Baseball, if you’ll recall, was a game invented to give schoolchildren something to do in the long summer months, soldiers something to do in the long days between maneuvers, and George Will something to write about besides economic reform in Tajikistan. Recently, however, the relationship between the sport and its spectators has grown more and more dysfunctional. And this past season, though teams have come up with increasingly imaginative ways to keep the fans in the stands (“The ’95 Mets: No Pending Indictments!”), millions simply decided to give the whole nasty business a pass. ™ Grim tidings at the turnstiles, of course, do not necessarily translate into equally gloomy news on the field, and at stadiums around the country, excellent—if unwitnessed —baseball continues to be played. Batters are still hitting balls into adjacent time zones, pitchers are still throwing fastballs at speeds great enough to make their mass increase, and outfielders are still snatching fly balls from the air with the nonchalance of a chef plucking a can from a kitchen shelf.
Of all the skills a ballplayer needs to make it in the major leagues, this ability to intercept a fly ball might be the most remarkable. How do outfielders regularly manage such a feat of speed, grace, and coordination? What is the subtle interplay of timing, eye tracking, and navigational calculus that allows them to do the job with such balletic ease? Why do they always pat each other in unpattable places after they do?
The answers to at least the first two questions were provided this year by psychologists Michael McBeath and Dennis Schaffer of Kent State University in Ohio, and Mary Kaiser of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. Working with nothing more complicated than a couple of volunteer ballplayers and a few video cameras, the researchers believe they have finally discovered just how it is outfielders do what they do, at last explaining a skill that made Reggie Jackson more famous than Andrew Jackson, gave the magnificent Mays so many magnificent Mays, and made America—if only for a while—a safe place to be named Mookie.
