Large increase in team batting average, from 251 to 280 after entire team underwent Vision Therapy
High-Performance Vision Training Improves Batting Statistics for University of Cincinnati Baseball Players
Joseph F. Clark1,4, James K. Ellis3, Johnny Bench5, Jane Khoury4, Pat Graman2*
1 Department of Neurology, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, United States of America, 2 College of Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, United States of America, 3 University Health Services and Department of Athletics, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, United States of America, 4 Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, Ohio, United States of America, 5 Hall of Fame catcher from Cincinnati Reds, Stryker spokesman and http://opdocs.com/OpDocs.com spokesman, Cincinnati, Ohio, United States of America
Purpose
Baseball 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.
Methods
All 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.
Results
The 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.
Conclusion
Vision 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.
Citation: Clark JF, Ellis JK, Bench J, Khoury J, Graman P (2012) High-Performance Vision Training Improves Batting Statistics for University of Cincinnati Baseball Players. PLoS ONE 7(1): e29109. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0029109
Editor: Alejandro Lucia, Universidad Europea de Madrid, Spain
Received: September 28, 2011; Accepted: November 21, 2011; Published: January 19, 2012
Copyright: © 2012 Clark et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: This work was supported in part by National Institutes of Health grant EB007954. No additional external funding was received. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: JB holds the positions of Stryker Corporation spokesman and OpDocs.com spokesman. This does not alter the authors’ adherence to all the PLoS ONE policies on sharing data and materials, as detailed online in the guide for authors.
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