Abstract
PurposeBaseball requires an incredible amount of visual acuity and eye-hand coordination, especially for the batters. The learning objective of this work is to observe that traditional vision training as part of injury prevention or conditioning can be added to a team's training schedule to improve some performance parameters such as batting and hitting.MethodsAll players for the 2010 to 2011 season underwent normal preseason physicals and baseline testing that is standard for the University of Cincinnati Athletics Department. Standard vision training exercises were implemented 6 weeks before the start of the season. Results are reported as compared to the 2009 to 2010 season. Pre season conditioning was followed by a maintenance program during the season of vision training.ResultsThe University of Cincinnati team batting average increased from 0.251 in 2010 to 0.285 in 2011 and the slugging percentage increased by 0.033. The rest of the Big East's slugging percentage fell over that same time frame 0.082. This produces a difference of 0.115 with 95% confidence interval (0.024, 0.206). As with the batting average, the change for University of Cincinnati is significantly different from the rest of the Big East (p = 0.02). Essentially all batting parameters improved by 10% or more. Similar differences were seen when restricting the analysis to games within the Big East conference.ConclusionVision training can combine traditional and technological methodologies to train the athletes' eyes and improve batting. Vision training as part of conditioning or injury prevention can be applied and may improve batting performance in college baseball players. High performance vision training can be instituted in the pre-season and maintained throughout the season to improve batting parameters.
Highlights
Baseball is a sport with a tremendous amount of quantitative batting data being generated from batting averages, slugging percentages, and numbers of hits, walks, strike outs and a host of others
There is general agreement that vision training is beneficial to various sports related activities but an objective and quantifiable assessment validating the concept is relatively lacking in the literature [1]
We found that many batting parameters increased significantly for the team when compared to the opponents’ performance as well as the Big East Conference’s performance
Summary
Baseball is a sport with a tremendous amount of quantitative batting data being generated from batting averages, slugging percentages, and numbers of hits, walks, strike outs and a host of others. Batting is an activity that has rigorous demands for eye-hand coordination requiring concentration and good visual acuity as well as depth perception. There is general agreement that vision training is beneficial to various sports related activities but an objective and quantifiable assessment validating the concept is relatively lacking in the literature [1]. The time it takes for a pitched ball to reach the plate is approximately 0.4 seconds. In that time the batter needs to spot the pitch, assess rotation and direction of the ball to make a decision to swing or not [2]. When swinging the bat the batter must consider both the timing of the swing and the angle of the swing
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