Close call for Ishikawa;

POSTGAME NOTES: Close calls for Burriss, Ishikawa; big hit for Aurilia; notes on Affeldt, Wilson, Lincecum
Posted by Andrew Baggarly on May 16th, 2009 at 12:25 am
Travis Ishikawa was just lucky that his close encounter Friday was with a tennis ball. The Giants scratched him from the lineup roughly 30 minutes before the first pitch because Ishikawa was hit in the eye while using a vision training device that shoots tennis balls at upwards of 150 mph.

There’s a description of it here.

Back in spring training, Giants farm director Fred Stanley was raving to me about the tennis ball machine and suggested I stand in the cage to see how it worked. So I went to the minor league complex early one morning, and after minor league third baseman David Maroul had his turn, I gave it a shot.

You hold this little stick of a bat that’s thinner than a fungo, but you’re only supposed to check swing as you watch the ball. Good thing, because I wasn’t touching those 130 mph tennis balls. The goal is to tell whether the numbers on the balls are black or red, and if you’re really good, to shout out the numbers as the balls whiz past.

I could tell red or black occasionally at 70 mph, but nothing more. At 130 mph, I couldn’t see anything but a blur of yellow. (I’m told Conor Gillaspie is a savant at it.) But it was pretty cool when they turned it back to 70. I could actually see numbers this time. I didn’t always get them right, but I could tell if it was a 1 or 7 as opposed to a 6 or 8.

I also learned that I probably couldn’t break serve against Andy Roddick.

Anyway, Ishikawa accidentally hit one of these tennis balls with the stick and it flew up and got him in the eye. He said he should be OK to play Saturday, but he wasn’t expected to play anyway against lefty Johan Santana. Hitting the Johan is probably harder than returning Roddick’s serves.