Throwing a baseball is hard. As xkcd pointed out just yesterday, accurately throwing a strike requires that a pitcher release the ball at an extremely precise moment—doing so more than half a millisecond too early or too late causes it to miss the strike zone entirely. Because it takes far longer (a full five milliseconds) just for our nerve impulses to cover the distance of our arm, this feat requires the brain to send a signal to to the hand to release the ball well before the arm has reached its proper throwing position.
The one feat even more difficult than throwing a fastball, though, might be hitting one. There’s a 100 millisecond delay between the moment your eyes see an object and the moment your brain registers it. As a result, when a batter sees a fastball flying by at 100 mph, it’s already moved an additional 12.5 feet by the time his or her brain has actually registered its location.
And that batted ball coming back at the pitcher can be going up to 140mph. Duck!!!!
In high school, when we were facing a really fast pitcher, sometimes we would start our swing before he released the ball and just hope we connected somehow.
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, just trade-offs.
