It is amazing to me the amount of stories I’ve seen over the years about how the curveball works. According to new research, the “break” the batter sees may just all be an optical illusion:

Yet as the ball nears home plate, the batter observes a sudden jump in its trajectory, the notorious “break.” A new study in PLoS ONE argues that the discrepancy between the physics and the perception of the curveball may be all in the mind — or, more specifically, an optical illusion created by the batter’s eyes and brain.

The human visual system dedicates more of its resources to processing images in the center of our field of view than in our peripheral vision. Larger numbers of photoreceptors and retinal ganglion cells in the fovea — the center part of our eyes — help produce extremely high-res, three-dimensional static images. And as the images processed by our retinas head to the brain, larger numbers of neurons in the visual processing centers (lateral geniculate nucleus and primary visual cortex) are responsible for helping make sense of what we see when looking at something straight on as compared to out of the corner of our eye.

Fascinating. So how do baseball players hit a curveball – are they able to compensate for this optical illusion and still swing in the right place? Also, could there be players who are less affected by this optical illusion, thus explaining why some are better fastball vs. curveball hitters?