Visuomotor predictors of batting performance in baseball players

We examined baseball players’ basic visuomotor skills by measuring their eye tracking and manual control performance, and then how these two capabilities relate to batting performance. We tested baseball players and demographically matched non-athletes with an eye tracking task in which they followed an unpredictably moving target with their eyes and with a manual control task in which they used a joystick to control a randomly moving target. Baseball players showed superior eye tracking and manual control capabilities over non-athletes. Furthermore, both eye-tracking and manual control performance become more correlated with batting accuracy with increasing player experience. Eye tracking performance in particular is predictive of batting skill, accounting for more than 70% of the variance in batting performance across players with 10 years of experience. Our findings suggest that the complex, learned skill of batting is limited by fundamental visuomotor capabilities, and that this limitation becomes more apparent with experience.