the.com/batting
a few hundred milliseconds to read, decide, and swing at a blur of leather.
means The act of taking your turn with a bat to hit a ball in cricket, baseball, or similar games — or the soft fluffy material used as padding or insulation.
from From 'bat,' a word for a stout club, which English likely inherited from an Old English 'batt' (cudgel), possibly reinforced by an Old French cousin meaning to beat or strike. The verb 'to bat' — to hit with such a club — gave us 'batting,' the ongoing act of doing so. The padding sense comes from a separate thread: 'batting' as matted cotton or wool, related to 'bat' in the sense of beating fibres into sheets, since the fluff was literally beaten flat.
- reaction window
- Fastball arrives in under 400 milliseconds
- failure rate
- Best hitters fail nearly seven of ten times
- the brain
- Eyes can't track the ball's final feet
- sweet spot
- A tiny bat zone barely flexes on contact
- prediction
- Batters guess the pitch before it's thrown
ted williams — .406 batting average in 1941, last player to hit .400
barry bonds — 73 home runs in 2001, single-season record
ty cobb — .366 career batting average, highest all-time
joe dimaggio — 56-game hitting streak in 1941