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I've never understood why when everybody in the ballpark, everybody with a television, or a computer watching a game five thousand miles away knows that on 0-2 you're going to get something slow and twisty and a guy as smart and skilled as Zunino can't figure it out. But of course he can.
What happens, though, is that pitch recognition like almost all human behavior turns out to be in some way almost automatic. I won't bore you with the details but the brain machinery that controls this employs thousands of proteins concentrated at tens of thousands of synapses and is way too complicated to do what we tell it to. Neural networks are constructed on the fly; the brain categorizes incoming sensory information into hierarchies.It does this on its own without any input from you. So when a baseball is thrown say up and in, the brain constructs a tiny network representing this information. If the next pitch has the same release point and the same initial trajectory, no matter what the hitter knows intellectually, his brain knows better. The brain is wrong, of course, and causes the hitter to misjudge the pitch, to swing and miss and cause Dr. D to write many thousands of words on the subject.
Until a player has enough experience to build more reliable categories and thus more relaible prediction machinery, he'll struggle.The hitter who is able to erase the memory of that prior pitch before the next one comes - to be, as they say, in the moment - is the one who will be able to negate the categorization machinery, to exercise what we would call judgment.
The human learning machine is very much an ungainly contraption. The fact that we can walk down the street most days and not hurt ourselves never ceases to amaze me. That some of us can learn to hit little projectiles coming at us at 100 mph is ridiculously cool.