When a hitter is going good, they say he’s “seeing the ball well” — and they say the opposite when he’s not. Thusly: Don Sutton has been saying lately that Austin Kearns is just “not seeing the ball well,” the ostensible reason for his .194 average, two home runs and 11 runs batted in. “Seeing the ball well” is a slippery term, it seems to me, but it beats the hell out of any other explanation: that a hitter is “not in his groove” or that (for some reason) he’s jinxed — “they’re just not falling in.”

Kearns had two solid hits Thursday night against the Bucs, nominal evidence that he is finally hitting his way out of his latest “funk” (another one of those slippery terms), one of them a single in the eighth that scored the game-winning run. You could see the relief in Kearns’ face when he jogged out to right for the top of the ninth. But to say that Kearns is “not seeing the ball well” is a bit of an understatement: true only if you can claim he hasn’t seen the ball well since he arrived from Cincinnati in July of 2006.Back then, some in the Nats’ front office hailed Kearns as the second coming of Vlad Guerrero, who slipped away from the Expos, back in 2003. Guerrero was then (and still may be) the best hitter in baseball (well, if you don’t count this guy). But if Kearns was ever going to be Guerrero then, it seemed to me, it was highly unlikely that the Reds would part with him, no matter how desperate they were for pitching. For us Nats fans, it would be just fine if “country” (there is a growing coterie of Kearns partisans out in right field who call him this) would regularly hit .289 with 25 or so home runs — rather than struggling to breach the Mendoza line. By the way: Vlad “sees the ball well.”

The closest I ever came to really understanding what people mean when they say that a player “sees the ball well” came in the middle of the 1982 season. The summer of 1982 was fascinating. There was a good race in the American League, with the then-California Angels being led by third baseman Doug DeCinces, their newest acquisition. DeCinces had come over during the winter in a trade with Baltimore for Dan “Disco Dan” Ford — one of the greatest trades in Angels’ history. The Halos had a murderer’s row of hitters: Boone, Carew, Grich, Lynn, Jackson and Baylor. DeCinces was the throw-in, the on-base guy from Baltimore with the okay-glove who had never quite lived up to the billing he had received after being drafted in the third round of the 1970 draft. He was the highly touted replacement for the legendary Brooks Robinson.

Of course, DeCinces could never really replace Robinson and while the Baltimore fans understood that, Baltimore’s announcers were forever mentioning that DeCinces’ glove could never equal Robinson’s. “Robinson would have had that one,” they would say. And so DeCinces was shipped west. (The guy who replaced DeCinces was an anonymous character from Havre de Grace, Maryland by the name of Cal Ripken.) Anyway …. for a time in the summer of 1982, long about mid-July to mid-August if I recall, Doug DeCinces suddenly became the best hitter in baseball. People noticed. I remember tuning in to the Game of the Week just to see him, and checking the papers every day to see what he had done. Other players talked about what he was doing in hushed tones and the likes of Baylor and Jackson and Carew would stand and watch him during batting practice. He hit fricking everything. Even Reggie was in awe. 

For a time there wasn’t anything DeCinces couldn’t hit, and a player who had wracked up a fairly average home run total of 4, 11, 11, 19, 28, 16, 16 and 13 home runs over the course of his eight-year career was suddenly putting them out with incredible regularity. He hit thirty that year, most of them in the hottest weeks of California’s deep summer. I remember someone (Vin Scully I think) interviewed him after one of his more prodigious shots in Anaheim. What was his secret? And DeCinces shrugged: he said he was just seeing the ball well. And Scully asked what that meant. And DeCinces answer was priceless: “When it comes up there,” he said, “it looks like a watermelon.”

But nothing lasts forever. By September, DeCinces had cooled off, Milwaukee triumphed in the playoffs (California was the better team), and St. Louis beat the Brewers in seven games in one of the most exciting World Series ever played. DeCinces played for four more years before heading to Japan and then was out of baseball. But for a time, in the summer of 1982, Doug DeCinces “saw the ball” better than any baseball player at the time. We might wish the same for Austin Kearns.