At 39, Edgar sees continued success

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At 39, Edgar sees continued success

Tuesday, March 19, 2002

By ART THIEL
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

PEORIA, Ariz. -- A week after the past season ended, Edgar Martinez was back in the weight room, and back upon the exercise bike.

A week later, he was in the batting cage almost daily until he left for spring training.

Season after season, decade after decade, the training habits of Martinez become part of franchise fable. Now they are even more intense, because at 39, he says, "If I take a break now, I notice it's more difficult to get back."

A part of the training regimen includes something few have noticed, because it involves avoiding what nearly every ballplayer does during the day of a game.

No TV viewing.

No computer work.

No reading.

And not for any reasons of snobbery or vapidness.

Martinez has a vision condition called strabismus, the use of only one eye while the other goes in another direction. If he doesn't rest his eyes before games, he runs a risk of being unable to judge the speed of a pitched baseball.

For one employed exclusively as a designated hitter of pitches that arrive in four-tenths of a second, the skill is somewhat useful.

"I've been dealing with it for years," Martinez said. "Kids used to make fun of me in school."

Martinez is left-eye dominant, while the muscles of his right eye intermittently pull the eyeball to the outside. The result is that the brain automatically shuts down the right eye's information temporarily (called central suppression) in order to avoid altered vision.

But that makes for momentary monocular vision instead of binocular vision, or a loss of depth perception.

For a hitter, depth perception is vital to detect ball speed. Without it, the ball appears in two dimensions until it is in the catcher's mitt.

Or the batter's ribs.


	Edgar Martinez hits the deck after a close pitch from the A's Barry Zito. Martinez's vision condition sometimes causes him to bail out on a strike. Mike Urban / Seattle Post-Intelligencer Click for larger photo

"That's why you sometimes see Edgar bail out on a pitch when it's a called strike," said Doug Nikaitani, an Issaquah optometrist and the team's vision specialist. "Occasionally he will lose the ball. When that happens, he's better off to pull back, and protect his hands and head."

With a career average of .319 and two American League batting championships, Martinez's career already was remarkable enough. But when one considers the effort put in just to maintain a basic function taken for granted by nearly all major league hitters, another dimension is added to the legend.

"I do different exercises for different things," he said. "They're designed to get the eyes to work together.

"If I move my head or eyes quickly in one direction, the brain shuts down my right eye until I work to bring the eye back where it belongs. That's why when I'm hitting, I have to concentrate on the pitcher when he begins to throw. I can't look at baserunners or infielders, because I can't be sure I'll see the pitch."

The condition is intermittent, but since Martinez can't control the occurrences, he has to be diligent about exercises and rest.

"When I read anything long, I have to do it after games," he said. "Rest is important. But as the season goes along, I get better and better. And I have 20/20 vision, so that's not a problem."

Nikaitani has worked on players' vision problems since the mid-1980s, when he helped correct former Mariners star Alvin Davis' double vision in one eye with a special contact lens. He tests the franchise's major and minor league players annually, and discovered Martinez's problem when he was a minor leaguer hitting around .270.

Another success story was Jay Buhner, who corrected a right eye-dominant vision problem by opening his batting stance, permitting a better look at the pitcher's release point.

"Sometimes vision can impact batting technique," Nikaitani said by phone yesterday. "When a batter is doing things differently, sometimes I can relate the problems to vision, rather than batting techniques. With Edgar, the exercises attempt to enhance his depth perception by using both eyes at a higher level.

"If I was a teacher or a coach, I would call Edgar the perfect student."

Martinez is so diligent with his eye exercises that the team has no substantive concerns. They are more worried about Martinez's leg muscles. He again is working his way back from a pulled quadriceps, and is hitting .147 this spring after a double in four at-bats yesterday against Colorado.

In October, a pulled groin muscle kept Martinez from pushing hard off his back leg, and he wound up hitting 3-for-20 against the Yankees in the AL Championship Series.

Anytime Martinez, at 39, goes two days without a hit, the is-Edgar-done? question will be advanced. Manager Lou Piniella hasn't seen a fade.

"His timing's off, but he'll catch up in the next 10 days," said Piniella, whose own playing career lasted until he was halfway though his 40th year. "Now that he doesn't play winter ball anymore, it takes a little longer. He just needs more at-bats.

"The first thing you look for (when a hitter loses it) is when the ball doesn't pop off the bat. The hits that would have gone through the outfield gaps, the fielders are catching up to. The balls that looked like they were going out, only make the warning track. The shots that should go through the infield were caught.

"It's all bat speed, and you lose it. I haven't seen that with Edgar."

Whenever the hunt begins for human capacities that will deny the fates, Edgar Martinez would be a splendid place to start.

P-I columnist Art Thiel can be reached at 206-448-8135 or artthiel@seattlepi.com

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