Ryan Harrison talks about the importance of your eyes in baseball. Like hitting, fielding, and pitching, “your eyes should be trained just as much.”

“The biggest factor in sight is actually how much you’re thinking. Overthinking can actually blind you from the details of the game that are needed to perform well, like the spin of the baseball when hitting or how the ball is moving when fielding.”

Harrison gives tips for hitting. He says, “When hitting, focus on the release point rather on the whole pitcher. You also should not just see it early but see it deep as well.”

“When players struggle hitting,” Harrison says, “they aren’t picking the ball up early enough. When a player [is] doing well, [he or she] says the ball looks like a beach ball. That is the player simply picking up the ball early. When [successful players are] asked what they’re thinking about, their answer is almost always that they aren’t thinking at all.”

When players are focused on the “here and now,” they will almost always succeed. Players will, as Harrison puts it, “get too caught up in who is in the stands or how they performed the day before, and it affects the way they play today.”

Harrison talks about how you can train your eyes: “You can train your eyes by using smaller Wiffle balls and just track them in. Players in the Dominican actually use small bottle caps to hit, and it helps them track the ball”

“You can work on tracking the ball to contact with the tee,” Harrison says. “Many players underrate the tee greatly.”

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