Prairie's Carlson has strong finish to baseball season in sight

CEDAR RAPIDS - Brayton Carlson didn't understand what was going on.The Cedar Rapids Prairie all-state second baseman was flailing away the plate, swinging and missing at everything. It got so bad at one point, he flung his bat to the ground in frustration after a strikeout and got ejected from a game.“In a way, it felt like I was helpless,” Carlson said. “It just felt like my swing wasn't the same. My timing was off. I thought it might be just because it was the beginning of the season.”That was part of it. Carlson slumped early in 2011 before recovering, so this wasn't exactly foreign territory.But it turns out there was something else there. Lingering affects of a concussion he suffered late in the football season were short-circuiting his ability to hit a baseball and even field it.“I never figured it would affect me like that over the long run,” Carlson said.He can thank his mom, Tammy, for being proactive enough to drag him to an eye doctor for help. DeAnn Fitzgerald of Cedar Rapids put him through a bunch of tests and discovered his reaction time was slower than it should have been.Thank you, concussion.“I thought my mom was just trying to make excuses for me,” Carlson said. “But eventually it worked out.”Fitzgerald, who did not immediately respond to an interview request, put him on a program to help him regain his reaction time and improve his hand-eye coordination. He has been doing it for three weeks, with his at-bat productivity returning to “normal” levels.Carlson hit two home runs in his first double-header after an initial meeting with Fitzgerald. He came into the week with a .370 batting average, team-high five home runs and 27 RBIs.Those are down some from his junior season, when he hit .425 and was named to the Iowa High School Baseball Coaches Association's Class 4A all-state team. Prairie is 19-13 going into its double-header today at Cedar Falls.“I'm a science guy, so I like to go on data and stuff like that,” said Prairie Coach Matt Thede. “Last year was very similar, with no concussion affects, with what he went through as a hitter. But he didn't (slump) nearly what he did this year. Last year, he all of a sudden turned it around after like five or 10 games. This year, (his slump) tended to go a little bit longer, until he started doing some of that stuff.”Carlson, who will play baseball with his older brother, Dustin, next year at Southeastern Comunity College in Burlington, was asked if Dr. Fitzgerald saved his senior season.“I'd say she definitely helped me out,” he said. “I don't know if she saved my season or anything. But she definitely made me a lot better.”