Analysis of basic ability of baseball batting

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Baseball batting is one of the most difficult task in that the batter has to hit the ball over 150km/h with a thin bat of 6cm in diameter. And batters are required to send a hit with batting average over 300. To accomplish this it is necessary to achieve accurate bat control. It has been believed that a good batter can swing a bat with the accuracy of mm order. In the present study, 10 university baseball players hit a ball on a tee that was set at the center of strike zone 20 times. The trajectory of the bat was taken by high speed video camera and the deviation of bat swing in the vertical direction was measured and the standard deviation(SD) of the deviation was calculated as a measure of bat swing accuracy. The SD was 1.1±0.3cm. This was larger than the value generally believed. It was suggested that the size of ball(6cm) and bat(6cm) permits to produce a good batting even when the center of the ball is 1cm off the center of bat at the hit. This probably prevent the accuracy to develop further. If players use a thin bat and small balls, they might be able to get better accuracy in swing.