SAN DIEGO — Cubs leadoff hitter Ian Happ can picture a future in which every major-league team has a vision coach on staff — a sort of specialized hitting coach. In a sport obsessed with sniffing out the slightest advantage, it’s almost hard to believe there hasn’t already been more of a push to find an edge in vision training.
“But it’s just going to depend on if there’s teams that want to invest money into it, I guess,” Happ told the Sun-Times recently. “Can you quantify it? Is it something you can say, ‘This is having a real impact?’ ”
In the meantime, Happ, 29, is on his own vision-training quest, which has continued from college — where he built a résumé that led to the Cubs drafting him ninth overall in 2015 — to a demotion to begin the 2019 season to an All-Star nod in 2022. Along the way, he has pondered the same question: Is vision training having a quantifiable impact?
When tracking a ball out of a pitcher’s hand, having 20/20 vision — aided by contact lenses or not — isn’t enough. Little things, such as how quickly a hitter’s eyes move in a certain direction, could affect an ability to pick up spin, for example.
The last couple of years, Happ has established a routine. Each day, he juggles and goes through a vision card sequence. Sometimes he’ll also mix in other training tools, such as string — placed on the nose before tracing an image back and forth with his eyes — or a sort of two-sided magnifying glass, flipped back and forth from the clear side to the blurry side.
“[Vision training is] probably the least known part about baseball, which is incredible because the eyes are probably the most important part,” Cubs hitting coach Dustin Kelly told the Sun-Times this week. “It’s just really hard to quantify how guys see the baseball, what they look for and how to really train it.”
The Cubs have training devices in their batting cages for players to use.
“Ian is definitely the most diligent with what his routine is with it, though,” Kelly said.
Happ’s introduction to the concept came during his freshman year at Cincinnati, in 2013.
The team, in 2010 and 2011, had participated in a study on the effects of vision training. The observational study – entitled “High-Performance Vision Training Improves Batting Statistics for University of Cincinnati Baseball Players,” and authored by several professors at Cincinnati, the team optometrist, and Hall of Famer Johnny Bench – compared the team statistics from one season to the next.
It acknowledged that a variety of other factors could have contributed to the team’s offensive improvement. But the team saw enough benefit in the vision training that they were still implementing it as a hitting station when Happ joined.
“It was super interesting stuff,” he said. “I don’t know if it benefited me a ton in college, but it was something I was familiar with.”
So when he was struggling at the plate to begin the 2019 season, particularly against fastballs, he delved back into vision training.
“I didn’t feel like my swing was that far off,” Happ said. “I just felt like I was swinging at pitches, not hitting them. And I felt like I was right on, timing-wise, and missing. I was looking for what could cause that.”
The Cubs recalled Happ in late July that year; he had a career-high .899 OPS the rest of the season. He kept at the vision training through 2020, even reaching out to his former athletic trainer, Aaron Himmler, at Cincinnati for drills. But he doesn’t try to draw a straight line between his vision training and improvement at the plate.
“I don’t know if I saw [a difference] in ’19 or ’20,” he admitted.
He got serious about it again leading into the 2022 season and ended up with the best offensive season of his career with the All-Star selection and his first Gold Glove.
“I struggled a lot in ’21 in the first half and then had a lot of success in the last month and a half, and was looking, again, for something that would give me an edge and help me continue to develop,” he said.
He has since taken bits and pieces from experts and other sports. A study about juggling’s effects on the brain interested him. While watching the “Formula 1: Drive to Survive” series on Netflix, he seized upon drivers’ use of tennis balls for reaction training.
He’s now committed to the practice. Buy-in across baseball might depend on measurable effects, but it’s a moot point for him.
“I think in baseball, it’s whatever gives you confidence,” Happ said. “So juggling and doing vision cards for 10 minutes a day gives me confidence. That’s the important part.”
