To fix offense, the Miami Hurricanes’ hitters spent the offseason fixing their eyes

Three days before they open their season against the Rutgers Scarlet Knights, the Miami Hurricanes had a brand new hitting drill to go through. The past two seasons in Coral Gables ended with a pair of uncharacteristic exclusions from the NCAA tournament largely because of Miami’s often-dismal offense, so the offseason was dedicated to fixing its hitting by any means necessary.

On Tuesday, the Hurricanes tried to fix their offense by fixing their eyes. Throughout the afternoon, hitters rotated through the batting cage wearing blackout glasses, which simulated a sort of strobe-light effect. As pitches hurled their way, the hitters would have their vision blink in and out. They could only see the ball at certain intervals as it moved toward home plate.

“It’s pretty legit,” said infielder Willy Escala, who batted .280 in 2018. It’s not just something we’re trying. It’s a proven thing, I guess, and I’ve heard of a lot of schools doing it, so it’s pretty cool to start doing it.”

The Canes begin their 2019 campaign at 7 p.m. Friday at Mark Light Field, and for Miami to end its stunning two-year absence from the NCAA tournament, the Hurricanes’ hitting has to improve. In 2018, Miami batted. 257 — 210th out of 297 teams. In 2017, the Hurricanes were even worse, batting .231 — 289th of 295 teams and last among teams from Power Five Conferences. Unsurprisingly, Gino DiMare’s first offseason as Miami’s new coach was largely spent focusing on repair a broken offense, both through approach and refinement.

The approach isn’t anything particularly unusual — assistant coach Norberto Lopez said the Hurricanes worked on hunting fastballs — but refining technique was about more than just about polishing players’ swings.

“The average big-leaguer has 20-10 vision,” Lopez said. “There’s nine muscles around your eyes — six of them are used for hitting — and we wanted to really make that better.”

At practice Tuesday, which happened to coincide with the team’s preseason media day, three doctors from the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute worked in the batting cages with Miami’s hitters. Bascom Palmer, which is a part of the university’s Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine, frequently tops the US News & World Report rankings for best eye hospitals and vision research centers in the country, and has been a staple around Alex Rodriguez Park at Mark Light Field since the fall.

Doctors typically come to the field twice a week to run through drills with the Hurricanes’ hitters. The workouts range from something as apparently high-tech as the strobe light-style drill to something as simple as trying to hit tiny, raw garbanzo beans.

“Something very almost like Hispanic-ish, you could say,” Escala said.

The garbanzo-bean hitting trains the eyes by focusing on something small and hard to track. Another common drill has fastballs shoot at the hitter from short distances, forcing him to react quickly.

Other drills involve multicolored balls in order to hone reaction time. In one drill, miniature wiffle balls shoot in the hitter’s direction, sometimes white and sometimes colored. Hitters have to catch white balls in their left hand and catch the colored balls in their right. In another, red or white balls shoot out across the plate. Red means swing, white means lay off.

“I was excited for it,” said infielder Freddy Zamora, who led all returning players with a .303 batting average in 2018. “The guys were excited for it because all of it is to help us out, so anything to make us better players on the field is good.”

DiMare, who had essentially been in charge of the Hurricanes’ offense before taking over as coach after last season, still feels like the past two years were just an outlier for a program which has sent more than a dozen players to MLB since the turn of the century.

Still, he and Lopez spent much of the last two years figuring out what led to this surprising downturn in production. Miami has reevaluated what it values in recruiting and simply allocated more practice time to hitting in the offseason.

Philosophically, DiMare isn’t ready to change anything wholesale, but the tweaks around the margins — and some future-facing tactics — could help the Hurricanes recapture their past success.

“My philosophy hasn’t changed. We’ve always been known as an offensive schools. We’ve probably in my 20 years here, turned out more guys going to the big leagues than any other school,” DiMare said. “At the end of the day our philosophy is something I trust and I believe in. The players have to as well and I think they are.”