Rico knows the problem

Rico says that, while he still has both eye (though the right one is less-than-perfect), he understands Mr. Underwood's problem, as described in this article by Alan Schwarz in The New York Times:

Three weeks after a line drive crashed into his face and destroyed his left eye, Jordan Underwood sat at Logan’s Roadhouse in Oklahoma City and decided his tea needed some sweetener. He opened a packet, extended his arm to the glass and proceeded to pour sugar all over the table.
“That’s the first time I was, I guess, mad,” said Underwood, then a control pitcher at an Oklahoma junior college. “It really hit me. I was going to have to make some adjustments.”
Losing an eye and, with it, conventional depth perception, might seem devastating to an athlete, like a pianist developing Parkinson’s disease. But less than two years after being fitted with an acrylic left eye, Underwood has emerged as the ace pitcher at Southeast Missouri State, a Division I program.
Underwood endured no elaborate tests, no procedures, no exercises, ocular or otherwise. Rather than triumph over science, experts say, he has merely reinforced it.
Underwood was told this could happen by the woman who designed his prosthetic eye, Nancy Townsend of Dean McGee Eye Institute in Oklahoma City. She insisted he could play baseball with only one eye. How could she be so sure? Because in 1978, after losing an eye herself as a teenager, Townsend played first base and left field in Canada’s women’s fast-pitch softball tournament. “If I could hit, he could pitch,” Ms. Townsend said. “The mind is a wonderful thing.”
Experts say that two human eyes help the brain discern depth to about twenty feet; beyond that, one eye is adequate. Given that the strike zone, sixty feet six inches away, is essentially a static rectangle with no depth, doctors are not shocked Underwood has been able to pitch, and pitch better than he ever had before.
“I was never really scared about going back out,” Underwood said. “Sometimes I’ll throw a pitch right down the middle and some guy swings as hard as he can, and my glove might jump up a little faster than it used to. But nothing really anymore. You’re so caught up in the game.”
Underwood’s swift recovery has become more relevant given recent events involving Luis Salazar, the Atlanta Braves minor league manager who, while standing in the dugout this month, was struck in the face by a line drive and, after several failed operations, lost an eye. Salazar expects to return to managing this season.
As for Underwood’s pitching skills, questions abounded. How could he find the strike zone again? Could he make pickoff throws? What about fielding ground balls and throwing to first base from different spots on the infield?
No Division One baseball coach, including Southeast Missouri State’s Mark Hogan, seemed to think Underwood’s career would survive his injury, which occurred on the mound in April of 2009 while he finished his second and last season for Seminole State Junior College in Seminole, Oklahoma. Hogan said he offered Underwood a spot on his team primarily to honor his gumption. “I never expected that much,” Hogan said. “How could I?”
After only a few wild bullpen sessions that fall, Underwood honed himself into the pitcher he had always been: a left-hander with an average, moving fastball but effective breaking and off-speed pitches. Underwood posted a 6-5 record and a 4.11 earned run average last year, so outwardly normal that opponents thought little of the slender kid with the odd Oakleys, with thick, clear lenses for extra protection.
They did not bunt on him to test his defense— a challenge Jim Abbott, the one-handed pitcher from the 1980s and ’90s, faced in college and the majors— because few if any knew Underwood had only one working eye.
News did seep out by this season, but bunting has not worked against Underwood, and swinging barely has either. Through five starts, he has a 1-1 record and a 2.76 E.R.A., with two or three potential victories blown by his bullpen. He is the Redhawks’ Friday pitcher— meaning he throws the first game of all weekend conference series— a cherished honor for a college pitcher.
Against North Dakota on 11 March, Underwood’s motion resembled a watch movement: calm and repeatable. He even took his right eye off the strike zone to look slightly down at his glove during his leg kick, before fixing it back again and flashing his arm forward. (The tilt of his head evidenced his relative good fortune: if he had lost his right eye, seeing the plate as a left-hander would have been impossible.) He picked off two runners, too.
A small plaque near the Redhawks’ dugout evoked another inspirational baseball story. The team’s home, Capaha Field in Cape Girardeau, was apparently used by the old St. Louis Browns for spring training during World War Two. Pete Gray, the one-armed outfielder, played 77 games for the 1944 Browns.
“Ground balls back to me can be a bit of a problem because of depth perception when they get closer to my glove,” Underwood said. “But I’ve practiced a lot. It’s really not that much of a problem.”
Underwood’s tallest obstacle might have been a little-known NCAA rule that requires athletes missing one of two matching organs— after donating a kidney, for example— to complete several waivers and forms confirming, among other things, that they and their parents acknowledge the risk of accidentally losing the other organ. (In Underwood’s case, a line drive like the one that struck Salazar could leave him blind.) Southeast Missouri State officials learned of the eligibility rule while Underwood was practicing with his new team in the fall of 2009 and whisked him off the field. He could not play with the Redhawks for months.
This could be Underwood’s last spring on the mound, given that his subpar fastball will almost certainly keep major league teams from drafting him in June. But his example could be important to other young athletes facing similar challenges, said Joan Vickers, a professor of psychology at the University of Calgary and an expert in eye tracking in sports. “There are people who lost their eye yesterday, and they’re devastated, but they can get busy carrying on with their life,” Vickers said. “This young man’s brain had to change the neural networks to determine where the strike zone is. But it does that very quickly.” She added: “There have been experiments where people wear prisms over their eyes that turn everything upside down, and after a while they can bicycle around roads with everything upside down. The brain is extremely adaptable.”
Alas, Underwood cannot do everything on a baseball field well. He cannot hit, for example. “I’m terrible,” he said with a laugh. Because of the depth-perception issue, presumably. “No,” he said. “Because I’m a pitcher."