Interesting article here, about how outfielders catch fly balls.
Do outfielders chase down fly balls by watching the trajectory and calculating where the ball will fall? No. They tested this by having college baseball and softball players chase down virtual reality fly balls in a lab. They programmed the ball to move in physically impossible ways, to see if it threw off the fielders. It didn't. Outfielders don't use the trajectory of a ball to predict its path; rather, they just keep their eyes on the ball.
The researchers discovered that players watch the ball and position themselves so that it appears the ball is neither speeding up nor slowing down, he said. If the ball appears to be speeding up, the player should move back, and if it's slowing down, the player should move forward, said Warren, chair of Brown's Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences.
Fascinating stuff.
