See, this has always been my suspicion, but i figured that, being a relative newbie to baseball, i must be missing something. It’s good to hear someone say it who obviously has a life-long interest in the sport, and who has a good understanding of the statistics and strategy.
The point I was trying to make, but that others have articulated better, is that baseball’s athletic “difficulty” is not due to any special extra physics involved. It is primarily due to a larger statistical window in which an attempt at success can yield a positive result (hit) versus a negative (strike,out,foul).
I think that the “baseball is hardest” lobby is trying to erroneously equate a .300 baseball hitter with a .300 basketball shooter and use that to make judgements about the respective sport’s athleticism or difficulty.
I would still contend that, using athleticism and skill as a measuring point, that sports like tennis, downhill skiing, MotoGP, and gymnastics involve more skill and training than hitting does. Quantifying that measurement is of course the hard part.
The contention, which continually gets confused, is NOT that baseball is the most difficult sport (overall), it is that hitting a baseball with a bat is the single, most difficult isolated action that an athlete is required to perform on a regular basis in any major sport. Nothing else requires the speed, timing, reflexes and judgement required to successfully hit a baseball. What happens before and after that is irrelevant to the argument.
There’s all of this talk about batting cages, making contact, etc. I don’t hear any of the naysayers addressing the issue of an 85 mph curveball leaving the pitchers hand, looking like it’s going to take your ear off and then having it break into the strike zone. But if you are good enough, the batter can pick up the spin of the ball, know it is going to break into the strike zone and hopefully get the bat on it. Otherwise, he’s going to bail out thinking he’s about to get killed. Next, should we talk about the split-fingered fastball? What about the 97 mph fastball from the pitcher that tends to be “a little bit wild”? The best baseball players typically retire because thay find that they simply can no longer get the bat around on the ball. When reactions slow just enough that you cannot hit the fastball, your career is over. Conversely, the minor leagues are full of very talented players that “can’t hit major league pitching” which usually means they aren’t effective at hitting the curveball.
The overall most difficult sport to excell at is probably ice hockey because just about everything that is done is a learned skill. Skating, stickhandling, shooting. Nothing is natural. Golf demands the most precision. Boxing is the toughest. All that being said, there is no single, isolated skill that demands more than effectively hitting a baseball.
Exhibit A:
Tom Glavine of the Mets against Albert Pujols of the Cards, just now, tonight.
Glavine doesn’t have the velocity he used to have. Pujols is one of the best hitters in baseball. Glavine threw a bunch of curveballs, stuff in and out of the stike zone and struck out Pujols swinging on a junk curve ball outside the strike zone.
It looks easy on TV. When you step into the batter’s box it all looks a lot different. If you can find someone that can hit a baseball better than Pujols you can make a fortune. Go do it. Until then, quit deluding yourself that it is easy.
I’m wondering where in the thread anyone suggested it’s easy to get a hit off Tom Glavine.
I re-read every post in the thread. I’m not seeing it.
It’s not easy to get a hit in baseball. Period. Glavine just demonstrated how difficult a pitcher (who’s lost his velocity) can make it for someone who is one of the best.
I think that one of the most overlooked aspects of the changes in batting averages over the years, i.e. the dirth of .400 hitters, is the change in the gloves. Take a look at the mitts they used to use, on a field that was the same size and shape as it is now. If the ball didn’t get to the fielder almost directly, there was no chance of his getting to it to make the play. And the first basemen most definitely did not work with the baskets that they use now. If all the other factors remained the same, a larger number of balls that were hit in 1910 would have gone past infielders for hits. And a larger number of balls that were thrown to the first basemen would not have been caught for easy 5-3 groundouts.
Some stats to work with:
Guy plays 6 games a week, averaging 3-4 at bats per game = 21 at bats per wk.
Good hitter gets 7 hits per week, he’s hitting .333.
But if he gets one or two more hits every week (8.5 hits/week), he’s hitting .404. That’s three more hits every two weeks to raise his average from .333 to .404, and I’m saying that the difference in the gloves could certainly make up a good portion of that difference. Or, put another way, if fielders used those gloves today, it would be easy to see how they’d miss a few balls. It wouldn’t take a lot to raise averages of hitters, particularly those who hit the ball REAL hard - the better hitters. Ergo, more .400 hitters back in the day. xo, C.
It’s not easy to do a lot of things in sports. So what’s your point? Seriously, does one Glavine strikeout trump the whole thread?
CC, there’s quite a lot of truth in that; doubtlessly major league fielders are quite a lot better than they used to be.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but I read that a batter in the major leagues cannot track the ball the last 5 feet before it reaches the batter because the ball travels at such a high velocity and the human eye cannot see the ball as it gets closer to him…but a good batter knows the best level to swing at the ball as it leaves the pitchers hand and makes contact more often.
It’s not a matter of whether you can see the ball, it’s a matter of reaction speed.
A ball travelling at 90mph is travelling at a rate of 132 feet per second. At that speed, the ball covers the last 5 feet in about 1/26 sec., or about 0.04 seconds.
Even if you can see the ball perfectly, there’s no way that you can react in that amount of time.
Hell, at 132 feet per second, i takes a ball less than half a second to get from the pitcher’s hand to the plate. You have to be swinging well before the ball arrives if you want to make contact. A batter probably has a couple of tenths of a second, at most, to decide what to do with any given pitch. In other words, he probably has to decide what to do before the ball is half-way from the mound to the plate.
Of course, the same is true for a cricket player. The difference, though, is that a cricket player can just stick the bat in front of the ball if necessary, because there is no penalty for hitting it straight to a fielder along the ground. If a baseball hitter does that, he’ll be thrown out at first. Also, the cricket player has the predictable bounce of a flat-bladed bat, rather than the rounded surface of a baseball bat.
There are actually a lot more variables a cricketer faces than a baseballer.
While the bat is larger and flat, he has to contend with the uneven bounce of the pitch, the fact that a cricket ball moves a lot more through the air than a baseball, that the ball deviates it’s line once it hits the pitch, hitting against a feild which may never be in the same position two balls in a row, that he has to face a constantly changing rotations of very different bowlers in a very short time, there are nor “fair” or “foul” hits - any hit in the air is as likely to get him out he can’t do a Wade Boggs and just foul off pitch after pitch and that the bowler is allowed, pretty much with impunity, to plunk him with the ball whenever he pleases. Cricket is also played in a far wider vaierty of light conditions than baseball, and the ball isn’t changed every pitch.
That said, cricket is a game of compilation and accumulation and of individual decisions. Apples and Oranges with baseball, really.
The distribution of talent in baseball follows the good old bell-shaped curve, with
major leaguers all clustered on the far right of the curve, where it flattens out to
zero. You and I probably are somewhere in the great unwashed middle, where our
batting averages probably would be .020; naturally no ML team is going to sign us.
Someone like Ted Williams or Tony Gwynn are at the far right, where hardly any
other players exist.
Well, i agree with your last sentence completely. The two sports, especially the hitting aspect of the sports, really are too different to compare in many meaningful ways.
I also agree about the issue of the ball hitting the pitch, and it’s something i was going to mention in my previous post, but i didn’t want to complicate things. You’re right that the baseball hitter really faces no equivalent. The most wicked slider, curveball, or knuckleball doesn’t deviate from its line through the air anywhere near as abruptly as a well-bowled off-cutter or leg-spinner deviates off the pitch. And the cut or spin imparted to the ball by the bowler can be magnified by cracks and imperfections in the pitch itself.
I haven’t seen any definitive tests on the subject, but having watched cricket most of my life, and baseball for the last six years, my own observations make me somewhat skeptical of your assertion that “a cricket ball moves a lot more through the air than a baseball.” I’ve watched some good swing bowlers in my time, guys like Terry Alderman, Safraz Nawaz, Simon Jones, and Waqar Younis, and on a good day those guys can certainly get the ball to move a lot through the air. But it doesn’t seem to me that their deliveries move any further than a good Barry Zito curveball or Tim Wakefield knuckleball. I could be wrong about this, because admittedly my conclusions are based only on personal perceptions from attending games and watching on TV.
You’re correct that the cricket field can be moved substanitally between deliveries, and that there might be a huge gap at backward point one minute, and a guy standing there the next. But the very possibility of movement is indicative of the fact that the fielding team in cricket has so much more ground to cover than a baseball team, and the cricket batsman has a lot more space to hit into. A baseball fielding team has one catcher, one pitcher, and the other seven players only have to cover a 90[sup]o[/sup] wedge of field. In cricket, there is one wicketkeeper, one bowler, and the other nine players have to cover a full circle, 360[sup]o[/sup] of open space.
This goes along with your observation about baseball players being able to foul off balls in order to remain at the plate. While it’s true that they can do that, the baseball hitter with two strikes is almost obliged to swing and foul off the pitch in order to stay alive, whereas a cricket player can play defensively by just blocking the ball, or padding up if it’s not going to hit the stumps, or just letting it go if it’s wide or too high. The only baseball equivalent of cricket’s dead bat defensive shot is the bunt, and that is employed sparingly and also takes away the option of fouling the ball off to stay alive. And if a baseball player puts the ball in play, he has to run, whether it goes into a gap or straight to a fielder; the cricketer can decide whether or not to run based on his estimation of the likelihood of being run out.
It’s true that cricket bowlers can hit the batter pretty much whenever they feel like it, although excessive bouncers to the body will draw a warning. The bouncer in cricket is best used as a surprise device to catch a batter off balance, to set him up for a different delivery later, or to induce a wild hook shot that will get him out. And we’re unlikely ever to see another proper bodyline series, so constant bowling at the body isn’t that much of an issue. Also, cricket players are generally considerably better protected against such deliveries than baseball players. They wear pads on their legs, and often padding on the upper thigh and rump area, padded gloves, often padded forearm guards, and full face helmets. Getting hit can still be an unpleasant experience, but these things help.
Also, any decent cricketer should have a good range of leg side shots. Bowling at the body might hit the batter, but it might also lead to a pull shot for four runs. Cricketers are taught to use footwork to move inside a leg side ball and hit it. Baseball players, on the other hand, have little option but to dive out of the way of a ball aimed at their body, or take a plunking.
You say that the ball isn’t changed every pitch in cricket, as if that’s some sort of advantage to baseball. It might be, in terms of light conditions and the visibility of the ball, but i think the fact that the ball is used for 80 overs in a test match can actually often make things easier for the cricket batsman, especially in certain weather and pitch conditions. We’ve all seen test matches where, after about 15-20 overs, the balls has lost its shine, the pitch is flat, and the batting side just smacks it all over the place. At times like this, it often seems that the only hope of taking a wicket comes with the taking of the new ball. I’ll bet there are plenty of bowlers who would love a baseball-style system where old scuffed balls are discarded and replaced with new ones. Of course, that would probably be the end of spin bowlers. And cricket balls are considerably more expensive than baseballs.
I’m not trying to argue that baseball is harder than cricket. The two are really very hard to compare. In fact, i’d be willing to bet that a cricket batter would find it easier switching to baseball than the other way around, because at least the baseball swing is a natural action. Playing a “straight bat,” essential to success in cricket, is not a very natural thing to do, and takes a lot of practice and training.
Anyway, i’ve rambled enough. That’s just my 2c.