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The hardest: Getting bat to meet ball (Gary Mihoces, 3/2/2003, USATODAY)

And now we can reveal USA TODAY's choice for the hardest thing to do in sports: hitting a baseball, thrown 90-plus mph at your chin,
or buckling your knees. Here's why it's so hard, from a scientific perspective, from an expert athlete's and from an average joe's.

In his book The Physics of Baseball, retired Yale University physics professor Robert Adair writes that the moment of contact when a bat strikes a ball lasts just 1/1,000th of a second.

But the skills required to execute that at the highest levels require years and years of training. You'll get a multimillion-dollar contract if you can pull it off successfully anywhere near three out of 10 times. [...]

Consider that a fastball thrown at 95-100 mph reaches home plate in about 0.4 seconds. Adair notes in his book that it takes 0.15 seconds for humans to voluntarily blink their eyes in response to visual signals. When a big-league fastball is on the way, you must do far more than just blink. You must swing the bat to precisely the right spot at precisely the right time.

"If a person from another planet was told what's involved ... they would say it's impossible," says Porter Johnson, a physics professor at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

It becomes even more challenging when pitchers throw curveballs and other breaking pitches. They also can throw the batter's timing off by mixing their fastest pitches with the slower changeups.

But skilled batters can be tipped off by the motions of pitchers. They can make split-second assessments of how the seams on the ball are spinning (indicating various pitches) and gauge its path toward the plate.

"It takes good eyesight, years of practice, good concentration," Johnson says. But in the final analysis, he says even good hitters are simply making well-educated guesses. "You've already committed yourself to swing at a particular point and a particular time. It's just a question of whether the ball happens to be there."

Adair says that when a fastballer such as Randy Johnson throws a pitch in the high 90s, the hitter has only about two-tenths of a second from the time the ball leaves his hand to process "the last information that does you any conceivable good whatsoever" - and then swing.

"After two-tenths of a second, they can turn out the lights in the stadium," Adair says, "and it won't affect your hitting him at all."

We've always known this, but what's shocking is that kicking a soccer ball didn't finish in the top 1,000: 10 Hardest Things to Do in Sports Posted by Orrin Judd at March 4, 2003 7:20 AM