One study by Loftus and Harley found that after 25 feet, face perception diminishes. At about 150 feet, accurate face identification for people with normal vision drops to zero. And these were recognizable celebrities.
http://faculty.washington.edu/gloftus/Downloads/LoftusHarleyDistance.pdf
Also somebody on home plate doesn’t have half his face and his chin obscured from the perspective of somebody at second base, nor are boxes or a wall partly in the way.
There are way too many variables involved to be able to judge from a study of that nature. Here’s a link to a study that I think is much better:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-014-0641-2After only a quick scan of it, I won’t pretend to understand everything about that study. But if I do understand one thing correctly, the hits decreased by only .55% per yard of distance between the distances of 5-yards and 40-yards (aka: 120-feet). And the false alarms only increased by .44% for the same distances. That’s less than a 20% decrease in hits for the 35-yards between 5 and 40 yards.
Heck, I didn’t recognize my dentist when we saw him at a restaurant recently. And we were only about 20-feet away. My wife didn’t either until he recognized her. So distance isn’t the only factor. Some people recognize other people easier than others. My wife is usually very good at it. It’s mostly mental, I believe.
That said, I asked my nephew, who played a lot of baseball (first base) in his younger years about this subject. He said he would read the lips of the opposing team’s third base coach, from first base, and tell his team what he said. The distance from first base to third base is over 127-feet. He said that he would have no problem recognizing a face at home plate from second base. He said that he has always aced vision tests. Howard Brennan said he had excellent distance vision.
Edit: added image of graph from the report
