I could never hit a curveball...

...as a kid. That, along with the fact that I couldn't hit any other kind of pitch, explains why I never made it to the bigs.

As it turns out, I had even less excuse than I thought. From an article in Bloomberg, "Curveballs 'Break' Only in Eyes of Baseball Batters, Study Says":

San Francisco Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum’s curveball, which helped him win consecutive Cy Young awards, doesn’t make a ball move abruptly in the air. The batter’s brain does that for him, researchers say.

The break, which appears to be a sudden change from the ball’s curved path, may come from the way the human eye shifts between central and peripheral vision, according to a study in the journal PLoS One. Researchers explained the “rise” in a fastball the same way.

The work published yesterday is the first to explain the break and rise of baseball pitches as illusions, according to the authors. Previous explanations include the idea that the hitter underestimates a ball’s speed, said Zhong-Lin Lu, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

“The brain is tricked,” Lu said in a telephone interview.