NORTH LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — There are a lot of similarities between the Bryan brothers.
Both pitch, both are right-handed. Both are even named after sports legends. Payton is named after football great Walter Payton, and Jordan is named after Michael Jordan.
As you'd imaging, competition between the two is naturally pretty fierce, but there is one pretty big difference: Jordan's vision when pitching versus Payton's.
He is legally blind in his left eye after being born with Coats' disease, a rare, non-hereditary eye disorder that causes leaky blood vessels in the retina.
It's led to about five surgeries in his 17 years.
WATCH | I wanted to get a better understanding of Payton's life with Coats' disease:
"Like, there's sometimes where I throw the ball and my head like whips where I can see nothing, like off the bat, but that's why I try to like, be better, like just being straight at it so my head just stays still," Payton said.
Growing up, it was heard to communicate the difference to others, especially in elementary and middle school.
"It's just so hard to explain to them because they don't understand what it is like because they have two eyes. I don't understand what two eyes is like, so one eye is like normal for me," he said.
He started speaking about it more recently and really opened up during a recent charity golf tournament for the Jack McGovern Coatss Disease Foundation, where he met others experiencing something similar.
"Even if people tell you to stop, if they tell you just stop trying, just don't listen. Just keep going. You're your own person, you can make the decision for yourself," he said.
I wanted to understand a little more about Coats' disease, less from the bleachers, more from the ophthalmology standpoint, so Payton's parents gave his doctor permission to speak with me about the science behind his left eye.
"So he can tell when the lights are on and off, but there's not a lot of motion that he can see," said Dr. Naomie Warner. "He can't make out details. It's almost like walking around with just one eye closed. You miss all of this visual field."
She showed me what a normal retina looks like compared to one with Coats' disease.
"It causes problems with your central vision in you're not able to see because you have a lot of exudate there. Exudate can also lead to like tractional pull on the macula and retinal detachments that can happen too, which, which further decrease your vision," she said.
I asked her what that does for someone socially.
"Socially, it can be hard. There have been studies that suggest that people are discriminated against because of it. They're thought of as being less intelligent because of it, none of which is true, but it can be really, really difficult for some of these patients when they don't feel like they can make good eye contact with people," Warner said.
"There is a surgery that you can do to repair that. It's moving the muscles a little bit. We're not restoring vision, but we're restoring the alignment of the eyes to make it look more 'normal.' The other thing that's more difficult is his depth perception," she added.
I ask her if that would make batting for Payton almost impossible, but he proved me wrong.
He hit a triple in April, and catching a pop fly is no problem.
But then came an incident with a batter in June.
"That one, I kind of lost it off the bat. It was kind of low key scary because I couldn't see it at all, but I saw it last minute. It just came so fast, like I wouldn't have been able to even caught it, Payton said.
"The first intial reactions is why is he still out there, you know," Jordan said. "Why does he still go out there knowing what he has and why he's risking it. It's like in a sense his life every day, but at the same time, I know his drive, so I know that you even if he gets hit, I know it's not going to stop him."
And he's right. Protective glasses on, Payton still goes out, keeping that competitive edge, which will come in handy in the fall when he heads to Ottawa University in Arizona on a baseball scholarship.
"Any road that he takes with it, it's going to be a good road," Jordan said.
If if it's not baseball, big brother says it's a bright future.
"We argue a lot, but I know at the end of the day we still love each other as much. I don't like him a lot of the times, but we're still best friends," Payton said.
