tracking the balls

[mkral]

Denise
I am sure Howard or Tewks will jump in and help out here but until then I will tell you what we have done to help. I have pinned a whiffle ball to the back of the pop up nets. About just above waist high on the back side of the net. We tell them to focus on that ball until toe touch then track to the ball on the tee. The whiffle ball on the back of the nets have helped a lot. It gives them a focal point. I just used zip ties (plastic ties) to hold them on.
Good Luck
Mike

 

[Tewks]

I have been looking into vision training programs, but haven't really found one that I really want to implement yet. I have 20/10 vision, so that helped make up for my lack of pure physical ability. I always tried to warm up my eyes before at bats. I read about going from a wide to narrow focus when I was young, which is what you need to do when hitting. When on deck, I start by focusing on the pitchers hat - specifically on the logo. Then I would zoom out to the center field distance marker - let's say the 400 ft sign (baseball... sorry.) So I would go back and forth between the logo on the hat and the 400 ft sign. Back and forth, back and forth. The first couple, it takes a second to focus, then it gets really precise. Once the focus felt immediate, I felt prepared - from a vision standpoint.

The same drill can be done before BP. I often tell my kids that the first round is more of an eye warmup than anything else. Let the ball get deep - try to see it as deep as possible. Work to the opposite field to start, then open up from there.

 

[PEPPERS]

They are staring at the ball on the tee. How can I get them to track the ball to the tee? Thanks Denise

I think I read where Howard had a clinch this week end so until he returns I can give an example of how we do it.

We (my daughter and I) learned it at a clinic at Alabama and it is simple.

Set the hitter at the tee, the hitter looks at where the pitcher would normally be. The hitter in their mind sees the pitcher go through the motion sees the ball come out of the imaginer pitchers hand and tracks the ball to the tee. The hitter practices just like at bat, rhythm and movement load stride and swing.

If we are at a place where I can safely stand be hind a net I stand behind a net go through a pitching motion and have my daughter key from my motion to track the ball as suggested above.

 

[PEPPERS]

Tewks it was suggested to me to use Flash Focus for Nintendo DS and I was advisd a number of players use it.

 

[mkral]

Denise,
Howard did have a clinic in Pittsburg this weekend so when he gets done I am sure he will jump in here.

Another thing we did today that really helped some of the kids is we had some of our pitchers pitch a wiffle ball into the back of the pop up net where the tee was set up. The batter tracked the wiffle ball then hit the ball off of the tee into the net. So the pitcher is on one side of the net and the hitter is on the other. This really worked well. It not only taught tracking the ball but also got timing down pretty well.

Good Luck!
Mike

 

[Lozza]

Yes, look for the squinters...many girls wear glasses in the classroom but are too vain, or don't like the bouncing, to where them when playing sports.

Or can't see the ball properly. As someone who has worn glasses her entire life, the ONE thing that I can recommend for any girls who need glasses who play is to get contacts. I could see the ball 100 times better and my batting improved out of sight when I started wearing them. I couldn't play with glasses now, the sweatiness and the lack of perhephrial vision would kill me.

 

[Hitter]

Denise

I found the older thread on tracking the ball and you may find it helpful.

Most of Team USA I was told used the Flash Focus program from Nintendo.

I have attended the vision training class presented by Doctor Bill Harrison of Slow the Game Down.com and would recommend
it. He does a lot of "stuff" with eye hand coordination while moving to improve your focus also.


Ken you might want to combine the thread as there is information in both that others may find helpful.

I put this together using my wife's medical book and Tom Verducci article from Sports Illustrated from March 2002 titled, Hitters Rule.

Eyes and tracking

HAP page 464; “Proprioceptors respond to stimuli in such deep body structures as joints, tendons, muscles, and the vestibular apparatus of the ear. They are involved with sensing where parts of the body are in relation to each other and the position of the body in space.”

When you turn your head quickly you see a blur and then the image catches up and you refocus again. In my opinion this is where we start having trouble tracking the ball and then everyone has an opinion on how to do it. Is the hitter using just their eyes, just their head or are they using both?

HAP page 474; “Hearing and equilibrium are considered in the same section (inner ear) because both sensations are received in the inner ear. The auditory apparatus, concerned with hearing, and the vestibular apparatus, concerned with posture and balance.”

HAP page 481; “The vestibular apparatus and equilibrium. The inner ear helps the body cope with changes in position and acceleration and deceleration. This vestibular apparatus signals changes in the motion of the head (dynamic equilibrium) and in the position of the head with respect to gravity (static equilibrium). The equilibrium system also receives input from the eyes and from some proprioceptors in the body, especially the joints. (Try standing on your toes with your eyes closed. Without your eyes to guide your body, you invariably begin to fall forward.)”

HAP page 496; “A set of six muscles moves the eyeball in its socket. The muscles are the four-rectus muscles and the superior and inferior oblique muscles. They are called extrinsic or extra ocular muscles because they are outside the eyeball. One end of each muscle is attached to a skull bone, and the other end is attached to the sclera of the eyeball. The extra ocular muscles are coordinated and synchronized so that both eyes move together in order to center on a single image. These movements are called the conjugate movements of the eye.” We feel the pencil drills helps this also and consider this weight lifting for the eyes.

Physiology of Vision

1. Refraction of light rays entering the eye.
2. Focusing of images on the retina by accommodation of the lens and convergence of the images.
3. Conversion of light waves by photochemical activity into neural impulses.
4. Processing of neural activity in the retina and transmission of coded impulses through the optic nerve.
5. Processing in the brain, culminating in perception-the object being seen.”

KYEOTB page 186; “To see the effects of this suppression look at the image of your right eye in a mirror. Now look at the image of your left eye. Did you see your eyes move? Probably not, because we have a process that turns off the visual system during saccadic eye movement. This is a comforting thing to do, because otherwise every time we made a saccadic eye movement, we would think that the world was flying around us. To prevent such confusion we suppress vision during saccade.”


Sports Illustrated, March 25, 2002 had a great article on hitting titled, Hitters Rule, by Tom Verducci. He covers what is called the contact hitter (Ichiro), the blended hitter (Giambi) and the power hitter (Thome). Remember I said I wouldn’t talk styles of hitting.

On page 69, “Says Delgado, “At times when I’m going good, I can see the bottom half of the ball on it’s way to the plate. That’s were I want to hit it.” And “Jeter is another hitter with extraordinary vision. He’s often able to see in the blur of the pitcher’s arm moving forward whether what’s coming at him is the bottom of the pitcher’s wrist (indicating a fastball) or the side of the wrist (indicating a breaking ball). “I’ve tried, but I can’t see it, “Yankees catcher Jorge Posada says. “I don’t know how he does it.” Rodriquez trains his eyes to focus quickly. While in the on deck-deck circle, he holds his bat a few inches from his face, the trademark facing him. He focuses on the trademark, and then quickly shifts his focus to the face of the centerfielder.”
Page 70, Martinez. “He performs eye exercises twice a day, for 45 minutes in the morning and then for five to 10 minutes about 30 minutes before game time. Martinez keeps a worn card, slightly larger than an index card that has a green circle to the left and a red circle to the right. Inside the perimeter of both circles are the words THESE LETTERS, though the R is missing from the green circle and the first T in LETTERS is missing from the red. When he stares at a spot between the two circles, because of a process optics experts call binocular fusion, a brown circle appears with all the letters of THESE LETTERS.” (Note you must stare at the center between the circles and yes it works!) The difficult letter for me is the (T) in the brown circle. I wear tri-focal glasses. “This exercise strengthens his eye muscles.” And “Attempting to improve his depth perception, Martinez will shift his focus from one of those letters to a spot on a distant wall with the same grid of letters, only larger, and then back again. Martinez also bunts against those high velocity tennis balls. (Other times, after slowing their speed, he tries to read the number on them as they whiz by.) “After tracking a smaller ball going 150 miles per hour,” Martinez says, “a baseball going 90 doesn’t seem so fast.”

The vestibular system sends signals primarily to the neural structures that control our eye movements, and to the muscles that keep us upright. The projections to the former provide the anatomical basis of the vestibulo-ocular reflex, which is required for clear vision; and the projections to the muscles that control our posture are necessary to keep us upright.
The vestibulo-ocular reflex. A rotation of the head is detected, which triggers an inhibitory signal to the extra ocular muscles on one side and an excitatory signal to the muscles on the other side. The result is a compensatory movement of the eyes.
Main article: Vestibulo-ocular reflex
The vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) is a reflex eye movement that stabilizes images on the retina during head movement by producing an eye movement in the direction opposite to head movement, thus preserving the image on the center of the visual field. For example, when the head moves to the right, the eyes move to the left, and vice versa. Since slight head movements are present all the time, the VOR is very important for stabilizing vision: patients whose VOR is impaired find it difficult to read, because they cannot stabilize the eyes during small head tremors. The VOR reflex does not depend on visual input and works even in total darkness or when the eyes are closed.This is why we give our head a head start and use a blind fold to teach our head and body positions must be the same even if our eyes are closed and it build confidence.
This reflex, combined with the push-pull principle described above, forms the physiological basis of the Rapid head impulse test or Halmagyi-Curthoys-test, in which the head is rapidly and forcefully moved to the side, while controlling if the eyes keep looking in the same direction.

They used a professional baseball player named Brian Harper and two others however my interest centered on him since the others had no experience. He demonstrated traits I would expect a pro to use.

Of interest were the others in ability to track the ball like the pro. They give the direction of tracking the ball in degrees from the fovea of the eye. To gain an understanding of this he suggested using a 12-inch ruler and holding it in front of you at arm’s length. Look at the left end of the ruler and the right end is about 34 degrees off the fovea. While looking at the left end you won’t be able to read the numbers on the right side. Because the two other people were using just their eyes or just their head, they did not track it as well as the pro. Brian tracked the ball using head and eye movements, keeping his eye on the ball longer than the other persons did. He did not track the ball to the point of bat and ball collision.

KYEOTB page 177; “He was able to keep his position error below 2 degrees until the ball was within 5.5 ft. from the plate, at which point he began to fall behind. When the ball was 2 ft. in front of the plate the image of the ball was already 16 degrees off his fovea and was going 1,100 degrees per second. Thus, he was no longer tracking the ball.”

Again he did not track the ball to the point where he could see the ball and bat collide because it is not possible.

He did give his head a head start. In addition, he was better at suppressing the vestibulo-ocular reflex and making his head and eyes move in the same direction.
This allowed him to track the ball with equal-sized head and eye movements, whereas the other subjects usually tracked with either head or eye movements.”

“Together these three superiorities allowed the professional athlete to track the ball to 5.5 ft. in front of the plate compared to our students who fell behind at the 9 ft. mark.”

Note: He did not see the bat and the ball collide!

Thanks Howard

 

[PEPPERS]

Hitter

Have you ever worked with a kid with eye stigmatism , any insight who this could effect vision and how to help?

I saw where you advised that you had a clinic this weekend any place where there is a list of upcoming clinics. I just lucked into the one we attended and some people were asking if any more were around Georgia.

 

[Hitter]

Hitter

Have you ever worked with a kid with eye stigmatism , any insight who this could effect vision and how to help?

I saw where you advised that you had a clinic this weekend any place where there is a list of upcoming clinics. I just lucked into the one we attended and some people were asking if any more were around Georgia.

Peppers

You may try Gotbustos@gmail.com for up coming clinic advice.

I am not an eye specialist and would not offer advice on how to correct that situation.

Some of my kids have had very unusual problems so I work with them on trying to figure it out based on the input the doctors give them and the drills they recommend as to vision training.

Thanks Howard

 

[jimginas]

1) Make sure the batter has BOTH eyes toward the pitcher and does NOT have their back eye on a 45 degree trying to see the ball. (Batters often do NOT turn their heads fully to the pitcher.

SOMETIMES the issue is they try and track the ball too early - focuing too early can cause less of actual vision.... many batters are ready to hit before the pitcher is ready to pitch.. hands up (meaning muscles start to tense up, slowing their nervous system to initiate the swing) and too early to focus.
..... we started teaching soft-look at pitchers hip and then track the ball from hip to contact and EVERY SWING - ESPECIALLY in practice (TEES, soft-toss, quick-hands, machine. FRONT -TOSS) -> Keep eyes on contact point if they swing, whether they made contact or not, so they learn not to pull their heads off the ball..

I like darting small wiffle golf balls from a short distance and VISION training drills.
****** Batters need to learn to read the seams of the pitch (Ball pulls to direction of the seams) and the best way to do this is CONCENTRATED effort to watch seams. Great time to do this is when pitchers are working with catchers and I tell batter stand in withOUT a bat and tell me what the pitch was doing. seams moving 12/6 - drop? / 6/12-rise? , pulling away or spinning toward her side of the plate..... (( Turnover changeups... As SOON as they recognize the back of the hand off the hip..... reload and drill the changeup if its where you can make good contact.........))
VISION TRAINING is HARDER to do then to teach, BUT players that are committed to their improvement will make time to learn to SEE the ball and NOT JUST SWING in batting practice.... Coaches should incorporate vision training into the practice schedule. It takes a lot of time and most coaches or players will NOT COMMIT to that.