It has to start with the eyes.

“You lift weights, right? You work out and you train and you eat right, and you’ve got to see pitches,” May said. “We’re talking about eye-training. For me, it’s like one of the most important things for hitters. But hitters don’t do it. They don’t think about it. And they should be doing it all the time. We choose to do weights. We choose to get stronger, and that’s fine, that’s good. But you’ve got to do the same things here.”

He pointed to his eyes.

“Just seeing pitches and building the strength of their eyes with work,” May continued. “What better to do it than with a slider machine?”

The Cardinals’ have a top-flight one at Busch Stadium — a TriplePlay pitching machine that fires a variety of pitches. It can be programmed to throw a slider from a lefty, a slider from a righty, curves from both types of pitchers, and several sorts of fastballs. All of those pitches can also be put at different spots in and around the strike zone with simple adjustments. A coach can set up a sequence of pitches so that a hitter can see a random mix. They knew something like it would be in Atlanta’s visitors’ batting cages because MLB has suggested it.