Rules Myths Part 1

[Dave Reed]

Originally Posted by Tim C

....studies that showed that the human brain can not determine the order of activities if they occur inside a time frame of .04 of a second. The brain simply cannot determine what happens in what order.
Regards,

I've seen this written several times, but the statement certainly isn't true in a general sense, and not always true in a baseball sense.

Here's a specific non-baseball instance: A spectator at a top-fuel drag race, if positioned in the grandstands along the finish line extended, can easily see which car is first to the line, even if the two cars are separated by just one foot or less. So he can correctly order the times at which the two cars crossed the line with a resolution of about 2 or 3 milliseconds. Two circumstances are key to this: the spectator is using only one sense (vision), and the events are not isolated: both events as well as their timing are predictable from the path and velocities of the cars. Contast that to the NBA where the timing of a shot is predictable, but shot clock buzzer isn't.

A second instance: Humans can discern the direction from which sounds have emanated. The primary mechanism depends on the difference in arrival time at our two ears. We routinely accurately judge not only the order of arrival, but the magnitude of the difference, at 1 millisecond or better. In fact, in a quiet room, for a sound source nearly equidistant to the two ears, we can order the arrival times within a few tens of microseconds! Once again, only one sense is employed (hearing). It is also important that the sounds reaching our two ears have nearly identical waveforms. On the other hand, surprise is not a problem.

In baseball, when the play at first is a race between a fielder and the runner, we can tell who arrived first if the the feet are separated by a 3 or 4 inches--about a third of a foot or approximately 10 milliseconds. Again only vision is used, and there is no surprise.

Now on to what I suspect may be controversial:
For a play at first involving a thrown ball, a good umpire will have seen the ball being thrown (he needs to know if it is a quality throw), and will, whether he knows it or not, have formed an estimate of when it will arrive at first base. He can also see when the runner is approaching the base. The two events are fairly predictable. Then, if he knows the play will be close, and he uses his eyes to check for a pulled foot, and his ears to hear the sound of the foot striking the bag and the ball hitting the glove, he'll be able to do considerably better than 40 milliseconds. There are two different kinds sounds depending on which occurred first. With practice, by identifying the character of the sound, you can tell which occurred first.

Don't believe it? Well, even for a fast runner, 40 milliseconds is more than a foot of travel. Watch enough television replays of close plays at first base, and you'll see that the professional guys call it correctly when there is well less than a foot difference.