“Keep your eye on the ball”. It’s a phrase we’ve all heard 1000 times, but is it right?
Research from Joan Vickers says no. According to Vickers, the longer we are able to hold an eye fixation (particularly at the point of ball release), the better our hitting performance will be.
We can see in the video above that Bonds’ eyes are far from tracking the pitch as it approaches the plate. Instead, he has established a fixation on the point of ball release, and is seemingly gathering all of his visual information from that point.
We can think about it in terms of a hard vs soft focus. Think about hard focus as zooming in on one specific point as much as possible. Think about soft focus as looking at nothing in particular, but being aware of what’s in your visual field.
By utilizing a soft focus with fixation, we’ll be better able to pick up ball release and initial ball spin for better hitting performance.