hey you, yeah you fucking idiot.
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/2003-03-02-ten-hardest-hitting-baseball_x.
not posting the entire article, only parts that are important.
And now we can reveal USA TODAY's choice for the hardest thing to do in sports: hitting a baseball, thrown 90-plus mph at your chin, or buckling your knees. Here's why it's so hard, from a scientific perspective, from an expert athlete's and from an average joe's.
But the skills required to execute that at the highest levels require years and years of training. You'll get a multimillion-dollar contract if you can pull it off successfully anywhere near three out of 10 times.
Consider that a fastball thrown at 95-100 mph reaches home plate in about 0.4 seconds. Adair notes in his book that it takes 0.15 seconds for humans to voluntarily blink their eyes in response to visual signals. When a big-league fastball is on the way, you must do far more than just blink. You must swing the bat to precisely the right spot at precisely the right time.
It becomes even more challenging when pitchers throw curveballs and other breaking pitches. They also can throw the batter's timing off by mixing their fastest pitches with the slower changeups.
But skilled batters can be tipped off by the motions of pitchers. They can make split-second assessments of how the seams on the ball are spinning (indicating various pitches) and gauge its path toward the plate.
Adair says that when a fastballer such as Randy Johnson throws a pitch in the high 90s, the hitter has only about two-tenths of a second from the time the ball leaves his hand to process "the last information that does you any conceivable good whatsoever" — and then swing.
"It's a matter of precision, adjustment and accuracy, and there's not much room for error. Miss by a half-inch, and you can top the ball or hit it into the ground. You have to have hand-eye coordination to adjust to the ball's speed, and you have to see the rotation of the ball.
"You have to hit the ball square, even though there are all kinds of mistakes that can be made. That's why three of 10 is good in baseball, but it might not be in another business."
your meter is certainly not broken, it just touches itself at night.
