I can see now!

Thanks for the post Go44!

My 17 year old also has an astigmatism and is also farsighted.  He has been wearing cool looking prescription oakley glasses for a few years.  He has really struggled with offspeed stuff this year so I started to do some research on vision and baseball, and it's pretty clear that there is more to good baseball vision than just where you can read an eye chart.  It turns out there's an optometrist that is not far from us that does vision training, so we went in for an exam and a tour of the place last week.  A few things I've learned:

-Glasses have severe performance issues when it comes to vision.  Specifically with astigmatism, they really don't offer consistent vision performance through the full field of view. 

-Contacts do not have the field of view issues and recent advancements allow for soft/daily use contacts to correct for astigmatism very effectively.  Hard lenses are better but apparently quite uncomfortable to wear.

-Dr said not wearing glasses most of the time (which my son does not do) prevents the brain from processing things rapidly when glasses are worn.  She specifically said reaction time (the time for the brain to process the optical images) is reduced corresponding to the severity of the vision correction (e.g. a person who rarely wears their glasses with 20/40 vision will have a greater lag than someone with 20/30).  I'm trying to get the kid to wear his glasses more, but I don't think he bought it, so we are going to give contacts another try.

-This optometrist does visual training for athletic performance.  She uses the Nike Sparc system and another system called D2 dynavision (I think).  She trains various aspects of vision such as depth perception, peripheral vision, contrast improvement and about 7-8 other facets.  My research says this has legitimacy to it.  My academic background is in engineering, so I have asked for data.  There is a paper that documented improvements after training as measured by on field performance by the U of Cincy baseball team.  We are going to give this a shot, but I remain somewhat skeptical.

Anyway, just thought I'd add to the conversation as I've been researching this a lot recently myself.  I still think LASIK is the way to go, but you've got to be 18, and even then some feel that's a bit early.

Opinion on LASIK from the doctor I talked to last night "MLB hitters no longer get lasik.  If you're a pitcher, I will set you up for Lasik tomorrow morning no problem.  If you are a hitter, we need to talk."

Boilermaker posted:

My 17 year old also has an astigmatism and is also farsighted.  He has been wearing cool looking prescription oakley glasses for a few years.  He has really struggled with offspeed stuff this year so I started to do some research on vision and baseball, and it's pretty clear that there is more to good baseball vision than just where you can read an eye chart.  It turns out there's an optometrist that is not far from us that does vision training, so we went in for an exam and a tour of the place last week.  A few things I've learned:

-Glasses have severe performance issues when it comes to vision.  Specifically with astigmatism, they really don't offer consistent vision performance through the full field of view. 

-Contacts do not have the field of view issues and recent advancements allow for soft/daily use contacts to correct for astigmatism very effectively.  Hard lenses are better but apparently quite uncomfortable to wear.

-Dr said not wearing glasses most of the time (which my son does not do) prevents the brain from processing things rapidly when glasses are worn.  She specifically said reaction time (the time for the brain to process the optical images) is reduced corresponding to the severity of the vision correction (e.g. a person who rarely wears their glasses with 20/40 vision will have a greater lag than someone with 20/30).  I'm trying to get the kid to wear his glasses more, but I don't think he bought it, so we are going to give contacts another try.

-This optometrist does visual training for athletic performance.  She uses the Nike Sparc system and another system called D2 dynavision (I think).  She trains various aspects of vision such as depth perception, peripheral vision, contrast improvement and about 7-8 other facets.  My research says this has legitimacy to it.  My academic background is in engineering, so I have asked for data.  There is a paper that documented improvements after training as measured by on field performance by the U of Cincy baseball team.  We are going to give this a shot, but I remain somewhat skeptical.

Anyway, just thought I'd add to the conversation as I've been researching this a lot recently myself.  I still think LASIK is the way to go, but you've got to be 18, and even then some feel that's a bit early.

Apparently, they don’t like to do LASIK under growth stops and most recommend not having until 21.