NEW YORK — The classic eye chart adorning the wall in nearly every vision care provider’s office hails from the work of Dutch ophthalmologist Herman Snellen in 1862, a continent and century away from modern baseball.
Snellen’s concoction is black print on white paper with a bottom line whose minute typeface rarely poses a challenge to a major league hitter, with respondents often granted infinite time to discern each letter.
“Well, that didn’t seem very realistic to hitting a baseball,” Dr. Daniel Laby, an ophthalmologist and leading sports vision expert, said with obvious understatement, noting that a hitter typically has half the time to decide to swing (150 milliseconds) than the duration of an average human blink (300 milliseconds).