NEW YORK — The classic eye chart adorning the wall in nearly every vision care provider’s office hails from the work of Dutch ophthalmologist Herman Snellen in 1862, a continent and century away from modern baseball.
Snellen’s concoction is black print on white paper with a bottom line whose minute typeface rarely poses a challenge to a major league hitter, with respondents often granted infinite time to discern each letter.
“Well, that didn’t seem very realistic to hitting a baseball,” Dr. Daniel Laby, an ophthalmologist and leading sports vision expert, said with obvious understatement, noting that a hitter typically has half the time to decide to swing (150 milliseconds) than the duration of an average human blink (300 milliseconds).
Laby, whose client list (Boston Red Sox, Houston Astros, Cleveland Indians, Chicago Cubs and Tampa Bay Rays) includes three of the last five World Series winners and one NBA team, began working with the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1990s, during which time the vast majority of players widely exceeded the baseline 20-20 standard and had little trouble with the 20-15 line at the bottom of the chart. In fact, his research found that the average hitter rated to 20-12 — that is, could see from 20 feet away what others could see from 12 feet of distance.
Such superior visual acuity was necessary, given the demands of the task: hitting a red-seamed baseball on a sometimes scuffed white cowhide — and thus posing a much weaker contrast than in Snellen’s test — all while the target spins and cuts to the plate in about four-tenths of a second. Laby set to work researching a better visual exam, one that was ultimately funded by a major pharmaceutical company seeking evaluations for patients with macular degeneration and other health issues.
This new iPad-administered test, called OptimEYEs, features quickly disappearing characters in a wide range of sizes and contrasts. (It is, in the estimation of this SportTechie reporter, much, much, much more challenging than Snellen’s chart.) Laby is in the midst of writing a paper connecting stronger visual function results on the OptimEYEs test with better plate discipline metrics.
“We wanted to develop tests that included contrast, size and time of presentation,” Laby said, before adding: “The technology isn’t just to hit a baseball better and help your team win the World Series. It is, frankly, to make it better for everybody.”
Laby is a doctor willing to break with convention conversely by adhering to it. In other words, he has shed the Snellen eye chart because there are better options. He has endorsed the elimination of baseball batting practice as it currently exists, arguing that the vast visual discrepancy between game and warmups could be detrimental. Laby wrote that a virtual reality simulator is one such alternative.
His reasoning, as is the case for all Laby’s recommendations, is rooted in evidence-based practices that require rigorous validation of methods and data. (That his MLB roster is stocked with some of the sport’s most analytically-inclined organizations is probably not coincidental.) Of the dozen studies he’s published, including a recent one about the impact of refractive errors in hitters’ eyes, most have had hundreds of subjects. His results are self-evident, given the teams he’s worked with and a trove of memorabilia in his office — with hundreds and hundreds of autographs and photos of players from the Red Sox’ David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez and Nomar Garciaparra to the Astros’ Carlos Correa — that would make a professional collectors envious.
OptimEYEs has now been in use for about five years and is available through a company Laby co-founded with a longtime research partner, optometrist Dr. David Kirschen, and David Meadows, a chemical engineering Ph.D. who worked as a scientist for pharmaceutical companies. That company is called 20over8, referring to the 20/8 vision that’s at the presumed limit of human capacity (and where several ballplayers have scored).
This exam is a diagnostic tool, not a training program, as one’s visual acuity can only be improved by glasses, contact lenses and LASIK — not that Laby would urge any baseball player to have the laser-refractive surgery.
What Laby has found is that there generally is a minimum vision threshold for baseball.
“If you’re 20-15 or better, I think you have the resolution ability to detect the spin and get that piece of the puzzle into account,” Laby said.
The issue with LASIK, therefore, is that the procedure typically results in vision that’s at least 20-20, but that’s not good enough for hitting major league pitching. The proportion who ultimately have 20-15 vision is not high. Furthermore, LASIK can sometimes result in side effects like dry eye and glare problems. Driving the point home further: Laby studied the on-field results of players who had the operation and found not statistically significant difference between their performance before and after the surgery.
“The bottom line is that we tell all players we take care of to do LASIK the day after they retire,” Laby said. “In other words, it is not what they should do during their careers.”
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In addition to his work in baseball, Laby is the director of the Sports and Performance Vision Center at SUNY Optometry and has worked with teams and players in the NBA, NHL, Olympic program and the lacrosse and hockey squads at West Point. (Among non-sports projects, Laby is consulting on New York City’s Vision Zero program to reduce traffic fatalities, and he has worked with the rapper Nelly which, he said, is “a long story.”) He believes in catering vision training to the particular needs of each athlete because targeted interventions, as one might expect, are more efficient than general recommendations.
On this point, he believes there’s a lot of wasted effort the sports vision field, with too much effort spent on unnecessary skills — Laby said there’s no evidence that convergence ability of the eyes, for instance, has been shown to impact baseball performance — and unnecessary expectations. Improving beyond certain thresholds is immaterial. Much of his work is with minor league players and draft prospects, who might need more vision training, as big leaguers generally already have elite visual skills.
“I have no evidence that, if you’re 20-12 or 20-10 or 20-8 — which are all better than 20-15 — you’re going to hit better,” he said. “If you’re 20-30, I have evidence that you’re not going to hit.”
Good to be back in the Dominican Republic testing future @MLB players! pic.twitter.com/xUy3dkUt55
— Daniel Laby, MD (@SportsVisionNYC) July 31, 2017
This follows his broader research interest in the entire visual and neurological process tracking the progress of a photon of light from the baseball to the eye and on into the brain. Of the necessary mosaic of visual skills (acuity, depth perception, et al.), each is like a gate that either allows the athlete to complete the task or not.
“It’s this gateway idea: Any one of these is a possible roadblock for that photon to do its job,” Laby said, adding: “Now, if you have a gate that’s good enough open to get through but isn’t wide open, do you gain anything by making it wider open? And I think not because the photon passes that gate unhindered and efficiently, so making someone’s ability better when it’s already good, it doesn’t do anything.”
To improve athlete’s all-around acumen, Laby employs an array of technological tools. The Sports Vision Trainer measures visual motor performance and hand-eye coordination with a proven link to plate discipline in baseball — at least for the top and bottom quintiles. Laby said players with the top 20 percent or bottom 20 percent of scores on SVT have a correspondingly excellent or poor batting eye, while the middle 60 percent is largely indistinguishable.
A similar tool made by Dynavision is helpful in training, Laby said, even if there is no scientific correlation with elite baseball performance because one shouldn’t practice on the same format as the test itself. Some other useful programs for concentration and motion-tracking include Neurotracker, deCervo and Neuroscouting.
A helmet with cameras facing both toward and away from the wearer’s eyes to simultaneously track eye movement and viewpoint, monitoring a concept developed by University of Calgary cognitive psychologist Joan Vickers called the Quiet Eye. “It’s looking at the period of time before the crucial act of the sport and after where your eyes are fixed on the position of greatest importance,” Laby said.
Research by Vickers and others in the field — Laby has completed an unpublished study for baseball — correlating success with longer durations of quiet eye. Vickers once wrote, “With the attainment of sports expertise, measurable changes occur in the visuomotor networks and QE as a consequence of extensive training and real world competition. Because the QE onset occurs prior to the final critical movement, and is of longer duration when performance is higher, the QE period represents the window of time when the neural networks are organized prior to and during motor execution.”
Laby said a hitter’s eyes tend to follow the pitcher’s throwing hand out of his glove to a point where he anticipates the ball being released. There, the eyes briefly linger.
“That becomes another piece of technology that we can measure,” Laby said, “and you can actually train the quiet eye.”