I learned something interesting when my son Jeff and I were in Arizona last week for our five day immersion in baseball spring training. I noticed that the stadiums we visited had what looked like an unfinished scoreboard or billboard in right center field. I asked Jeff, a spring training veteran, what that tacky looking board was doing out there. He said it was the "batter's eye."Despite being a baseball fan since I was a kid, I had never heard of the "batter's eye." The entry in Wikipedia describes it thusly:
The batter's eye (short for batter's eye screen) is a solid-colored, usually dark area beyond the center field wall of a baseball stadium, that is the visual backdrop directly in the line of sight of a baseball batter, while facing the pitcher and awaiting a pitch. This dark surface allows the batter to see the pitched ball against a sharply contrasted and uncluttered background, as much for the batter's safety as anything. The use of a batter's background has been standard in baseball (as well as cricket) since at least the late 1800s.Boy, that got me to thinking. One of baseball's canonical sayings is "keep your eye on the ball"--good advice for hitters, but also for defensive players as well. Only the pitcher is excused. They have to keep their eye on the mitt that the catcher puts up as a target. The pitcher's job is to throw sufficiently deceptive "stuff" that they prevent the hitters from keeping their eye on the ball.
But now comes the "batter's eye," designed to clean up the background so that the ball doesn't have to be seen against a fan's shirt or a homemade sign urging attention to John 3:16.
We should all have it so good. In life we all have to keep our eye on the ball as well. I'm kind of wishing we had a batter's eye to help us out. Our backgrounds tend to be cluttered with life's refuse and sometimes we just can't keep focused because of all the "stuff" that masks what we need to see and do.
The author is unknown to me, but one of my favorite sayings is this: "It is not known who first discovered water, but this much is known--it was not the fish." We are often the least equipped to see our own lives with clarity. When we're in the middle of it all, when we're looking out into centerfield and see only an array of shirts and signs, it is very difficult to see our own truths.
When things get tough it would sure be nice to have a solid dark background out there when the high, hard one comes our way.
