it’s not just a question of physics, or of the distances within the playing field, etc.
It’s also an issue of having a good time.
People think it is fun to watch a baseball player miss 70% of his attempts, but it is not fun to watch a football or basketball player miss 70% of his attempts.
Me, I think it’s more fun to laugh at anybody who likes baseball. Three hours of watching men stand around and spit… yeah, that’s a good time. 
[QUOTE=psychonaut]
So why aren’t most pitchers at least 6" taller than the average person, like basketball players are?
[/QUOTE]
Although I don’t have any proof I would guess that the average MLB pitcher IS taller than the average adult American male, but the difference is probably less than 6 inches.
Let’s see. According to this page the average height of white American men is 5’10".
(Obviously not all major league pitchers are white OR American)
However looking at the pitching rosters of several major league teams:
Boston Red Sox
New York Yankees
Florida Marlins
Milwaukee Brewers
I see very few guys as listed even under 6 feet, and none that are 5’10" or under, which would argue that the average would have to be higher.
[QUOTE=CJJ*]
This cliche has always bothered me too, but I believe there is a grain of truth to it. Personally I interpret it as “the hardest thing to do among things the athlete is expected to do as a regular part of their participation in the game.”
A little wordy for a cliche, but interpreted this way it is definitely true. A QB with a 30% completion average, a basketball player with a 30% shooting average, and a hockey player with an unblocked shooting percentage of 30% would be pathetic; in MLB the 30% hitter is a millionaire (OK, the hockey one is qualified as “unblocked”, meaning the goalie either saved it or there was a score, but still…).
I’ll also specify that the word “hard” is based solely on this success rate; as RickJay points out, there’s really no other way to measure it. I’ll also concede that other sports may involve routine activities that require more stamina, concentration, strength, or other athletic qualities, but to use some examples cited, gynmasts do not fall off the balance beam on 70% of their moves, a boxer isn’t considered “good” if he survives only 30% of his fights, and a tennis player who completes only 30% of his serves is not playing at Wimbledon.
[/QUOTE]
I still don’t buy this argument, i’m afraid.
Firstly, i think that defining “hard” based on the percentage “success rate” is an inherently arbitrary and flawed strategy. Sure, it means we can quantify something, but it seems to me that the cost of such a strategy is that we fail to take into account the different criteria for success in different sports. This method of evaluation also assumes that difficulty and success are merely binary categories (you get a hit, or you don’t; you get a basket, or you don’t); they take no account of games like, say, rugby, where it is very difficult to measure ability with quantitative statistics at all, and where consistency of high quality general play is a key aspect of the game.
Furthermore, even if we do accept your percentage criterion, there are other candidates for more difficult sporting tasks. Take the position of bowler (sort of like a pitcher) in cricket. Over a five day international match (called a test match), there will be a maximum of 40 wickets, or outs (20 for each team). Each day of a test match, there is a minimum of 90 “overs” to be bowled. At 6 balls (or pitches) per over, that’s over 500 per day, or about 2,500 balls for a five day match. That means that, in this scenario, there will be one out for about every 60+ balls delivered, making the success rate of test match bowlers about 1.6%.
The cricket statistic that measures how frequently a bowler gets a wicket, or an out, is called the Strike Rate (SR), and is measured by calculating how many balls are are bowled per wicket taken. The figures for test match strike rates can be found here. That list, for those unfamiliar with the game, contains the names of the greatest bowlers ever to play the game, many of whom would be shoe-ins for any cricket hall of fame. As you can see, most of these guys bowl at a strike rate of between 45 and 60, and the best strike rate ever is George Lohmann (who played in the 1880s and 1890s) with 34.19. That means that Lohmann took a wicket every 34.19 times he bowled a ball, for a success rate of less than 3%. And most great bowlers hover between 1.6% and 2.2%.
Now, i don’t think this low percentage means that bowling in cricket is inherently harder than batting in baseball. In fact, i’m using it to illustrate how difficult it is make any such evaluation at all. The requirements for each are so different, as is the role that each task plays in its respective game. Cricket bowling, for example, has the non-binary factor (see above), because a bowler in cricket can bowl very well without getting wickets, and can still be a great asset to the team. A bowler, for example, who bowls very economically, allowing very few runs per over, might frustrate the opposing batters and cause them to try and score faster or make silly mistakes, leading to wickets later on. While good bowlers need to get wickets, their success is not evaluated on that alone.
English professional county cricket player Ed Smith wrote a book called Playing Hard Ball: County Cricket and Big League Baseball, in which he compared the two sports. One of his more interesting points was to note that baseball and cricket are, in terms or pressures and expectations on different types of players, almost the mirror image of one another.
In baseball, the immediate pressure of every individual at-bat is felt most acutely by the pitcher, because a single error on his part can mess up the whole thing. Because the hitting average in baseball is so low, with even great players failing two out of every three times, there is less pressure on the hitter each time he steps to the plate. Sure, a long run of outs might lead to concern and to increased pressure, but on any given at-bat even the best players in the world are more likely to fail than to succeed. And the hitter gets multipple chances. If he fails in the first inning, he’ll be back up to try again in the third or fourth.
The pitcher, on the other hand, gets very few opportunities to make a mistake. And every failure by the pitcher has dramatically greater consequences for the outcome of the game. The pitcher is expected to succeed in getting the out more often than not, and if this doesn’t happen he’ll be pulled from the game in short order. And as the end of the game nears, the pressure not to make a mistake gets even greater.
In cricket, by contrast, the bowler (pitcher) is the one who plugs away for long periods of time with infrequent rewards, much like the hitter in baseball. A bowler is not expected to get an out on any given delivery, and, in terms of getting an out, is expected to fail far more often than he succeeds.
For the batter, on the other hand, the pressure is constant, because he only gets one or two appearances in a match, and a single error can cost him his wicket and leave him sitting in the clubhouse for the next few hours or even days. Batters are expected to get a certain number of runs each time they go out to bat (a decent test match average is anything above about 40 runs per attempt, with the great players averaging over 50); they are expected to succeed more often than they fail. The pressure not to fail, and the consequences of a single mistake, are far greater for the batter than for the bowler in cricket.
What does this all mean for evaluating which is harder? Maybe nothing. I think that such comparisons are inherently difficult, perhaps impossible, to make, and i’m still unconvinced that hitting a baseball is inherently or objectively any more difficult than any one of a number of other sporting feats.
[QUOTE=mhendo]
Firstly, i think that defining “hard” based on the percentage “success rate” is an inherently arbitrary and flawed strategy
[/quote]
I don’t believe it’s arbitrary; it seems natural to say that if activity A cannot be accomplished as frequently as activity B, activity A is harder. I’ll agree that binary success/fail does not take into account the nuances of partial success–this may be why you call using it as a criterion for evaluating difficulty “flawed”–but remember we are evaluating an activity which by it’s very description (“hitting the ball”) is closer to a binary success/fail than, say, yards gained rushing the ball in football.
The Cricket example you cite is by your own admission flawed because it is not always (perhaps not even frequently) the primary mission of the bowler to get a wicket to fall with each bowl. I could just as easily say that hitting a home run is a far more difficult activity than just getting a hit, but not every batter approaches an at-bat with the intention of hitting a round-tripper. They do, however, approach each at-bat with the intention of hitting the ball (deliberate sacrifices aside, as these are infrequent and in any event are not scored for or against the batter in the official statistics).
I’ll agree to this; the argument is getting rather subjective at this point. The only points I was raising are as follows:
[ul]
[li]The cliche should only apply to that class of game-related activities that an athlete is expected to do frequently and as a regular part of their participation in the game. Football QB’s throw passes, basketball players shoot the ball, tennis players serve and return, and baseball players try to hit a pitched ball.[/li][li]The cliche only makes sense if you take “hard” to mean something akin to “success rate”. This does not mean that hittling a baseball takes more stamina, strength, concentration, or even “athleticism” than other general sports-related activities, but merely that you can have a substantially lower success rate at it than, say, shooting in basketball, throwing passes in football, or returning opponent’s shots in tennis, and still be considered a pretty good player.[/li][/ul]
[QUOTE=mhendo]
We can’t say this about hockey. Sure, we can look at Gretsky’s stats and see that he was a great player.
[/QUOTE]
Please, please. “Gretzky.” This is a matter of national importance to us
[QUOTE=RickJay]
Please, please. “Gretzky.” This is a matter of national importance to us
[/QUOTE]
Oops.
That’s a pretty bad boo-boo, considering i lived in Canada for two years, was born there, and hold a Canadian passport (which, if they’ve seen my post, is probably now being revoked).
[QUOTE=Spartydog]
Hitting a moving object with another moving object is inherently a very difficult thing to do.
[/QUOTE]
I’ve done it with my car without even trying. 
[QUOTE=psychonaut]
So why aren’t most pitchers at least 6" taller than the average person, like basketball players are?
[/QUOTE]
First observation: Taller pitchers tend to do better (think Randy Johnson).
Second observation: Being 6" taller as a person doesn’t mean you are pitching the ball from 6" higher than someone 6" shorter than you (think about it…).
Third observation: Hitting averages were significantly lower in the period that the mound was higher than it is at present.
[QUOTE=RickJay]
Please, please. “Gretzky.” This is a matter of national importance to us
[/QUOTE]
:smack:
[QUOTE=Musicat]
DSyoungEsq I always wondered why a hit was defined such, since chance seems to be a large part of it, but that’s the way it is, right?
[/QUOTE]
It’s defined as “getting yourself on base by your own merits” because it’s an offensive stat that’s supposed to communicate a lot about the effectiveness of the batter. “Hits the ball a lot into the air for easy catches” isn’t something managers value. There is a little something to be said for guys who don’t strike out much, but if they also tend to chop the ball into the ground for easy outs, that can more than make up for it. A hit avoids the batter getting out, and presumably any runners ahead of him. It’s a very valuable thing.
As for the chance part, that’s partly true, but you’ll notice that it’s the same guys for years who somehow manage to get “lucky”. That’s because they’re giving themselves more chances to get lucky. Albert Pujols gets robbed by leaping shortstops, but he hits more hard liners and hard grounders than the average person, so his chances at getting “lucky” go up. Even though his hitting has been charted and I’m sure fielders are positioned especially for his at-bats, he hits the ball hard so many times that the number of times the fielders “fail” has to go up.
[QUOTE=psychonaut]
So why aren’t most pitchers at least 6" taller than the average person, like basketball players are?
[/QUOTE]
It’s not the fact that the ball is being released from higher up, it’s that a higher mound allows a pitcher to “fall” further before releasing the ball and thus give it more velocity.
Being taller does help pitchers in the sense that the longer the arc of their arm, the faster their hand moves.
[QUOTE=Cheesesteak]
Because they:
1)Put the pitcher so damn close to the plate
2)put him on a hill so he throws downward
3)made the ball really small and dense
4)put stitches on the ball so it can curve
5)make batters hit with a wooden stick
6)give batters only 3 strikes vs. 4 balls
In essence, the rules conspire to make it fairly difficult to get through an at bat successfully. For the last 75+ years, the sport has been mature, so the relative skill of pitchers and batters hasn’t changed all that much, though they have tinkered with the mound to keep things somewhat even.
If they put the mound at 70ft 6in instead of 60ft 6in, batting averages would skyrocket. Change any of the other rules, and averages would change. There’s nothing inherent in hitting a ball with a bat that makes it difficult to do, it’s the situation the batters are faced with that makes it hard.
Putting a basketball through the hoop is easy in comparison. If they put the rim at 15 feet and reduced the diameter by 20%, suddenly shooting a basketball would be the hardest thing to do in sports.
[/QUOTE]
Another one would be to make the baselines 80 ft instead of 90. Or put the fences at 250 ft instead of 350. In fact, I am not sure averages wouldn’t rise (but home runs go down) if they were 450 ft. In the early days, the conditions were modified continually to produce the game people wanted. In cricket, players occasionally score 100 runs in one at bat!
It is not quite accurate to say that not much has changed in 75+ years. In 1930, one of the leagues (National, I think) had a league batting average of .300. But by some time in the 50s averages had fallen till someone won a league batting title with a .301 average. Then they lowered the mound a bit and (perhaps and unofficially) tightened the strike zone and averages came back a bit.
Another big change was the nature of pitching. In 1950, a pitcher who started a game was expected to finish it. And he was expected to “pace himself”. Essentially that means not to throw as hard as he could except in an emergency. Relief pitchers were either rookies on the way up or veterans on the way down, but there were no relief specialists (Jim Konstanty was the first one I remember and he was responsible for a basically mediocre Phillies team winning the NL pennant). Nowadays pitchers throw as hard as they can for six innings, maybe seven, and then comes a parade of relief pitches followed by a “closer”. Sometimes I think it is a wonder anyone gets a hit under these conditions.
The pole vault and gymanastics analogies don’t really apply.
What is the world record for a pole vault? Somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 feet? I could fall over 15% of that number. I do it on a regular basis 
No “common” person can hit near .045 in even minor league baseball.
I think I can score a 0.45 in the Olympic gymnastics even by doing a few booty shakes.
[QUOTE=GargoyleWB]
I want to nit pick this, both as a decent athlete and one with a physics degree…
Hitting a moving object with another moving object, or as I prefer, intersecting two motion vectors, is really incredibly easy, especially for the human brain. All it takes is practice, practice, practice. Batters are not crunching non-linear differential equations in their heads everytime they swing a bat, they are simply responding conditionally to a visual input (the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand).
The only thing that drops a batter’s percentage from .950 down to .300 is that the pitcher throws inconsistently placed pitches, which can vary the predicted path for the batter since the batter has to start their swing before the ball is even halfway to the plate.
Go to a batting cage, or batting practice, sometime. A batter can consistently whack home-run balls at will if the pitches are coming in with regularity from the pitching machine. This says to me that the skill is simply like any other, learned and practiced.
IMO, returning a first-serve effectively in tennis is far more difficult than hitting a pitch, when considering all of the inputs and variables involved.
[/QUOTE]
You help to make my argument.
“the human brain”. That’s the crux of the matter. Humans are able to utilize calculus. They are able to intuitively make the caluculations of speed, direction and trajectory and react accordingly. That’s what makeshem uniquely capable of hitting one moving object with another moving object that is apart from their own body.
“hitting home-run balls at will”. That is uninformed and ridiculous. Look at Home Run Derby. Batting practice pitchers throw 60 mph balls into the center of the strike zone and the best major league home run hitters have trouble hitting a home run the majority of the time. There is too much margin for error. Nobody can hit home runs “at will”.
“go to a batting cage” - I don’t think you have ever been to one. It’s tough enough to hit a lob pitch. Turn the speed up to 80-90 mph and the average athlete can hardly see the ball coming much less react fast enough to get the bat around.
All sports are the extension of kid’s game. Practice is everything. Sports are a matter of taking basic human skills and extending them to the N’th degree. Kids walk, run, throw, jump, and fight much more naturally than they bat. Infererring that something is not that diffucult because an elite group of athletes is able to practice enough to gain some success at it is irrelevant.
“tennis” - Gimme a break. If a tennis serve was returned successfully less than a third of the time the game would have to be radically changed or it would die.
Question: Suppose a player came along who was a much better batter than the typical major leaguer – their batting average was far above .400. How high would it have to be before managers start routinely giving them intentional walks? .500? .750? How high before they give intentional walks even when the bases are loaded (provided it’s not a game-losing move, of course)?
[QUOTE=psychonaut]
So why aren’t most pitchers at least 6" taller than the average person, like basketball players are?
[/QUOTE]
Obviously, because they are all playing basketball.
[QUOTE=coffeecat]
[QUOTE=Spartydog]
Hitting a moving object with another moving object is inherently a very difficult thing to do.
I’ve done it with my car without even trying.
[/QUOTE]
[/QUOTE]
As Ron White would say, the problem is that the bat is moving too quickly. Put a pair of headlights and a horn on it, and swing it at 55MPH, and the ball will actually jump in front of the ball. 
:smack: And this is why I should preview, so I put my /Quote tags in the right places. “I’ve done it without even trying” is of course coffeecat.
[QUOTE=dtilque]
Question: Suppose a player came along who was a much better batter than the typical major leaguer – their batting average was far above .400. How high would it have to be before managers start routinely giving them intentional walks? .500? .750? How high before they give intentional walks even when the bases are loaded (provided it’s not a game-losing move, of course)?
[/QUOTE]
It’s not just the BA. On-base and slugging percentages are as important. Case in point is Barry Bonds – until he got injured last year, he was invariably walked (setting records for IBB) in almost every at bat. He was far too dangerous to pitch to. He was very discriminating in his strike zone and only swings at strikes. And when he swings, he hits the ball on the nose and usually out of the park. His BA was still between .300 and .350, but his OBP was between .500 and .600, and his slugging percentage in the astounding .700 to .800 range (at times over 1.000).
Did opposing teams ever intentionally walk Bonds when the bases are loaded? If so, does it matter what the score is? Did they do it when behind or when the run would give Bonds’ team the lead?
[QUOTE=dtilque]
Did opposing teams ever intentionally walk Bonds when the bases are loaded? If so, does it matter what the score is? Did they do it when behind or when the run would give Bonds’ team the lead?
[/QUOTE]
This happened at least once, in a situation where the other team was leading by two runs in the bottom of the ninth; they walked Bonds to make it a one-run lead and pitch to the next guy. It worked.
An intentional walk is a safe strategy for a manager; managers are rarely criticized for taking a proactive tactical move like an intentional walk or a bunt or a steal or what have you, even if it doesn’t work out, but then are heavily criticized for NOT doing those things, even if it does work out. Walking Bonds and pitching to the next guy is never criticized; if you walk him and then the next guy hits a game-winning double the media tends to say “Well, they didn’t let Bonds beat them, but they got unlucky.”
However, the intentional walk is HEAVILY overused, I would guess by a factor of at least a hundred percent and maybe more. They backfire just as often as they help. Bonds was not quite walked “in almost every at bat” as Nivlac suggests - the most he was ever walked was about 40% of his plate appearances, in 2004, and in only one other season was he above 30% - but he was walked way, way too much. (he also didn’t have any plus-1.000 slugging percentages.) As great a player as he is, giving him a free pass is really stupid unless there is a very specific set of circumstances. Even at his very best, pitching to Bonds was smarter than automatically walking him.
Someone figured out a few years ago that if you automatically walked someone like Barry Bonds or Babe Ruth every single time up, their team would score like 100, 150 runs more than if you pitched to them normally. That’s a monstrous number of runs, enough to make an average team a pennant winner.