A fast bowler releases at 145 kph and the ball reaches the bat in about half a second. A human nervous system needs roughly two-tenths of that just to begin moving. There is no version of this where the eye watches the ball and the body replies in time.
So researchers covered the ball. They showed batsmen video of a bowler cut off at the instant of release, and elite players still called where it would land. Club players couldn't. Then they fired identical deliveries from a machine with no bowler attached, and the great ones lost their edge entirely.
They were never reading the ball. They were reading the shoulder, the wrist, the angle of the front foot, a fraction of a second before anything left the hand — information the club player's eyes were receiving too, and had never learned to use.
Which makes the skill a prediction, built from thousands of deliveries and running ahead of the event it predicts. What looks like superhuman speed is an earlier start.
Genius looked like faster reflexes. It was earlier attention.