Confidence is key for MLB players

I was playing MLB The Show 25 recently and, as the pitch came in, for the barest of moments, I couldn’t tell if it was a fastball or a curveball. I hesitated for so short a period of time that I wasn’t even consciously aware of my hesitation until long after the pitch result was completed: a swinging strike. But I’m playing a video game, and I’m playing it on one of the lower difficulties, too. For MLB athletes, it’s even harder.

According to this article from the Seattle Times, it takes something less than half a second for a fastball to reach home plate. It takes approximately 1/10 of a second to identify the ball and almost 2/10 of a second to swing. Which leaves a touch more than 1/10 of a second to decide if the pitch is going to be hittable and make the swing. Naturally, none of that addresses the difficulty of physically directing the bat to where the baseball is going to end up and ensuring you meet it at the exact correct angle at the exact correct time.

Or, to put it another way, if I didn’t know anything about baseball and you described the physics of the situation to me, I would say it was absolutely impossible for a human being to ever make contact with an MLB pitch, much less hit a home run.

But home runs are hit dozens of times every night during the summer. We have found people with this completely bonkers talent, and we have them playing a game for entertainment. Just wild.

Anyway, since you’re probably wondering what the point of this physics discussion is after I gave you a headline about confidence, it’s this. If you have 1/10 of a second to make a choice, you’ve got to be supremely confident in your choice, or you’re simply going to make it too slowly for it to matter – even if you’re right!

Some people spend their time thinking about the Roman Empire, but I spend all my time thinking about Jac Caglianone’s first MLB at-bat.

I wonder what the alternate universe where that ball falls looks like. How many more Jac Jacks would we have been blessed with if the Jac Hammer’s first ball in play had landed in the field of play?

David Lesky had a really great article on his newsletter recently, talking about how Jac Caglianone looks like he’s going to be the key to the Royals’ potential success in 2026. One of the things he identifies as leading to Jac’s struggles last year was his lack of pitch recognition. Given that Jac, like all other big leaguers, has something like 1/10 of a second to decide where the pitch is going to be and whether to swing at it, I think a lack of confidence could be a huge reason for a hitter to at least appear to be misidentifying pitches. A lack of confidence could also lead to second-guessing, which could lead to actually misidentifying pitches.

I suspect this is a large part of why the Royals moved on from two of their hitting coaches at the conclusion of the season. Maybe, as some have suggested, hitters all have their own hitting coaches that they work with, but during the season, they rely on the team hitting coaches to help them identify physical missteps in their game as well as to provide them the confidence they need to make decisions in such short periods of time. Jac is the poster boy for a team full of players with all the physical talent they need to succeed, but who struggled to actually implement that talent in game situations. And so changes had to be made.

Of course, that rule about milliseconds from the subhead above applies to more than just hitters. If you’ve ever wondered why a fast outfielder can’t catch a flyball, it probably has to do with the extra milliseconds he had to spend determining where he needed to run.

Pitchers, you might think, are somewhat immune to this because they control the pace of the game – less so since the implementation of the pitch clock, but they still do – but imagine a scenario with me if you will. You’re standing in front of a stove with a burner turned on, and I tell you to place your hand on the burner. You’re probably going to hesitate, right? Pitchers don’t have hot burners, but they do have little injuries that, even if they don’t physically compromise them, can compromise their confidence in their ability to throw a pitch. They may choose to avoid throwing the pitch entirely, but even if they decide to throw it, even the tiniest hitch in their delivery caused by an entirely natural fear of pain can cause a slider to hang in the middle of the plate or send a fastball flying to the backstop.

If this article has a Royals-centric point, it’s that I fully expect Jac Caglianone to bounce back and have a terrific career because I believe his issues were largely related to a lack of confidence and frustration after some really rough luck at the beginning of his big league career. But the larger point is this: baseball is hard. And the sport we all love to watch features ridiculous feats of human ability surpassing our true comprehension. And that’s pretty cool.