Page 27 - Way Out to the Old Ballgame

Framing the Pitch

“Thanks. I’m not a great student, but I can follow a clear
explanation.”
Fort ignored the implied rebuke. “Then listen carefully. The
difference between a good hitter and a bad one is very small and very
volatile. Few players do not experience slumps and streaks, one often
following the other in rapid succession. You may imagine you simply
cannot see the ball when your average drops, that it has become a
streaky blur going past you into the catcher’s mitt; or, conversely, that
it looks as large as a watermelon when you’re on a roll, slowing down
before your eyes so you can lay the sweet spot on the bat right on it
and you’re getting three hits a game. Why the change? How can a
physical phenomenon, the trajectory of a baseball, be perceived in
such varying ways and with such varying results in a batter’s reaction
to it?”
Luke knew a dozen explanations for hitting streaks and slumps,
none of them scientific, and several dozen ways, none particularly
effective and most based on superstition, to change or continue a
batter’s luck at the plate. But why was luck involved? The game’s
rules had originated and evolved to maintain a close balance between
offence and defense. The better team tended to win and the better
players tended to have better statistics at the end of the season. That
was skill, and one of the game’s favorite proverbs was that chance
favored the prepared individual. Self-control, consequently, was
considered a necessary virtue; most players believed keeping their
performance at a constant, almost unconscious level, not letting
emotion spoil years of training in responding without thought to the
high-speed movements of a thrown or batted ball, would pay off in
the long run. Thus the exasperation expressed in a bat broken over
the knee or a fist injured punching a dugout water cooler. Men were
not machines: spectators had no interest in seeing machines compete,
but they expected their heroes to succeed in a mechanical fashion,
faltering rarely or never.
“My working hypothesis,” continued the researcher, “is based
upon what seems to me the obvious parallel of perception to other
physical phenomena. What is the stuff of the universe? Mass-energy.
Why has it a dual nature, why can we observe it as either particle or
wave? Are irreducible quanta merely a function of our limited tools
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