Tennis, baseball are serving high speed balls – The Denver Post

Pretend you are in a batter’s box getting ready to face former Rockies all-star pitcher Ubaldo Jimenez.

Now blink.

By the time your eyes are open again, Jimenez’s 95 mph fastball would have screamed past you for strike one.

It takes 0.40 of a second to complete a full blink and 0.395 of a second for that 95 mph fastball to travel from the mound to the plate, according to an FSN Sports Science study.

Even Hall of Fame outfielder Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox, a career .344 hitter and the last player to hit .400 in a season, once said: “Hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in all of sports.”

Baseball radar is notoriously unreliable at monitoring exact pitch velocity, and the reaction time necessary to hit a pitch is made more difficult by the amount of movement and differing speeds of the pitches.

Entering the all-star break, only 21 major-league hitters had better than a 30 percent success rate — a .300 batting average.

Sports Science’s study says it takes 30 feet for a hitter to pick up the ball and calculate speed, spin and trajectory. By that time the ball is more than halfway to the hitter, requiring a near immediate reaction and swing of the bat.

But baseball is dwarfed in terms of ball speed by tennis.

At Wimbledon, Sam Groth sent a 147 mph first serve past Roger Federer, which was the second- fastest serve in Wimbledon history.

Groth also holds the record for fastest professional serve at 163.4 mph.

Opponents never see quite that speed, though.

In tennis, speed is measured when the ball leaves a player’s racket. A New York Times interactive video showed that a 150 mph serve decreased to 103 mph prior to the first bounce and to 85 mph after the bounce.

By the time the ball reaches the baseline or the opponent’s racket, the ball is traveling at 73 mph.

The presence of a net and covering a 27-foot-wide court intensifies ball speed in tennis. And like hitting a 95 mph baseball, some things are better left for the professionals.

Cameron Wolfe: 303-954-1891, cwolfe@denverpost.com or twitter.com/CameronWolfe