The Batting Tee - Additional Info

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." - Aldous Huxley

I've received a few comments in reference to my partial article I last posted about the batting tee. In response to those, I thought I would respond with the following:

The act of hitting a live pitched baseball is:

• A dynamic interceptive motor skill. By definition: involves the ability to synchronize one’s own movement to that of a moving target. To be successful, an individual must pick up and use perceptual information about the moving target. It requires the individual to link their own movement and the spatial and temporal constraints being imposed by the moving target. The ball is being thrown by a pitcher who is trying to manipulate the balls flight, so the batter must use perceptual feedback, mainly from their vision, to tell him/ her where they believe the ball is while it is in motion and then must time the swing correctly in relation to this assessment. Coordination of dynamic interceptive movements are predicated on the cyclical relations between an individual’s actions and information sources from the performance environment (5).
•  An open skilled sport. By definition, open skilled sports are when an athlete has to coordinate his/ her actions in accordance with the movements of an object to be acted upon or those of a partner or opponent. There is variability in timing and in the direction, length and height of the ball trajectory (6). It’s learning movements to an unstable, ever-changing environment where the emphasis is on the athlete’s capabilities to select the appropriate response in a given situation for success.
•  Externally paced skill. The environment, which includes opponents, controls the rate of performing the skill. The performer must pay attention to external events in order to control his/her rate of movement. These skills involve reaction and are usually open skills. i.e. in ball games, the performer must time his actions with the actions of other players and the ball. (7) This also means there is a time constraint/ time pressure. The athlete must take action within a very limited amount of time. So a very limited time to assess, decide and act.
•  Variable skill. The skill is applied to a number of different environments/ conditions/ stimuli, allowing both the development of the skill and the ability to adapt the skill to a range of possible situations. This is vital for open and interactive skills (7).
•  Choice Response Time Task (Hick’s Law). The more stimuli or more responses choices there are, the slower you get. In hitting, response times reflect the time it takes to interpret several different stimuli, get information from memory, initiate a muscle response and to act or not to act.

The act of hitting off a batting tee is:

•  NOT an Interactive Dynamic Motor Skill. The ball/ target never changes. It’s not moving, it’s stationary. No spatial and temporal constraints.
•  NOT an Open Skill, it’s a Closed Skill. By definition a closed skill is: One of a series of movement patterns performed in a predictable, non-changing environment so that movements can be planned in advance. There is no variability in timing and in the direction, length and height of the ball trajectory.
• NOT an Externally Paced Skill, it's a Self-Paced Skill – Where the performer determines the time and pace of skill execution. There is no time constraint. The athlete can take as much time as they want to plan and execute the act of swinging to one specific spot.
•  NOT a Variable Skill Task, it's a Fixed Skill task. A specific movement practiced repeatedly and often referred to as a drill (7).
• NOT a Choice Response Time Task, it's a Simple Response Time task (Hick’s Law) There is just one stimulus (e.g. ball sitting on a tee) and when it’s placed on the tee, the athlete responds with one response (e.g. swing the bat). People respond faster when there is just one stimulus and one response type (ball sitting still – always swinging).

How is using a batting tee mimicking or training a real game swing and mechanics? It's not. Absolutely nothing resembles a real pitched ball hitting off a batting tee. There are no batting tee “drills” that resemble “game like conditions.”

Long-term effects of a more variable approach

“…research has shown that the long-term effects of a more variable approach, where multiple things are practiced mixed together, are much more beneficial than single minded repetition and block practice.” (15)

The following example is from the book “Make it Stick” about the Cal Poly baseball team experiment. “Easier Isn’t Better” pgs. 79-82 (15).

Cal Poly experiment: This was done during practice (real environment not laboratory).

Going against a live pitcher, one set of batters, Group 1, saw 45 pitches - fastballs, curve balls and change-ups but they were evenly divided up. Group 1 would see 15 curve balls in a row, then 15 fast balls then 15 change-ups.

The other group, Group 2, were given a more difficult practice. The three types of pitches were randomly interspersed across the 45 pitches. For each pitch, the batter had no idea what to expect.

They did this twice a week for six weeks. At the end, the hitting was assessed. Both groups benefited from the “extra” practice but Group 2 (random pitches) – in their words – “displayed remarkedly better hitting relative to those who practiced on one type of pitch thrown over and over.”

The batting tee is an example of practicing one type of pitch thrown over and over. There are a multitude of laboratory and real environmental experiments that support this same result. Coaches and athletes think they are bettering swing mechanics training with a batting tee, but they’re not. Swing mechanics are not produced nor executed in isolation to the environment. Learning and then utilizing the appropriate mechanics are dependent on environmental and sensory variables too. 

The correct swing for one pitch type and location is not the correct swing for a different pitch type or location. And there are an abundance of them...

REFERENCES

(5) Greenwood, Daniel & Davids, Keith & Renshaw, Ian. (2013). Experiential knowledge of expert coaches can help identify informal constraints on performance of dynamic interceptive actions. Journal of sports sciences. 32. 10.1080/02640414.2013.824599.

(6) Wulf, Gabrielle. Attention and Motor Skill Learning. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics 2007.

(7) Galligan, F. et al. (2000) Acquiring Skill In: Advanced PE for Edexcel. 1st ed. Bath: Bath Press, p. 102-108

(15) Brown, Peter, Roediger, Henry III, McDaniel, Mark. Make it Stick. The Belknap Press of Harvard University; 2014