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Everyone's reporting on a couple of close calls (the narrow escape kind, there aren't any umpires involved) down in Florida. I'm glad nobody's seriously hurt, but more than fluky accident reports and haunted sprinkler systems, this caught my attention:

Frank Catalanotto recently underwent successful Lasix eye surgery to improve his sight.

One of the reasons I could hit a little, back in the day, was the gift of 20-15 eyesight; I was able to pick up the spin on the ball as soon as it left the pitcher's hand. (Now I peer over the top of my reading glasses, and my distance vision is beginning to deteriorate; we'll find out if I can still hit high-schoolers when practice begins next week). Unless you're Alfonso Soriano or Vladimir Guerrero, there's a lot of physics calculatations in 0.4 seconds, including location ("is that in my ear?") and speed, so if you get a clue whether it's fastball, curve or slider a few milliseconds earlier, that's a big advantage.

Recently, I was talking to someone about Jays farmhand Jim Deschaine, who had always been a contact hitter before his terrible 2002 at AA Tennessee, and suggested the team should take him to an optometrist. Your eyes change over time, rarely for the better. If Cat, who can already hit -- .331/.390/.499 vs. RH in 2001 -- sees the ball a bit better, that's great news, especially if he can avoid being killed by fly balls.
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_Jurgen Maas - Thursday, February 27 2003 @ 12:16 PM EST (#95460) #
I read something somewhere that said Ted Williams had 20/10 eyesight according to the army doctors.

Somebody wrote an article somewhere/sometime discussing the importance of eyesight in evaluating prospects... or at least I think that's what it was about. I couldn't find it with a brief google search. Anyways, I think the argument was that Bonds had the best vision in MLB, and that teams should start paying more attention to player's vision.
_Matthew Elmslie - Thursday, February 27 2003 @ 12:50 PM EST (#95461) #
I remember reading in one of Ron Luciano's books that Darrell Evans had *terrible* eyesight. I wonder how he was able to hit as well as he did? I'm not trying to step on your point or anything; obviously eyesight is important. I just wonder how it's possible to compensate for bad eyesight.
_Jurgen Maas - Thursday, February 27 2003 @ 01:04 PM EST (#95462) #
That's interesting, Matthew. Maybe Evans guessed more than most? Maybe Luciano was wrong?

With all the talk of performance enhancing drugs potentially devaluing the old time records, I wonder if Sean Bean's Acuview contact lenses might be just as much to blame?
_Matthew Elmslie - Thursday, February 27 2003 @ 02:36 PM EST (#95463) #
Well, this particular book wasn't so much a Luciano book as it was Luciano giving some lesser-known ballplayers a chance to tell their stories - these guys weren't stars, so they'd never have the chance to publish their own autobiographies, so Luciano let each of them contribute a chapter-long autobiography to his book. In addition to Evans, there was Marc Hill, Steve Nicosia, Milt Wilcox, Mike Squires, Julio Cruz... Mike Easler... Greg Minton... I forget who else.

Anyway, that was Evans himself talking about his eyesight, so I think the chances of him being wrong about it are pretty slim.
_Jordan - Thursday, February 27 2003 @ 03:00 PM EST (#95464) #
I was quite saddened when Ron Luciano took his own life.... I greatly enjoyed his books (well, the first one and most of the second, anyway), and he seemed to have a great joie de vivre and love of the game. Probably he wasn't a very good umpire, and I could always see Earl Weaver's point that an umpire shouldn't be bigger than the game. But I still liked the idea of an umpire who would shout "Foulfoulfoulfoul" whenever a bat slipped out of the hitter's hands down the first-base line, and who'd chat with fans between innings. There hasn't been anyone like him since.

I also greatly liked Dutch Rennert. "Straaaahke..... Waaahhhhhhhhn."
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