he maintained a pleasant manner and, fortunately for the psychologists who wanted to learn about the effects of his condition, he never got bored with their incessant questions and studies since, obviously, he was never aware just how long he had been sitting there conversing with the researcher. And so, with time, psychologists learned a remarkable thing… While the man would always say at the beginning of any session that no, he had never seen the researcher before, or, for example, that he had never before seen juggling balls or tried to juggle… with repeated trials he could indeed learn how to juggle quite skillfully. That is, he demonstrated a strong ability to learn and improve day-to-day at motor tasks of this sort. In a sense, someone who cannot remember doing things from moment to moment can still learn to do things quite well! So we see that you don’t need to engage the cerebral language-centers to learn to perform a physical or motor task.
What does this mean for us? That learning to hit a baseball is an entirely different process than, say studying for EOGs! The kids will learn to hit by engaging the alternative path through the brain, the one by which we need no hippocampus… Engaging the language and intellectual centers is, well, pretty useless as far as learning to hit a fast-moving orb with a bat. We do want our kids to go up to bat with empty heads, like Kent Hrbek and Manny Ramirez! And the skill they need to perform is learned not through talking about it, but through lots and lots and lots of repetition. They need to swing successfully at 1,000 balls this month, and I’d think by the time they get to high school, they’ll be natural “intuitive” hitters if they have hit 10,000 balls.
The number 10,000 is borrowed from a reading of Malcolm Gladwell’s great, and fairly recent book called Outliers.
Gladwell claims that greatness requires enormous time, using the source of The Beatles' musical talents and Bill Gates' computer savvy as example. The Beatles performed live in Hamburg, Germany over 1,200 times from 1960 to 1964, amassing more than 10,000 hours of playing time, therefore meeting the 10,000-Hour Rule. Gladwell asserts that all of the time The Beatles spent performing shaped their talent, "so by the time they returned to England from Hamburg, Germany, 'they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.'" Gates met the 10,000-Hour Rule when he gained access to a high school computer in 1968 at the age of 13, and spent 10,000 hours programming on it. [this last paragraph snatched out of wikipedia]
Since we are talking about a micro-skill, I’m positing that 10,000 swings, rather than so many hours of practice, will have the boys in good shape as far as hitting the baseball.
So, my friends, please forgive me for this very long explanation. I just wanted to reinforce the importance this 1,000 hit goal if your player wants some hits next year in middle school ball.
One last thing… You may wonder whether it is better to hit a 100 balls every other day or to hit 50 balls every day. There is a lot of new research going on about what goes on in our brains during sleep. And I read that remarkable things are happening as we slumber. Neurons literally let go of some connections and reorganize themselves by making new connections to other neurons. In the manner of a re-wiring, our brains reorganize to incorporate the new learning from the day we have just completed. Regarding motor tasks, it appears that our brains use this time of rest and renewal to recalibrate the hand-eye coordination, leaving our hitter slightly more well-tuned to hit the ball after a cycle of hit, sleep, and hit again. And if you agree with where I am going here, this means that it is better to get a little bit of work in every day, so that the hitter gets the benefit of multiple recalibrations. So it is better, therefore, to get at least a little bit of hitting practice in every day.
A thing you might do about this is make sure your player has a few dozen baseballs and have him doing soft-toss drills as much as possible.
Submitted by Strategic Thinking
