Out of the four major professional sports, baseball, undoubtedly, is in the most dire need for offense.
Pitching prowess has supplanted hitting power–or lack thereof, rather. Just about every statistical measure confirms that. The American League and National League combined to break the all-time strikeout record for a seventh straight season, less than 3,000 shy of amassing 40,000 strikeouts collectively. The leaguewide batting average hovered around .251 this year, levels that borderline reached the worst ever, dating back to when the AL debuted the designated hitter in 1972.
Moreover, on average, big league pitchers’ fastball has gradually increased from 89.9 MPH in 2002 to 91.8 MPH this season, per FanGraphs. There’s been an uptick in hitters swinging outside of the strike zone as well, up to 30 percent from those kind of pitches.
The 2014 World Series between the San Francisco Giants and Kansas City Royals virtually personifies the ultimate manifestation of this epidemic.
Clearly, batters’ approach at the plate has been well below par, in terms of their in-game decision-making processes. There’s a palatable necessity for them to react faster and better to pitches.
In recent years, however, an under-the-radar development centered around science is being experimented among a few teams: neuroscience.
According to the Wall Street Journal, then-General Manager of the Boston Red Sox, Theo Epstein, first tapped into this practice with a local company called NeuroScouting. The intention, in theory, to create software that could assist batters in their ability to identify pitches that they could make contact on, both enhancing its speed and accuracy facets. A video game-esque format has materialized as a prerequisite for hitters before games within the minor leagues. The Tampa Bay Rays, even, have gone insofar as placing fines for players that don’t perform these tasks.
Another startup, similarly, named Neuroscout offers electrode caps for players to wear in order to quantify the pertinent brain functions, whenever partaking in visual demos of trying to hit pitches. Such test, again, would assess player’s neurological strength and weaknesses during the minor leagues.
As Red Sox’s Manager, Ben Cherington, points out to the WSJ: “Intuitively, it would make sense that this would be a helpful tool, but I just don’t know if anyone yet can prove it’s predictive. The hope is maybe it can be.”
Nevertheless, the newfound curiosity for neuroscience in MLB to combat hitting woes is bound to grow. This data enables teams to utilize it as a training module as well as a scouting device. It’s a matter of continued repetitions for tangible trends to emerge–in spite of being atypical to players’ routines.
To compound the intrigue behind this scientific area further, though, the University of Georgia has published a new study in the journal PLOS ONE that shows a new way athletes–particularly baseball players, in this case–can improve their respective reaction time by 10 percent.
The basis of this study pertains to determining whether or not a nutritional supplement can influence brain functionality. The supplement chosen was zeaxanthin that’s known to be quite actively accumulated by the brain and retina; in turn, plausibly impactful towards cellular function due to previous cellular modeling studies conducted. It’s also the most widespread carotenoid alcohol in nature, the very pigment that serves paprika’s color, too. The measure of the brain function derives from visual processing speed–the underscoring way of cognitive fundamental that details a person’s ability to detect, process, and react to stimuli between the eyes and the brain.
Again, it’s worth noting that this entire area of study, nutritional neuroscience, is relatively new. This University of Georgia Vision Science’s experiment is the first performed of its kind that demonstrates how carotenoid supplements can impact brain processing speeds among young, healthy adults.
Up to this point, what’s known about optimal brain function and its processing speed tends to prescribe to various factors that can be altered. Pharmaceuticals, like caffeine, would, indeed, be an example that boosts cognitive ability, albeit in a transient manner. Exercise, of course, propels these executive functions further and for an extended interval of time, particularly evident amongst the elderly. Dietary, though, poses potential by the mere fact that half of the brain is composed of fat, intertwined with the nervous system that contains the aforementioned carotenoids lutein and zeaxanthin. This latter point dovetails to these latest findings, after just one trial has been conducted on record with elderly women, with regards to the effects of lutein supplementation on cognitive performance when compared to a placebo.
“Our hypothesis was that supplementation would yield a benefit,” Dr. Billy R. Hammond, Graduate Coordinator and Professor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences Program at the University of Georgia, tells SportTechie.
“This, however, was based almost purely on ex vivo data; so, we had no real basis for predicting the empirical effect on young subjects.”
The “young subjects” that Dr. Hammond refers to are college students, 92 of them, 56 females to 36 males, with an average age of almost 22 years-old. They were chosen, in large part, because they would be the least likely to show a change–being at the virtual peak of one’s cognitive abilities. Dr. Hammond reasoned that if they could achieve a change in this group, then the effect incurred would be robust and generalizable. The age demographic is critical in order to delineate the final results and discourage any negative effects from that of an elderly sample, especially since carotenoids are known prophylactics that could directly impede neural functions.
These students had to undergo several procedures that were measured and later again after four months of supplementation: macular pigment optical density–it’s the concentration of zeaxanthin and lutein together quantified in retinal tissue–visual reaction time–both variable and fixed positions–and critical flicker fusion. Most importantly, the coincidence anticipation timing test enabled the students to follow a streak of light at variable speeds and time their response to when a light reaches a target location–the principal simulation relevant to batting in baseball.
Considering that these tasks are predicated on psychological processes, it’s difficult to discriminate against one student from another’s results since they had to see flashing lights. Each of them had to follow the protocols independently and had no knowledge of being on placebos or active intervention.
Although this study didn’t face the average attrition rate for clinical trials, 30 percent, it’s usually the biggest obstacle to overcome along with the initial recruitment. They’re in the process, though, to follow-up the results with neuroimaging methods in order to directly measure the changes in the brain, itself.
Still, Dr. Hammond affirms previous understanding that proves the battle of aging to improve reaction time: “The old axiom that you are what you eat is literally true. The brain is composed and maintained by your diet–period.”
The composition of one’s diet, accordingly, directly influences the activity of neural tissue. While the brain is made up of about 60 percent fat, it can be solid or liquid form. Diet represents the “magic bullet” that either saves or kills, with the physical appearance of one’s body as the aggregate byproduct of eating habits made. Exercise, thus, stands as the only other elixir for the brain.
Dr. Hammond believes that this study worked due to the fact college students are rather deficient in the basic food components that the brain needs to evolve. People synthesize close to nothing, conserving most of one’s metabolism for our quite large brains. Since carotenoids are the key chromophores in plants that the body leverages for a gamut of functions, lutein and zeaxanthin are instrumental for the central nervous system to react in a pronounced way.
“We are in an epidemic of absence: we are missing so many things that formed the basis of our biology for hundreds of thousands of year. The result is less optimal function in youth, degenerative disease with age,” describes Dr. Hammond, in terms of the importance behind finding out that nutritional intervention could influence brain function in college students or, by the same token, professional athletes.
That said, the role of nutrition and vision training to aid athletic performance have been well-documented. The synergy of these two constructs, with the former serving as the catalyst for the latter’s improvement, is a novel concept. While some eye-care professionals are cognizant of zeaxanthin’s potential towards vision optical effects, this study reveals the direct benefits of zeaxanthin in visual processing speeds and reactions times–what baseball players need.
The Oakland A’s, in fact, participated in a similar trial two years ago, where they had their players take EyePromise supplements that contained the same formula as this University of Georgia study. Not only were those results reflective to these current findings, A’s players reported an enhanced ability to track a baseball after a pitcher’s release and the baseball’s rotation.
“As an athletic trainer, I am looking to give our players every edge possible,” says Walt Horn, Oakland A’s’ Assistant Athletic Trainer.
“If an athlete can see the rotation of the ball better, process what they see faster and improve reaction time as demonstrated in the UGA study, they have a better chance of improving their performance over time,” Horn continued.
Dr. Dennis Gierhart, Founder of ZeaVision, which produces the EyePromise supplements, considers that athletes need to see benefits close to real-time, therefore, recommending higher doses intake of zeaxanthin. Such trials with MLB clubs suggests that the performance advantages do translate to elite athletes; the likely qualifier, though, being: “translating visual performance benefits onto the field is a complex thing to measure.” There’s a distinct possibility that a user of the supplements could experience their visual performance regress, provided they stop using them after becoming accustomed to this consumption.
Of course, it’s prudent for athletes to ensure that the National Science Foundation (NSF) logo for sports is visible in the product’s packaging and consult with their professional advisors. The ingredients of the supplements has to be extremely high quality and filtered by the eye-care industry, first and foremost.
This 10 percent enhancement in visual processing speed and reaction time means a 43 millisecond edge for a batter at the plate. The adoption of this supplement’s intake could also mean closing the gap between pitchers and hitters in MLB, a step towards more offensive production across the board would be welcomed for the sport’s vitality.