Baseball’s Curse of the Baby Blues

The eyes have it.

A couple of years ago former Baltimore Orioles coach Buck Showalter appeared on ESPN during a Baseball Tonight segment called Scouting the Body, all about what recruiters look for physically in an ideal baseball player. He pointed out that the best players have brown eyes. While there are great green and blue-eyed players, Showalter says, “Scouts don’t like to see hitters in a perfect world have anything other than brown eyes.”

In the last couple of weeks the very blue-eyed Texas baseballer Josh Hamilton began using special contacts to improve his daytime batting average. He blames his eye color for the disparity between his day and night time batting averages. And, now doctors are backing up that theory.

Dr. Richard L. Ison is the Hamilton’s optometrist outside of Dallas who agrees that light-eyed people have more difficulty deflecting glare. This is especially true for baseball players.

Dr. Ison says, “”Because of the lack of pigment in lighter color eyes, like blue or green eyes as opposed to brown, you get a lot more unwanted light and that can create glare problems.”

The phenomenon is called intraocular light scatter or straylight. According to several eye studies light transmittance through the iris is higher in light-blue-eyed people than in dark-brown-eyed people. Many eye doctors think that different eye colors influence straylight by reflection from the fundus oculi. A retinal pigment epithelium in the fundus oculi absorbs light and to prevent light scattering. In dark-eyed people, the color of fundus oculi is brownish-red in it is orange in light blue-eyed Caucasians.

So there is real science to back up Hamilton’s claim. While blue-eyed people may be more predisposed for sensitivity toward bright light because they scatter more light than they absorb, is this why Hamilton’s daytim batting average is one-third of his nighttime average?

Dave Cameron over at FanGraphs.com says unequivocally no. After first hearing of the Hamilton story, he asked his audience to help him crowdsource all the blue-eyed baseball hitters and run their averages to see if this was a real trend. He was quite impressed with the rapid response which allowed him to quickly conduct his experiment using a sample size of 25 players with blue eyes.

He says, “The sample of blue-eyed players we looked at follows the trend established by the rest of Major League Baseball.”

After looking at batting averages for 47,000 daytime appearances and 100,000 nighttime games, he found the blue-eyed baseballers hit just about the same during the day and during the night.

He says, “This non-difference matches up with the rest of the population, as there is no consistent historical day/night split for Major League hitters over the years.”

Among his sample of blue-eyed batters, Cameron says they split evenly, with 13 hitting better during the day and 12 hitting better at night.

One of the players Cameron singled out was Mark Grace, a blue-eyed former Chicago Cub. He says, “Grace is perhaps one of the most interesting cases, as his eyes are very blue and he spent the majority of his career with the Chicago Cubs, who play more day games than any other franchise in baseball.” Yet Grace collected the most hits (1,754) in the 1990s.

Calvin D. Esbaugh told MSNBC.com “The deal is, if someone has less pigment in their iris, they could potentially be more sensitive to sunlight.”

After wearing contacts that tint his eyes red, Hamilton reports that his daytime vision is better, making it easier to hit the ball. He says the glare from home plate and the brightness of the ball are not as bad as they were.

Cameron says, “Maybe Hamilton is the outlier here. Maybe his eyes are especially sensitive, and he’ll sustain a large day/night split going forward. It seems more likely, however, that we’re just looking at noise generated by looking at a sample of fewer than 600 career plate appearances, and Hamilton was looking for a reason to explain something that goes beyond randomness.”

More than straylight, Hamilton may be suffering from photophobia, or light sensitivity.

Dr. Esbaugh says, “Although not every blue-eyed person would be equally affected there are other factors involved in light sensitivity besides eye color, such as the density of rods and cones — the light receptors — in your retina.”

A blogger known as Baseball Guru says, “Mickey Mantle and George Brett both had blue eyes, and both performed slightly better during the day. While optomotrists have sided with Hamilton and said that it is true, I am a skeptic and not a believer, for the Mickey Mantle and George Brett reasons.”