He could close his eyes and hit his throwing partner in the chest. That still came naturally. The accident had not stripped that. Then Matt Imhof opened his left eye _ his only working eye _ and tried to catch the baseball.
He knew he had to decide where the ball was headed and when to close his glove with half of the information he had before. He knew he had no shot if the ball came straight at him. The white orb was more of a blur than before. It looked choppier.
"I don't catch it all the time," the former second-round pick said. "I used to play baseball, and I can't catch it."
The Phillies had paid him more than $1 million to live his dream. That promise had deteriorated into a constant stream of doubt about his place in the game. Baseball is cruel. It planted him in that exact moment _ a humid night in June 2016, a few miles from the Atlantic Ocean, facing a wall inside a nondescript concrete structure that broke apart when he tugged at an elastic exercise band attached to a metal hook.
Two months after the metal smashed his right eye, he called an old pitching coach. They met at a field in California.
"It was more therapeutic than anything else," Thomas Eager, the coach, said. "I think he just wanted to play catch because he wanted to see if he could still play catch."
The game had carried him this far. He had to know.
