Real players train extremely hard, and few manage to hit .300. Not every pitcher throws all the same pitches the same way. So no, hitting against a pitching coach or whatever wouldn’t make you good enough to hit half that.
Nobody playing regularly is hitting .045. Benchwarmers who don’t play enough to get into a rhythm, or injured guys, may bat .045. And just think - there are plenty of people TRYING to make it who are, in the estimate of GMs and such anyway, aren’t good enough to make it. They’re levels better than you’d be with just a year of training. These guys have been trying to hit for decades!
What, you expect Matt Walbeck to always hit safely in every 4.27 at-bats? Not gonna happen. Besides, the man has never played in more than 115 games in a single season. See Marley’s benchwarmer comments.
jb_007clone,
Your OP didn’t say anything about “hitting only”. You said “MLB worthy”, which means a lot more than hitting .160 during a walk-in tryout.
So, supposing your .160 newcomer magically appeared on an MLB roster. How does he stay on the roster, with no fielding skills whatsoever? As a pinch hitter? – he’s not good enough for that.
So, do you want to change your parameters again til you find a statement you can get a few people to agree with?
For the record, I agree with everyone else, it would take an extraordinary person, not an ordinary person, to accomplish this.
I suggest you look for financing to pay for a year of workouts at a batting cage, with your collateral being the expected income from an MLB team next year. Surely if it’s such a sure thing, you’ll find lots of takers.
First of all, catcher is a position where players aren’t necessarily expected to hit all that well. A good defensive catcher, or one that manages a staff well, can get by not hitting well. But, no position player is going to get by hitting under .100. I expect whatever player’s stats you are looking at are for a limited amount of at bats. Try looking at the player’s career stats instead. No position player is going to play out a whole season at .045.
Many players spend their whole lives in the minor leagues and still never learn to do it. Players put years and years (not just one) into improving their hitting, and still never progress to the majors.
Any major leaguer could go into a cage and hit every pitch once they got lose, no problem. Getting into a cage and adjusting to the timing of a 90 MPH pitch each time is no problem. It isn’t even comprable to hitting pitches of varying speeds, in varying locations, that have movement on them. Pitching machines do not equal major league pitchers.
There’s a part in “Ball Four” by Jim Bouton, where he talks about pitchers having sucky batting averages in the majors. He mentions that most major league pitchers have a bit of nastolgia for their high school days, when they could strike out ten a game, pitching every other game (playing only a couple or three a week), and hit .350 playing the outfield the rest of the games.
They were outstanding athletes overall. In the majors they just don’t have time to be world class in two disciplines.
Your point is “the average guy”. To my knowledge, no one from my high school has ever made the majors, and those were not the average athletes in town. Out of ~600 boys in the junior and senior classes, there were, what, 25 on the varsity team? That’s 4.2%, and as I said, I’ve never heard of any of them ever making the majors, in the history of the school since 1962. Jamaal Wilkes of the Lakers went to the high school across town, but that’s about it for the local superstars.
Let’s look at what you’re saying, just statistically. The “average” person is at about the 50% percentile. There are 30 teams, giving us about 750 players. Just for rough figures, let’s say there are about 2.65 million men ages 20 to 40 in the United States. This means that the major leaguers compose .028% of the reasonably eligible population. Except that this is actually low, because of the number of foreigners now playing in the majors. Edgar Renteria of the Cardinals is black, but is actually Colombian, and is still even now getting comfortable with English.
So, to sum up, you’re saying that in one year, a person could go from the 50th percentile to 99.972th percentile in one year?
I utterly and without qualification say, “You’re wrong.”
Simply wrong. Wrong. Wrong. You have not addressed any of the points made against you.
No one mentioned that it is impossible for someone to become a major league player. YOU said “average” person. That’s what the problem is here. Read my point about the statistics of the percentiles on the ability curve, and see if that doesn’t make sense.
I told my dad about this discussion, and he said, “Tell him to practice for three months and see if he can get signed for A ball.” I completely agree.
I meant to say that the figure is actually HIGH, because not all 750 major league players are American. The actual figure should then be lower than .028% of the American population having achieved major league ability at any one time.
You guys are right. The worst player on the worst team in the league is better than the other, as you put it, 2.65 million eligibile people in the United States. I am totally, and thoroughly wrong. No person, no matter how hard they trained could ever beat him at hitting. To even concieve of that notion is insanity! Hitting a .160 equates to setting foot on the moon in relation to the average man. I once again apologize. Where was my head?
“I told my dad about this discussion, and he said, “Tell him to practice for three months and see if he can get signed for A ball.” I completely agree.”
The average joe is not trying to get signed by anybody! Who knows, maybe in three months, with intensive training, he could be as good as the worst A ball player.
Being dumb and sarcastic isn’t much of a credit to your argument. Do you want to refute anything anybody said? That usually goes over better.
You realize that “the worst A-ball player” probably showed an exceptional degree of skill in high school and/or college, and in the years leading up to that- right? Sorry, all that experience and practice adds up to being worth more than three months of intensive practice. Even with all the practicing, you still haven’t played in a single real live game against opponents of major league (or whatever level) caliber. And that makes an enormous difference.
Why stop at 1 year of 16 hour practices to be just better than the worst hitter in mlb? Why not practice 2 years and crack a starting lineup? Or, 3 years and become all-star caliber? Or 5 years, and go on to a hall of fame career?
What would happen if Alex Rodriguez or Vladimir Guerrero decided to take a year off and do these practices? If they improved by the same margin that would take an average joe off the street to major league caliber, they’d probably hit every pitch out of the park for a homer.
jb_007clone, you are ignoring many factors here, but a major one is that someone can only improve themself so much by practicing, no matter how hard they work. After a certain point, just putting in more practice hours won’t be of much more help to someone.
Well, your pointless sarcasm aside, this is exactly what I and all the rest of us do, in fact, actually mean. Read that sentence over and over, until you believe it.
It is true BY DEFINITION. If someone else were better, then he would be the person with the major league contract.
If you aren’t willing to actually address the fact that no one here agrees with you, or ANY of the points made, then I just give up. Dude, are you willing to have any kind of rational discussion on this or not? People are telling you compelling arguments why they think you’re wrong, and all you’ve done is get mad for their disagreeing.
This is totally correct. In fact, in the four years I was in high school, I didn’t hear of ANY player at the two high schools in town getting signed to ANY kind of professional contract. To even get scouted shows that you are a cut above the rest.
Oh, and I messed up in my statistics. I meant that we should assume that there are 26.5 million from 20 to 40 in the United States. I dropped some zeros. This means that major leaguers represent under .00028% of the eligible men.
This means that their is less than one major leaguer for every 35,333 eligible men in the United States.
As was already said, the guys who are playing pro ball, even in the low minors, have been playing ball their entire lives. They have devoted countless hours, days and years to it.
There is no way an average Joe (who, I assume, is defined as a youngish guy off the street in decent shape who has not been playing organized ball ) could aquire those kinds of skills to a degree where he could equal any proffesional hitter.
This is possibly true given that the ‘average Joe’ had some talent he didn’t know about. BUT the worst benchwarmer on the worst team probably isn’t on the roster for his hitting ability. he’s there for his defense. If it weren’t for that, they’d buy him a bus ticket back home. Meaning even if you are correct, that still doesn’t make him able to play pro ball.
I just noticed that this whole thread reads like one of december’s debates.
OP asks a question, virtually everyone says “It can’t be done.”
OP rephrases question, gets his ass handed to him.
OP needlessly tries to clarify rephrased question, evidently thinking all his naysayers are reading it wrong. Gets his ass handed to him again.
OP gets sarcastic.
What’s next, questionable cites to back up his argument?
There is no major league baseball position player today who is normally a .160 hitter. Such players wouldn’t make it out of single-A ball. The VAST majority of players in double and triple A would hit better than that in the majors. Even the worst Tiger will probably get his average above .200 if you give him the rest of the year. And even if you could hit .160, you’d do it without pwoer, walks, or speed, and you’d have no defensive value. You’d wash out of the Pioneer League in a month.
Your error is in assuming that the worst major leaguer is a .160 hitter. That’s not true. The worst major league position players today are really .210-.220 hitters; they might hit .146 in a short stint just out of sheer bad luck, but over the long haul they’re not that bad. Even those players who ARE .200 hitters usually have other skills to recommend them - maybe they’re glove wizards, or they can hit the ball a mile when they do hit it. Bob Uecker hit an even .200, but he was a good defensive catcher and had a weird, inexplicable talent for hitting Sandy Koufax, so he managed to stick around. A geniune .160 hitter would never get past rookie league ball. the guy you saw hitting .045 was 1-for-21. He’s not really that bad, you know - it’s just a fluke based on his having only 21 at bats. Give him 210 and he’ll be above .200.
In fact, I would argue that an ordinary Joe could not hit .160 just through one year of practice. The “luck” average - where you would expect any good athlete with some baseball experience - is closer to .120.
Now, I will agree that it is possible that if you took an athletic young man and trained the bejeezus out of him for a whole year he might get better than the worst SINGLE A player. But at Signle A, you have some players who are freshly drafted based on a projected potential who turn out to be total busts. Every year a crappy team like Pittsburgh will draft some 18-year-old kid just because he’s fast and strong and they “like his tools,” thinking they can turn him into a ballplayer, send him to Rookie or A ball, and he hits .127, makes three errors a week, and wrecks the Hummer he bought with his signing bonus. You could be better than that guy. But better than, say, Donnie Sadler? No way.
The Kansas City Royals tried to turn above-average-Joes into Major leaguers with an experimental academy they started in 1972.
From here:
" The Academy was a major league experiment to take teenage players with overall athletic skill and develop them into major league players. When the Academy was closed by the Royals in 1974, Branch rejoined the Pirates."
IIRC it was considered a complete failure. So even by taking above average players and giving them intense training and instruction, it still didn’t translate into major league talent.