Bobby Valentine is No Genius

Although every commentator at ESPN save Michael Wilbon thinks Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine is "smarter than everybody else in the room," most of what he does suggests the opposite. His own view seems to be that managing a baseball team well is akin to rocket science -- it's a highly technical matter that only people with large brains can do. He imposes wacky and ineffective "innovations" on his players, like making the first baseman dance around behind a runner instead of holding the guy on in the way that thousands of other coaches and players have determined to be best.

I detest Valentine's attitude, not because I think good managers and coaches are not intelligent, but because the best ones understand that it's not technical intelligence that makes them good. Ron Gardenhire is a great coach because almost every year his teams get better over the course of the summer. His success stems not from creating new ways of playing, but from insisting on sound fundamentals and from earning the trust of his players. Valentine alienates the people he works with by trying to prove all the time how smart he is.

Valentine's most recent foolishness came in the form of a call to have machines call all balls and strikes. As part of his rant against human umpires, he cited a "study" showing that the human eye is incapable of tracking a 90 mph fastball all the way to the plate. I don't know whether Valentine has read the paper or not, but I have. It was written in 1984, by Professor A. Terry Bahill of the University of Arizona, and Valentine does not fairly represent its content. Bahill does indicate that professional baseball players can track a ball much more effectively than most people, and that the eye can not literally track the ball all the way to the bat. To quote:

Although the professional athlete was better than the students at tracking the simulated fastball, it is clear from our simulations that batters, even professional batters, cannot keep their eyes on the ball. Our professional athlete was able to track the ball u n t i l it was 5.5 ft in front of the plate. This could hardly be improved on; we hypothesize that the best imaginable athlete could not track the ball closer than 5 ft from the plate, at which point it is moving three times faster than the fastest human could track.

His point is that the advice to "keep your eye on the ball" is not possible to follow.

But here's the part that Valentine did not know or understand:

[this data] makes it d i f f i c u l t to account for the widely reported claim that Ted Williams could sometimes see the ball hit his bat. If Ted Williams were indeed able to do this, it could only be possible if he made an anticipatory saccade that put his eye ahead of the ball and then let the ball catch up to his eye. This was the strategy employed by the subject of Figure 5: this batter observed the ball over the first half of its trajectory, predicted where it would be when it crossed the plate, and then made an anticipatory saccade that put his eye ahead of the ball. Using this strategy, the batter could see the ball hit the bat.

In other words, the batter (or the umpire) does not need to follow the entire trajectory of the ball to know where it will end up. People with natural talent and training can anticipate with very high accuracy where the ball will be at the end of the track. And the umpire has an even greater advantage over the batter, in that he has a second to make a decision after the ball has stopped, whereas the batter does not.

Nobody at ESPN appears to have tried to find the source of Valentine's supposed immense knowledge. Valentine does not claim to have done "the study" himself, so why not ask him about it? Did he actually read it? Does he need help understanding it, despite his enormous intellect? Or is he being disingenuous?

Hm.