84 Years Ago Today . . .
. . . Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig struck out. That happened in an exhibition game against the Chattanooga Lookouts while the Yankees were en route home from spring training to start the season.
In and of itself, that would be only mildly interesting. However, the pitcher who struck them out was a bit unusual.
The individual was a 17 year old youth who’d just been signed to the Lookouts a few days previously. Their name was “Jackie Mitchell“. And no – “Jackie” here isn’t a short for “Jack”.
David Schoenfield at ESPN has an article today concerning the event. If you’re a baseball fan, it’s worth a read.
Well done, Ms. Mitchell.
Category: Baseball
Amazing story; thanks for posting! There’s a link to a YouTube short about it, and at the ~4 min mark, has the footage of her striking Ruth out.
Don’t forget to mention Jennie Finch, who pitched the equivalent of 98mph underhanded and struck out a big portion of the major hitters of the early 2000s, including Piazza, Pujols, and others. And is gorgeous to boot.
Jennie was quite the dish. There was a short lived women’s pro softball league for a while that she played in.
The distance between the pitcher and the plate is 20 feet less in Women’s fast pitch, making Finch’s pitch the equivalent of 98mph due to shorter reaction time. Softballers also have a rise pitch,,,
In my opinion MLB teams should have “sister” clubs of Womens Fast Pitch Teams.
It’s not really about reaction time. Players hit 65 mph pitches from 45 feet away all the time: It’s called batting practice. The only speed that matters is that over the last 25-30 feet.
The problem is that a major leaguer player can, after seeing some 400,000 pitches (including games and practice), predict where the ball is going in under 100 milliseconds. (This is why the cutter is such a nasty pitch, since it looks identical to a fastball.)
Softball is sufficiently different that a hitter’s visual database of pitch and pitcher movement no longer works; so he goes from predicting and reacting to thinking (a 200-250 millisecond process).
Something, something OODA loop, scanning process, etc.
or, for us ordinary mortals… we have to start to swing BEFORE the pitcher lets go of the ball.
Not completely.
I mean yes, the swing “starts” (i.e., the weight shift) about around the time the pitcher releases; and the better your bat speed, the longer you can wait to commit.* See, e.g., Hank Aaron. But, while Ripken or Pujols, have better than average reflexes (Good enough for MLB), they’re well below, say, an NHL netminder or a world-class ping-pong player.
The problem against softball pitchers is this. Hitters don’t actually track the ball to the plate: It moves faster 15 feet more the brain can translate the light signal into perception. So, basically, the brain takes a billion bits of information and generate images of what it thinks the world should look like in one-tenth of a second (i.e., and optical illusion). The more experience a hitter has, the better, much more of a back of the brain decision that guess will be. The softball pitch is sufficiently different that the hitter doesn’t have the same database to guess from, making it slower/more front-brain.
It’s sorta in the same vein that, as a class, fighter pilots are no better at racing cars (in a competitive sense) than the average Joe.
Thanks Hondo. Amazing tale and an even more amazing lady. Must have had some arm on her. I would have loved to see her pitch!
Never heard of this lady until today. Thank you for posting this, it was interesting reading!