Baseball players of all ages work on improving their skills during practice. Some more recent training methods have worked on vision training to improve hitting skills. One particular method involves using a pitching machine to throw tennis balls at a high velocity. The goal of this training is to be able to call out colored numbers written on the tennis balls as they are pitched, as this relates to pitch recognition during game play. There has been no scientific research done on this system to see whether or not players are able to improve their tracking ability. This study seeks to investigate the tracking accuracy of subjects using the color naming task.
Subjects were tested using a pitching machine called the Flamethrower. Tennis balls with numbers written in either black or red ink were fed at random into the Flamethrower for each pitch. Balls were pitched from a distance of 60.75 feet from home plate. The average velocity was 79.76 MPH for each pitch. Eye movements were recorded using the ISCAN infrared tracking device, while head movement were recorded using the mini-Bird 800, which was mounted to the ISCAN goggles. Raw data from these devices were converted to digital format, compared, and analyzed with a computer program written in Visual Basic 6.0.
Thirty subjects were assigned at random into one of three groups. The subjects’ tasks in these three groups were color (and number) naming of a pitched
ball, tracking the ball as well as one can, and coordinating the eye and head as one would when batting. Subjects wore the ISCAN goggles to record data during each
pitch. Data was recorded on total of 2950 pitches between the three groups.
The primary outcome measure was mean gaze error away from the location of the ball, which was measured at 6 feet in front of the plate. Mean gaze error for groups 1 , 2, and 3 were -4.81 degrees (StDev 4.30), -2.20 degrees(StDev 6.08), and -3.03 degrees (StDev 5.82) respectively. A one-way analysis of variance with Tukey’s post-hoc testing showed a significant difference between each group (P<0.001).
The tracking accuracy of subjects in the color naming group was not as accurate as subjects tracking the ball alone. The results of this study suggest that
color naming may not play a significant role in improving tracking ability. It cannot be ruled out, however, that color naming may work on another aspect of training baseball batters such as attention or kinetic visual acuity. Further work needs to be done to determine the relationship of attention and kinetic acuity, if any, to hitting a baseball, and whether or not these would benefit from color naming training.