Differences in Baseball Batting Movement Strategies between Facing a Pitcher and Pitching Machine

It is generally accepted that pitching machines cannot completely simulate a real pitcher’s pitching motion and ball trajectory. To understand if a batter would change batting movement strategies due to visual information provided by a pitching machine as opposed to a real pitcher, three professional baseball players in the minor league in Taiwan were recruited for examining several event instants and vertical ground reaction forces of their batting movements. It was found that every subject started taking a forward step earlier with higher variability, and shifted body weight more slowly in facing a pitching machine. The results may be attributed to lack of visual clues which could be found in a real pitcher’s whole body kinematics, causing uncertainty for the batter. Therefore, it was concluded that athletes would change batting movement strategies in the batting practice with a pitching machine. It needs to be noted that it is premature to generalize this conclusion to larger population due to small sample size used in this study.