You can't hit what you can't see.

[George Thompson]

"You can't hit what you can't see" is a baseball proverb that I'm sure I have heard from broadcasters in recent years.  Attempting a search for examples, early or recent, would tax my patience excessively, but I offer here an instance from 1914 which I have recently stumbled over.

[From an essay by "Billy Evans, American League umpire" on "What ails Walter Johnson".  When he entered the league he had been able to throw the ball with extraordinary speed and got a lot of strikeouts, but of late he has been allowing more hits, getting fewer strikeouts & losing more games than previously.]  "Sluggers who favored pitchers with speed never enthused when Johnson was announced as the Washington pitcher.  Most of them insisted that it was impossible to hit what you couldn't see. . . ."  NY Times, November 1, 1914, p. 54, through Proquest.

Johnson only won 28 games in 1914, so it was natural that there would be such speculation.  The previous year his record was 36 wins, 7 losses.  But as late as 1924 he was 23 and 7, that the next year 20 and 7.  His last year was 1927.  This information is from baseball-reference.com

The notion that some pitchers throw to fast for the ball to be seen is common, more or less.  There is an old joke of a batter arguing a called strike by saying "it sounded high".  In 1979 Cliff Johnson, a power hitter with the Yankees, broke the thumb of Goose Gossage, hard-throwing realief pitcher of the Yankees, in a locker-room shoving match that began when Gossage said that Johnson could only hear his fastball.

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George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998.
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