An accident left him legally blind in one eye. That won’t stop this Capital pitcher.
Capital baseball coach Jake Chandler approached Calvin Connelly three years ago with a proposition.
After watching his freshman season unfold, he suggested that Connelly try hitting left-handed because he felt Connelly wasn’t seeing the ball well out of the pitcher’s hand from the other side of the plate.
Connelly’s response surprised him.
The right-hander informed his coach that he was legally blind in his left eye — so in fact, he couldn’t see the ball during the pitcher’s windup or out of his hand, only picking it up as it approached the plate.
“I had no idea until he said something,” Chandler recalled. “It’s amazing that he doesn’t see that he has a hindrance. He works through it and overcomes any obstacle thrown his way.”
Connelly, now a senior, doesn’t hide that he’s visually impaired. But he doesn’t advertise it either.
His close friends and most of his teammates now know. But with no visible scarring and a corrective contact lens that restores some of his vision, you’d have to get inches away from his face and have Connelly tell you what to look for to detect anything.
“Honestly, I don’t really feel like I’m disabled,” Connelly said with a shrug.
A FREAK EYE INJURY
While home sick from school five years ago, Connelly built a slingshot out of popsicle sticks and a rubber band to fight off the boredom. His older brother started playing with it when he got home. And in a one-in-a-million shot, he fired the inside of a fine-tipped ballpoint pen out of the kitchen, through the living room and into Connelly’s left eye as he watched TV.
Connelly never saw it coming. The projectile sliced into his pupil and broke the lens in the back of his eye.
“(The doctor) said the cut was amazing,” said his mother, Becky Connelly. “It was like a knife.”
Emergency room doctors sewed up his cornea that day. Surgeons later tried to repair the traumatic cataract, hoping to insert a new permanent lens and restore his vision. But the damage was too severe.
Connelly must wear a high-powered corrective lens, which brings him to 20/60 vision, he said. He can detect light without it, but everything else would remain blurry, leaving him unable to decipher shapes.
PITCHING WITH LIMITED VISION
Connelly said he doesn’t blame his brother for the accident, and he won’t make excuses on the baseball field. The senior has become a key member of Capital’s pitching staff, sporting a 5.56 ERA in 11 ⅓ innings this spring. And he maintains that his injury has little effect on the diamond.
Connelly said he still has 20/20 vision in his right eye, which he leans on heavily. He said he uses his left eye only to help out with depth perception. He was a catcher at the junior varsity level, handling all the darting pitches and tracking all the moving baserunners just fine.
He admits that he sometimes has trouble reading the catcher’s signals. Chandler said he has to focus extra hard while covering first base to find the ball and the bag all at the same time. And his contact temporarily slid out of place while on the mound Friday, forcing Connelly to guess that his catcher called a fastball. (He maintains he was right.)
“Once I got that contact, I was like, ‘Oh, this really isn’t that bad,’” Connelly said. “As I get older, I’ll get used to it. It’ll be my new normal. Right now, I just try not to use it as an excuse for anything.”
Chandler said that’s the attitude that allows Connelly to overcome what others would consider obstacles. It’s what makes him a 4.0 student with plans to study civil engineering at the University of Idaho next year. And it’s what allowed him to spend a year in the Capital program without coaches knowing anything about his eye.
“He’s a kid that never misses a winter workout,” Chandler said. “He never misses anything. He works his butt off.
“I wish I had a hundred more Calvins in my program.”
