In the MLB you have people like Matt Olson and Shohei Ohtani who are very celebrated baseball players, and for good reason. In 2023, Matt Olsen had fifty-four home runs and 139 RBIs (runs batted in). Shohei Ohtani had forty-four homeruns and 95 RBI batted in.
Matthew Kent Olsen is the starting first baseman for the Atlanta Braves. Matt Olsen was drafted by the Oakland Athletics in 2012, before playing for them in 2016. His first years in the MLB did not start very well, only having two hits and no RBI (runs batted in). From this, he has only improved, so now in 2023, he has 172 hits and a .604 slugging percentage.
So how are these MLB superstars like Matt Olsen having so much success? The answer is focus and practice. Cincinnati Reds’ first baseball Joey Votto said that before every season he used to sit in the batting cage and just watch the baseball go by to adjust to the increasing velocity every year. That helped because he won league MVP in 2010. Johnathan Hock, the writer and director of the documentary “Fastball” said, “There’s something primal about this confrontation between a man with a rock and a man with a stick.” GQ Sports, Clay Skipper attempted to hit a 90-mph fastball, and even with multiple days of training, and help from various hitting coaches and MLB players, he still could not make solid contact with the ball. Clay Skipper is your average person, who may have played Little League for a couple of years but then stopped. So then, basically, he represents you and me, and you must remember that ninety is nothing to every major leaguer.
Then just how do they do it? Let us go through the process together. The distance between the pitching mound (where the pitcher pitches the ball) and the batter’s box (where the batter stands to hit the ball) is sixty feet and six inches. Though little league coaches like Clay’s might have told you, “See the ball, hit the ball,’ it is not that simple when it comes to one hundred fastballs. It takes a 100-MPH fastball about 375 milliseconds to reach home plate, and for reference, the blink of an eye is about three hundred milliseconds. Here are the steps. Firstly, the pitcher releases the baseball, then it takes about 75 milliseconds for your brain to identify the ball, which leads to about 150 milliseconds for the batter to decide if he is going to swing if it is going to hit him, where the ball is going to land in the strike zone, and when to swing. All is 150 milliseconds. Then, after that, the batter must swing. For a major league hitter, it takes 100 to 150 milliseconds. Which leaves zero margin for error. ” It is easier said than done,’ said former Baltimore Orioles 3rd baseman Danny Valencia. Like shutter speed in a camera, the hitter’s brain tracks the pitch by taking rapid snapshots of the ball and its trajectory. But the speed of the pitch creates holes that cannot be processed quickly enough for the batter to hit the ball. Your eyes just cannot constantly keep up with the ball, 100 percent of the time, it is just not possible. Well then, how do they do this, how do they keep up with the ball, and the answer is training, and sometimes genetics. Former Dodger pitcher Trevor Bauer was told by his parents and coach that they did not think he would ever make it to the big leagues, but still made the MLB with the help of advanced tools and perseverance. Many great MLB players today wouldn’t be as great as we see them today without the help of highspeed cameras, machines that track the spin our your pitches, and pitching machines that people like Joey Votto used to their advantage. These are all essentials if you want to make it to the MLB as well.
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