WASHINGTON - As I watch Kenny Lofton, Bernie Williams, Andruw Jones or any of the other major league outfielders still playing in mid-October, I stand in awe at the ease and grace they display in tracking down flyballs hit between them and the wall.
There may be no greater moment of suspended tension in the game of baseball than when a ball is hit deep into the outfield and a fleet runner with his glove hand extended swoops in hoping to catch the ball in the last second before it touches the ground.
Incidentally, the beginning of this sequence from a fielder's perspective is something television cameras rarely catch. A fan at the park able to instantaneously switch vision from a pitched ball to a fielder has a better chance of observing the whole choreography.
At the crack of the bat, a good outfielder begins his pursuit. He seems to instinctively know where that hit ball is going to again make contact with the ground. There's something magical about ball and outfielder arriving at precisely the same spot at the same time in the expanse of a massive meadow.
Baseball fans of old certainly remember the grace that Joe DiMaggio brought to center field in Yankee Stadium. The most often heard comment about DiMaggio as a fielder was that "he made every catch look easy."
Other fans will recall the so-called "miracle" catch that Willie Mays made in the 1954 World Series on a ball hit by Cleveland's Vic Wertz. With his back to home plate and running full tilt toward the deepest center field wall of the old Polo Grounds in New York, Mays arrived just in time to allow Wertz' deep fly ball to sail over his shoulder and into his glove. This was no miracle. Mays made similar catches frequently.
As a boy I once saw Duke Snider, the graceful centerfielder of the Brooklyn Dodgers, race into right centerfield and up the slightly angled wall on the Bedford Avenue side of Ebbetts Field to snag a fly ball at his waist in mid-stride about six feet up the wall. He simply continued his strides on the banked section of the wall and returned to the grass after making the catch.
How do those outfielders know when and where to be in order to catch those long drives and line drives?
A year or two ago, during the annual Republicans-Democrats charity baseball game in the region of Washington, D.C., Rep. Jo Ann Emerson of Missouri, one of only two female players in the game, wound up with a black eye, a jammed thumb and another jammed finger while trying to catch balls in the outfield.
"I don't have any idea how to play the outfield," Emerson told a reporter. "I sprinted up to the ball and overshot."
Many an amateur outfielder can empathize with the Congresswoman.
How come Messrs. Lofton, Williams, Jones et al., rarely if ever "overshoot"?
I don't think outfielders know how they do this.
Sometime last year a reporter asked a group of outfielders in spring training what was the most difficult part of playing the outfield.
For the most part, those who replied made light of their answers or echoed what they'd been coached to do.
"I catch it and then I throw it. I try not to make things too complicated," concluded journeyman outfielder Phil Plantier.
"You've got to remember to set your feet and to get your body in the right position," said Dante Bichette of the Colorado Rockies, sounding very much like every Little League or sandlot baseball coach I've ever heard.
In fact, in an instructional manual put out by the Coaching Association of Canada, one can read how important stance is to an outfielder. Having hands and feet in the proper position when a ball is pitched, the coaches write, "allows the outfielder to react in any direction."
Coaches teach outfielders to run on the balls of the feet rather than on the heels to avoid jarring the head and interfering with the fielder's clear vision of the ball in flight.
The most frequently heard explanation or advice heard from outfielders, however, is the clichÈ admonition, "you've got to get a good jump on the ball."
Well, I've got some news for you, baseball fans.
Lofton, Williams, Jones and others like them, including DiMaggio, Mays and Snider, are simply intuitive mathematicians who perform an algorithm of the trajectory of the ball and the path they must pursue to meet the ball. Without even being aware of it, outfielders perform a complex operation usually reserved for analytic geometry and calculus.
That's the conclusion of psychologists in England who performed four experimental studies of "ball catchers" as they ran to catch balls fired from a machine. They reported their results last year in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, not exactly a baseball fan's bedside companion.
After videotaping six skilled fielders, the professors from Oxford and Sussex came to this conclusion: The fielders' speed "kept the acceleration of the tangent of the angle of gaze elevation to the ball at zero."
This "gaze elevation" is the measure of the angle between the fielder's horizontal gaze and his gaze into the air at the ball, which changes with every step and every second the ball is in flight. Hence, in mathematical terms, the fielder performs an algorithm, which is a way of solving problems through a number of repeated mathematical operations.
The professors conclude, "only when fielders keep the angle of gaze elevation between zero and 90 degrees will they catch the ball."
Of course, the researchers acknowledge that fielders don't consciously understand or apply this complex mathematical rule when they pursue a fly ball. The psychologists contend, however, that children learning to catch a ball have this cognitive tool available to them as they watch balls that are thrown fall in front of them, behind them or to either side of them.
Once again, we are alerted to how science can help art and recreation. The implication here, clearly, is that coaches should be studying and applying "gaze of elevation" exercises for outfielders.
The one thing such studies can't help with, though, was pointed out by Billy Ashley, the former Los Angeles Dodger outfielder now with the Boston Red Sox. "Assuming you arrive at the ball," Ashley noted, "it's always a good idea to catch it - and then HOLD ON TO IT."
As another British writer on human activities might have put it, "Ay, there's the rub."
Allan R. Andrews can be reached at aroyandrews@gmail.com
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