Better batters from brain-training research: Baseball player study significantly improves vision, reduces strikeouts

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Four words no baseball player wants to hear: Strike three. You’re out.The University of California, Riverside’s baseball team heard those words less frequently in the 2013 season after participating in novel brain-training research that significantly improved the vision of individual players and may have added up to four or five games to the win column.The results of that study appear in a paper, “Improved vision and on-field performance in baseball through perceptual learning,” published in the Feb. 17 issue of the peer-reviewed Current Biology.Most studies of visual abilities focus on mechanisms that might be used to improve sight, such as exercising the ocular muscles. Improvements in vision resulting from those experiments typically do not transfer to real-world tasks, however.A team of UCR psychologists — professors Aaron Seitz and Daniel Ozer and recent Ph.D. graduate Jenni Deveau — combined multiple perceptual-learning approaches to determine if improvements gained from an integrated, perceptual learning-based training program would transfer to real-world tasks.They did.Before the start of the 2013 NCAA Division 1 baseball season the UCR researchers assigned 19 baseball players to complete 30 25-minute sessions of a vision-training video game Seitz developed. Another 18 team members received no training. Players who participated in the training saw a 31 percent improvement in visual acuity — some gaining as much as two lines on the Snellen eye chart — and greater sensitivity to contrasts in light.”The vision tests demonstrate that training-based benefits transfer outside the context of the computerized training program to standard eye charts,” Seitz said. “Players reported seeing the ball better, greater peripheral vision and an ability to distinguish lower-contrast objects.”The researchers found that the trained players had 4.4 percent fewer strikeouts — a decrease not experienced in the rest of the Big West Conference. The UCR team also scored 41 more runs than projected after controlling for skills improvements players would be expected to gain over the course of a season. Ozer arrived at this number by using the runs-created formula developed by baseball historian and statistician Bill James.The longtime baseball fan then used the Pythagorean Winning Percentage formula, a statistical tool used by sabermetricians to compute a team’s wins and losses based upon their runs scored and runs allowed, to estimate that the training resulted in as many as four or five more wins.(The team had a season record of 22-32, but later was forced to vacate eight wins due to an ineligible player.)UCR’s year-over-year improvements were at least three times greater than the rest of the league in batting average, slugging percentage, on-base percentage, walks and strikeouts, the researchers determined.”Elite baseball batters use various kinds of sensory information to be successful batters, but most weight is given to visual feedback,” Seitz said. …


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#Baseball, #Biology, #Division, #League, #Research, #Season, #Snellen, #Team

MLB largely responsible for players" steroid abuse, researcher says

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The widespread use of illegal steroids among Major League Baseball players has been fueled by an “economy of bodily management,” the free agent market and exploding television revenues, a UT Arlington assistant professor argues in a newly published research paper.Sarah Rose, a labor and disability historian, says by attacking individual ballplayers’ morality, commentators have obscured the more salient issue.”Baseball is representative of the fact that Americans increasingly live in an age of biotechnology in which bodily modification for profit has become the norm and, often, an unstated job requirement,” said Rose, who joined the UT Arlington Department of History in 2009 and is director of the University’s Minor in Disability Studies program.Rose is the co-author of a new article “Bionic Ballplayers: Risk, Profit, and the Body as Commodity, 1964-2007″ published in the journal LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas. Her co-author is Joshua A. T. Salzmann, assistant professor of history at Northeastern Illinois University.The researchers found that while the league minimum salary remained at $6,000 between 1954 and 1967, players’ average salaries soared to $16,000 in the mid-1960s. Teams paid these increasing salaries out of funds newly attained through television revenue. Between 1964 and 1979, revenues from television contracts rose from $21 million to $54 million.During this time, players and owners investigated new ways to preserve and, eventually, enhance players’ bodies.The pair interviewed notable sports figures such as Nolan Ryan and Bob Costas and a wide array of baseball players, team physicians, trainers, general managers, agents and union officials with careers dating back to the mid-1960s. The article focuses on Sandy Koufax, Tommy John, Frank Jobe and Jos Canseco, who in his own book admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs during his playing career. In fact, his tell-all claimed that the large majority of Major League Baseball players used steroids.”Enticed by the prospect of riches, players and teams harnessed fitness training, reconstructive surgery, biomechanical analysis and performance-enhancing drugs to reduce wear and tear on players’ bodies and, ultimately, radically alter them for profit,” Rose and Salzmann concluded in the paper. “This interplay between economic incentives and medicine created what we call bionic ballplayers: bigger, stronger, and at times, more fragile than their predecessors.”The study suggests that the question raised by steroids is not individual morality, but rather the morality produced by a political economy of labor that calls for both services and body parts rendered.Ironically, as Rose and Salzmann’s article went to press, MLB Commissioner Bud Selig had just suspended 13 players for using steroids.”Why has professional baseball players’ steroid use been characterized as an immoral illegitimate bodily enhancement, when other medical interventions, such as ‘Tommy John’ elbow reconstruction surgery, have been celebrated as career-saving cures?” Rose questioned. “While admittedly different, we show that both bodily interventions arose out of the same dramatic shifts in the business of baseball — shifts that drove the medicalization of the game and players’ bodies.”The researchers contend that before the advent of salary arbitration and free agency, ballplayers were disposable parts in a high-risk work environment. …


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#Agriculture, #Alternative-Medicine, #Baseball, #Labor, #Liberal, #Pregnancy, #Steroids, #Tommyjohn

Major League baseball players experience stage fright on the eve of reaching a major milestone

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USD Assistant Professor Nadav Goldschmied and fellow researchers have found that Major League baseball players experience a bit of stage fright on the eve of reaching a major milestone.Goldschmied and fellow researchers studied 24 players who hit at least 505 homeruns during times in which they were to reach a major batting milestone. Using Drive Theory as a basis for their study, researchers found that it took batters significantly more time at bat when on the precipice of reaching a milestone.The researchers explained, “Altogether, the difference between performance of the baseball players before and after career home run milestones is consistent with the hypothesis that there is an association between the type of task undertaken and the assumed stress.”During a time in history when much scrutiny is paid to player performance and performance enhancement drugs (PED), Goldschmied explains that the research indicates, “players who reached the milestone in the last 15 years do not show the same pattern of deterioration in performance prior to their crowning achievement as players who played the game before them. We suspect that PED use may provide a physiological or psychological buffer from the detrimental effects of stress.”The study appears in this month’s Perception and Motor Skills journal.Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by University of San Diego. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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#Alternative-Medicine, #Baseball, #Cancer, #Goldschmied, #Health, #Materials, #Motor, #Professor, #Research