There’s hope in sight and Grichuk gets it
In his hometown in Texas, Randal Grichuk has unlimited access to the local batting cages.
He can go in as often as he likes, a deal he worked out with the owner after buying a pitching machine when he returned home following last season — in which he produced a subpar .238/.285/.473 slashline with the St. Louis Cardinals. The batting average was a career low for the 26-year-old outfielder, while his on-base and slugging marks were well off his personal highs.
So, the Blue Jays’ projected starting right fielder — acquired from St. Louis for a pair of pitchers — hits the cages almost daily, facing a machine that can throw sliders, curveballs, cutters and sinkers.
“You name it, it can throw it, and it can go random,” Grichuk said this past week.
The body parts he’s focused on strengthening the most when he steps into the box, the ones he thinks will improve his plate discipline and drive up his on-base numbers, might not be the ones you’d expect: his eyes.
“So many people don’t really work out their eyes, and I think there are a lot of muscles in the eyes that are just like normal muscles. You need to train it. You need to work it out,” said Grichuk, who took a course on vision training specifically to address that.
Recently retired star outfielder Carlos Beltran famously used a device known as a Conditioned Ocular Enhancement, in which coloured and numbered tennis balls are fired at the plate at up to 155 miles per hour, as players try to pick out the speed and follow it into the catcher’s mitt.
Vision training in sports, though, remains underutilized by athletes, experts say, despite decades worth of evidence suggesting it works.
For example, a study of the University of Cincinnati’s baseball team, published in 2012, found that after six weeks of standard vision training before the 2011 season, the squad’s batting average increased from .251in 2010 to .285, while their slugging percentage was up by .033 from one season to the next while the slugging mark for the rest of their conference fell by .008.
Like diet and sleep, those familiar with vision training believe it can give players who use it that slight edge they need to succeed.
“Baseball, it’s a unique sport from the point of view that it’s very heavy visually,” said Dr. Michael Nelson, an optometrist with EyeGym Canada, a Winnipegbased Sports Vision training centre. “The visual requirements, probably more than any other sport, are integral. You have to have really exceptional eye-hand coordination, you have to have great depth perception, you have to have great visual acuity. Processing speed has to be fine, the coordination has to be precise. There are so many factors. It is a big factor in baseball.
“Sometimes just a little bit of difference can make all the difference.”
Kristine Dalton, an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo, runs a research lab that tries to understand how vision helps people move, using sports as a model. She explains that it’s all about hardware and software.
Hardware — the physiological properties of the eye (such as optics, length, prescription) — constrains what a person can and cannot resolve and see. Those components are not easily modified because of the bones and structure of the eye.
Software comprises perception (the brain interpreting what the hardware collects) and integration (where visual information is interpreted by the brain and used to react).
It’s called Sensory Motor Integration and vision training targets the software, Dalton says. Sensory Motor Integration teaches athletes to look at specific points or recognize patterns, moving the eyes strategically to get the information they need for decisionmaking quickly and efficiently.
In baseball, batters generally perform at their worst the first time they face a pitcher. In later at-bats, they start to recognize patterns in the pitcher’s stance and delivery.
The Sports Gene by Sports Illustrated senior writer David Epstein recounts an instance where Olympic champion softball pitcher Jennie Finch struck out major league slugger Albert Pujols. Dalton called it a “classic example” of a hitter being unfamiliar with a pattern. Pujols is used to an overhand throw, while Finch pitches underhand.
Vision training simply teaches a player’s eyes to process information faster. In a game where decisions are made in milliseconds, trained depth perception — the ability to move from one optic to another, or adjust focus from distance to up close — can give a hitter the edge.
Today, Dalton adds, the tools to make it happen are more accessible than ever, with computer-based programs and advances in virtual reality.
And yet, it’s still rare to find a team with its own sports vision facility.
Karen Muncey, one of the pioneers of vision training in Canada — who worked with the Blue Jays from 1988-90, as well as NHL and CFL teams and Olympic athletes — says so much of a pro team’s budget is spent on player salaries that it leaves the training side of the equation shortchanged.
The average person uses 30 to 40 per cent of their visual potential, she adds, and while elite athletes use more, there is still 30 to 40 per cent unused.
“One of the big drawbacks with sports vision training is, there’s the tendency to associate (it) with therapy, as opposed to training,” Muncey says. “The term training has a much more positive connotation because it’s used to improve and advance the player’s game and his or her net worth, so consequently they’re really happy to advertise the fact that they’re doing all this hard work and they’re being dedicated to the work. Therapy, on the other hand, has that more negative ring to it, that implication that something’s wrong with me so I’m going to be viewed as flawed and therefore somehow less valuable.”
MLB Network’s Peter Gammons reported that Grichuk’s predecessor, 37-year-old free-agent Jose Bautista, recently had his eyes checked. The diagnosis? Bautista’s vision was “really bad” after his final season as a Blue Jay, in which he slashed an anemic .203/ .308/.366 with a career-high 170 strikeouts.
Nelson and Dalton have no inside knowledge of Bautista’s vision history, but agree that even a subtle change for the worse would have played a part in his struggles.
“Things that might have been easy and fast to deal with when we were younger are a little bit harder as we start to get into even our mid-30s,” Dalton says. “Things are just a fraction of a second slower and in everyday life you don’t notice it, but a fraction of a second facing a baseball pitch is a lifetime.”
The slightest change could make all the difference, Nelson adds.
“The difference is minuscule (between) being successful or not successful and if one little thing changes, all of a sudden that could make the difference for an athlete.”