New research from Duke Health
suggests baseball scouts looking for a consistent, conscientious hitter may
find clues not only in their performance on the field, but also in front of a
computer screen. In a study of 252 baseball professionals published in the
journal Scientific Reports, Duke researchers found players with higher scores
on a series of vision and motor tasks completed on large touch-screen machines
called Nike Sensory Stations, had better on-base percentages, more walks and
fewer strikeouts (collectively referred to as plate discipline) compared to
their peers. The players were on U.S. major and minor league teams. They used
large touch-screen stations to complete nine exercises, many of them resembling
two-dimensional video games where users track or touch flat shapes as they
scoot across the screen.
The tasks test a person's ability
to glean information from a faint object or in a split second plus skills such
as reaction time and hand-eye coordination. The researchers found that overall,
better performance on tasks predicted better batting performance for measures
of plate discipline, such as on-base percentage, strikeout rate and walk rate,
but not slugging percentage or pitching statistics. In particular, high scores
on a perception-span task, which measured the player's ability to remember and
recreate visual patterns, were associated with an increased ability to get on
base. High scores in hand-eye coordination and reaction time were associated
with an increased ability to draw walks, while better scores in spatial
recognition, such as the ability to shift attention between near and far
targets, were associated with fewer strikeouts.
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