Why Cubs leadoff hitter Ian Happ sees vision training as baseball’s next frontier

SAN DIEGO – Cubs leadoff hitter Ian Happ can picture a future where every MLB team will have a vision coach on staff, a sort of specialized hitting coach. In a league 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 said in a recent conversion with the Sun-Times. “Can you quantify it? Is it something you can say, this is having a real impact?”

In the meantime, Happ is on his own vision training quest, which has intersected with inflection points in his career – a college resume that made him a first-round pick, a disappointing demotion to begin 2019, an All-Star selection. Through that journey, he’s pondered that same question: Is it having a quantifiable impact?

When tracking a baseball out of a major-league pitcher’s hand, having 20/20 vision – aided by contacts or not – isn’t enough. Little things like how quickly a hitter’s eyes move in a certain direction could affect the ability to pick up spin, for example.

The past couple years, Happ established a routine. Every day he juggles and goes through a vision card sequence. Sometimes he’ll also mix in other training tools like string – you put it on your nose and trace the image back and forth with your eyes – or a sort of two-sided magnifying glass – you flip it back and forth from the clear side to the blurry side.

“It’s probably the least known part about baseball,” Cubs hitting coach Dustin Kelly told the Sun-Times this week. “Which is incredible because the eyes are probably the most important part. 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 some 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 vision training came during his freshman year at the University of Cincinnati, in 2013.

The team, in 2010 and 2011, had participated in a study on the effects of vision training. The authors of the research article,

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,” Happ said. “I don’t know if it benefited me at ton in college, but it was something that I was familiar with.”

So, when Happ 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 and he recorded a career-high .899 OPS the rest of the season. He kept at his vision training through 2020, even reaching out to his former athletic trainer, Aaron Himmler, at Cincinnati for drills. But Happ 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 said.

He got serious about vision training again leading into the 2022 season, and he’d end up putting together the best offensive season of his career, make the All-Star team and claim 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.

Happ’s vision training is no longer only informed by his college experience. He’s taken bits and pieces from experts and other sports. A study about juggling’s effects on the brain’s white matter interested him. While watching the ‘Formula 1: Drive to Survive’ documentary series on Netflix, he seized upon their use of tennis balls for reaction training.

Happ has committed to the practice. And while for baseball, the question of how to measure the effect could steer the industry’s buy-in, for him, it’s essentially moot at this point.

“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.”