Like I used to tell my coach...

Seriously, hitting a baseball is impossible. It wasn't my fault.

Psychologists have been studying baseball players almost as long as the Red Sox had been disappointing fans in Boston, and much of the attention has naturally focused on the most heroic part of the game: hitting. Baseball's great sluggers, such as Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, and Albert Pujols, make it seem so effortless, which makes it hard to accept the scientific consensus that hitting is basically impossible. That's right, impos-sible. Why? A ball thrown by a major league pitcher reaches speeds of 100 m.p.h. and an angular velocity (the speed in degrees at which the ball travels through your field of vision) of more than 500 degrees per second. A typical human can only track moving objects up to about 70 degrees per second. Add to this the fact that it takes longer to swing a bat than it does for a pitch to go from the pitcher's hand to the catcher's mitt, which means a hitter must start his swing before the ball is released and has less than a half a second to change his mind. All that equals impossible. [More]

And don't even think about trying to catch a fly ball.

“Good fielders do not run to a place where the ball will land and then wait for it, but rather catch the ball while running. This is contrary to what many coaches prescribe, which is to ‘get under a ball and not drift on it,’ ” he says. “Without a side view of a ball, a fielder has mostly only information about angular velocity (rate of optical expansion of ball as it approaches) with little information on linear velocity.” [More]

This would explain the Cubs, I guess.