In baseball, a pitch can take as little as 400 milliseconds to reach the plate. With a typical reaction time of 200 milliseconds and a swing of about 150 milliseconds, a batter must decide whether to swing and how to swing based only on the first 10 to 20 percent of the ball’s flight. At that point, there is still a lot of uncertainty about the pitch’s speed and trajectory. And yet, major league baseball hitters still manage to hit the ball about 25 percent of the time—40 percent if it were Ted Williams or Tony Gwynn in their primes.