Baseball position players typically have better vision than the average member of the population, a Darwin-esque elimination process that allows them to compete with pitchers attempting to get them out.

Based on that principle, researchers from the University of California, Riverside sought to improve the vision of the college's baseball players and ultimately their performance, the Los Angeles Times reported. According to their study, published Monday in the journal Current Biology, their methods not only resulted in a 31 percent gain in binocular acuity, but translated to an extra 44 runs and 5 wins (using famed sports statistician Bill James' Pythagorean Theory of Baseball) for the 22-32 Highlanders.

Previous studies have focused on methods to improve vision, but none so far have been transferrable to real world tasks.

"What we think we're doing is improving the brain's ability to read out information from the eyes," Aaron R. Seitz, a cognitive neuroscientist at UC Riverside and co-author of the study, told the LA Times.

Hitting a baseball, as documented in "The Sports Gene" by David Epstein, is about anticipating where a ball will cross the plate based on the arm angle and release of the pitcher, and vision. Both, as Epstein showed, are mostly innate abilities. When an eye doctor spent time with the Los Angeles Dodgers prior to the 1992 season, he discovered nearly every player to have vision greater than 20-20, half to have 20-10, and some even to approach 20-8, the limit of human sight. To put that in perspective, just one out of nearly 10,000 patients randomly sampled in India had 20-10, according to the book.

Thus, what makes the research by Seiz, Daniel J. Ozer, and Jenni Deveau so exciting is that is demonstrates a way to improve, to a relatively significant degree, an ability largely thought of as innate and immovable. Of course, they haven't gone as far as to say the vision tasks directly improved performance. More research is needed to make that bold claim.

"When we first spoke with the coach, what he said was if you can make a 1% difference in their playing it would be huge," Seitz said. "Baseball at a collegiate level is highly competitive, so anything that gives them any edge has a big impact in determining if they're going to win or lose a game."

Seitz and colleagues measured vision improvement by keeping pitchers as control subjects, for they don't bat and rely much less on vision to succeed. They measured hitting improvement -- in terms of strikeouts and runs created -- by comparing UC Riverside players to players around the league, and determined that the gains had by them were greater than what should have been expected.

"I must admit that I'm now becoming a baseball fan," Seitz said of the year's experiment, which they'll repeat this year while adding the school's softball and basketball teams. "Whenever the UCR team was playing, I would just be checking the scores every five minutes on my phone."

Beyond baseball, they hope their results can help people with vision deficits.