Seeing Eye Home Run
This week’s two minute read is a sappy baseball story. Please subscribe and share for weekly sports and crime flash fiction.
Seeing Eye Home Run
Hitting is timing. Pitching is upsetting timing. – Warren Spahn
Mike Sabiler stood in the batter's box that he owned to such an extent you could run a clean title search on it. After more than 3000 major league at bats in many ways this would be his first.
Yesterday he finally had the conversation that had been weighing on him for a year or more. With his father. The creator of his career. And, with mom of course, his life. In that order.
“Dad, I can’t see,” he finally admitted to someone. It felt good to say out loud no matter how much bad it portended.
“Driving is a problem. Watching TV. Reading menus. Catching fly balls. I haven’t said anything to anyone. Not to Mindy, although she is bound to catch on soon. Not to the club, of course. Somehow by miracle it has not impacted my hitting. Yet.”
Sabiler was legendary already at age 23. He had accumulated in half the time the counting stats of a ten-year veteran headed to Cooperstown. Stat-heads and eye-test purists alike loved his game.
The senior Sabiler was almost equally famous for his unorthodox methods, but who could quibble with the results. Legendary blindfolded batting practice. Hours of hitting drills without a ball. Timers everywhere like a Swiss watch factory. Crafting a bottomless catalogue of swings for every pitch speed and type.
His dad went to the dusty file cabinet in the corner of his memorabilia-laden office. He pulled a yellowing lab report out of a Manila folder and handed it to his weeping son.
“Dad I can’t read very well anymore.”
Which was true. But he could make out the high points. His name listed as patient. Age 3. The ophthalmologist report. A lot of jargon but ultimately the diagnosis: Likely legally blind by mid 20’s.
“You knew about this! And never told me!” he shrieked, sobbing.
“Son, this is what we have been training for since you could walk,” his father said evenly. “To be honest, it’s been years since you hit a ball based on sight. Without realizing it you’ve been hitting, and hitting historically well, almost wholly by timing. And to the extent senses play a role at all you’ve been guided as much by the sound, hell even the smell of the ball than anything else. Truthfully, there’s not much vision can do to help with the speeds and distances we are talking about here, in your heart I think you know that.”
In the batter's box he used the first pitch as a dry run. He knew it would be a waste pitch to try to get him to chase. He would let it go by. But in doing so he observed that he could identify the start of the windup with ease. By sound. And the path of the ball by its buzz.
He knew from years of general programming and recent pitcher-specific scouting what kind of pitch would come next. A fastball. Outside. But in the zone to avoid a 2-0 count. He knew the hurler’s velocity maxed out at about 97mph. From there it was just a matter of plugging in those inputs to engineer the correct swing. Like picking a song on a jukebox.
For the second pitch he actually closed his eyes. Listened for the crunch of the metal spikes into the mound initiating the windup, the gutteral grunt accompanying the ball’s release. Activated the foolproof internal clock. Confirmed by the hum of the pill it was on the proper flight path. Swung away. From the heels.
It’s true what they say about the other senses becoming heightened when one of them isn’t used, he thought, circling the blurry bases. The crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd sounded louder than ever.