The oft-told standard in baseball is that a 90-mile-per-hour fastball takes four-tenths of a second to reach home plate and, because the act of swinging a bat takes about half the time, a hitter must identify the pitch, its expected location and decide what to do in about 0.2 seconds. Those numbers seem small and impossibly fast, but one can hardly appreciate the reality until seeing a pitcher enter his windup, release the ball and then for the video to stop at the juncture when a decision must be made.
That is the premise behind the work of gameSense, which draws on research that began in the late 1970s into anticipatory behavior based on early visual cues, showing a clear distinction between the abilities of experts and novices at quick-reaction tasks.
“They were using this video-occlusion method to try and study what seemed like super-human ability…to be able to read these pitches and do what, by all breakdowns, really shouldn’t be possible,” gameSense chief science officer and co-founder Peter Fadde said.
Fadde co-founded the application with Tom Pardikes, a sport science psychologist who received his Ph.D. from Virginia Tech and now serves as company president. The program has a bare-bones sensibility in which hitters can choose various pitchers and and see only a fraction of the ball’s flight from the release point before having to select the type of pitch (such as fastball, curveball, changeup, etc.) and whether it would ultimately be a ball or strike.
In the past few years, the pitch-recognition training program has now been used by nearly two dozen college baseball teams, with a few major league organizations conducting trials with their minor leaguers. One franchise did trial training last summer with their short-season A ball teams and found statistically significant improvement in on-base percentage and slugging percentage.
While proving causation, especially in a first-year professional hitter with no established track record, is a thorny area, Fadde said the hitters’ pitch-recognition training clearly improved their scores in the gameSense app, and that postseason scores in the app correlated with better offensive performance.
“That’s not going as far as saying, ‘Oh, we did this, and it caused that,’” Fadde said. “We’re just saying these two things grew together.”
Fadde, who is also professor and director of the Learning Systems Design and Technology graduate program at Southern Illinois University, recently co-authored a peer-reviewed research paper accepted by the Journal of Motor Learning and Development based on the findings. One group that conducted only spring training and postseason tests saw a 10 percent improvement in results, owing to experience during the summer. A separate group at the same level, which also included mid-season gameSense pitch-recognition training, saw a 17 percent increase.
Fadde’s foray into the field began during his 13-year tenure as the video coordinator for Purdue football, where he ultimately earned his master’s and doctoral degrees here and there. (“I kind of went one piece at a time, like the old Johnny Cash song,” he joked.) While hoping to broaden the use of video in the athletic department, Fadde approached the baseball coach at the time, Doug Schreiber, and asked if he could do research with his players.
Schreiber agreed, granting Fadde wide access. The coaches ranked their hitters, who then were randomly assigned into a treatment or control group. Fadde taped Purdue’s pitcher on old VHS tapes from a vantage point as close to the batter’s box as possible. He’d show video clips to the treatment group and have them guess pitch type and location. The treatment group that trained on pitch recognition would go on to have significantly better seasons, as judged by basic batting statistics.
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Now the app is both web- and app-compatible, with gameSense loaded on iPads for players to use in clubhouses and on bus trips. Some even do quick training drills on their smartphones; Fadde heard one player completed a program while waiting for his order at In-N-Out.
Fadde had the opportunity to solicit feedback from some of the minor league players to use the program and reported wide acceptance because there’s no need for knowledge transfer — in other words, they’re working on pitch recognition by looking at pitches rather than doing some non-baseball-specific visual exercise.
At the end of one focus group, the organization’s minor league hitting coordinator, who had been sitting silently in the corner of the room listening to his A-level hitters discuss the app, approached Fadde and said, “I’m wanting to go forward with this just because of what you hear around the table, just because of the way these guys are talking about pitches, about recognizing pitches and working the count. That’s the type of dugout talk you get at Double A or Triple A.”