Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [95]
My explanation impressed Ted. Sure, he constantly challenged people with his jibes, but that was his way of thumping their brains, forcing them to think about their craft. He got in your face like some Marine drill instructor who knows his way is the highway, but Ted loved it whenever a player stood his ground and fired back. So I said to him, “Now it’s my turn. Bet I can tell you something about why you were such a great hitter that even you don’t know.”
You might have described his response as laughter, but no, it was something much deeper, a gut rumbling that quaked his whole body until the bench shook under us. A groundskeeper walked through the dugout on his way to the diamond to trim the grass along the infield. “Look,” Ted’s voice boomed after him, “at who’s going to tell me about hitting.” But then his mirth-filled eyes turned serious. Hitting was never a laughing matter to Ted for very long. “All right, hot shot. Tell me. Why did I hit so well?”
Pointing to his right eye, I said, “This is your dominant eye, even though you’re left-handed. For most left-handers the left eye dominates. When you stand at the plate facing the pitcher, you look at him through your dominant eye. That gives you a perfect view of every pitch.”
“And what exactly does that bullshit mean?” He sounded gruff and scoffing, but I heard the little boy’s excitement coloring his words. He was genuinely interested in hearing more. Ted never passed himself off as a learned man. He did not impress me as particularly bright or worldly. I never heard him discuss a book or a play or a work of art. His cinematic tastes ran to cowboy movies, the oaters more than the classics. Ted’s politics, such as they were, came across as predictably hard-hat conservative and revealed little self-reflection. But when it came to hitting, Ted fit the role of scholar. The decades spent obsessively studying his craft had left him with a mind as inquisitive and flexible as Einstein’s. He appeared eager to learn something new about a subject he understood better than anyone in the world.
On that bright, cloudless Florida morning, we could clearly see a water tower half a mile in the distance. I asked Ted to stare at the tower with both eyes for several seconds.
“Okay, now keep looking but cover your right eye so that you can see the tower only with your left.”
“The damn thing skipped over,” he shouted. “It moved about three inches.”
“Now do it again, only this time cover your left eye.”
“Son of a bitch. It didn’t move at all that time.”
“That’s what right-eye dominance means,” I explained. “Your right eye gives you a true, smooth perspective of an object. If you were left-eye–dominant and looking at a pitcher with your right eye, the ball would appear to jump slightly when you first caught sight of it. Most people need a split second to adjust to that movement. You didn’t have to waste time making that adjustment, so you picked up the ball’s spin and location faster than most hitters.”
“Isn’t that something.”
Some of Williams’s students started running past us toward the outfield. A grounds crew member motored his golf cart over to our dugout to taxi Ted out to them. As they drove off, I watched him cover one eye, then the other, while looking at various points around the ballpark. “You believe it?” he said between laughs. “A goddamned crazy pitcher had to tell me this. Son of a bitch.”
We were friends from that day on. Ted would see me in the morning and cover his left eye in a salute. Whenever we had a free moment, he joined me at my locker to talk fishing. Professional anglers rated Ted an expert fly caster, and he loved to tease me for preferring to hook my lines with bait. “Takes no skill to fish with bait,” I can still hear him growl, “it’s like cheating. Old ladies can do it.” That was his guy’s way of showing affection.
I marveled at how he performed his duties. Ted was sixty-eight, but his energy seemed inexhaustible; none of us could keep up with him. Most coaches in our camp contented themselves to merely pass on a generic