sixseatport
In Chicago the suspense is largely limited to figuring when the Cubs or Sox are going to choke THIS year. 
No, I’m not refering to just making contact in baseball. I meant what I said and I said a base hit. And for the sake of this argument, a double, triple, or homer is considered a base hit.
There’s no way golf measures up to the pressure and skill required to successfully acheive a base hit in professional baseball.
There’s just no adversary in golf. Hence, much less pressure. In baseball, the pitcher and the fielders are working together to deny a hitter of a hit on each pitch.
Other sport “acts” that amaze me:
anyone who high jumps higer than his head;
returning a pro’s 1st serve in tennis.
And speaking of baseball, how about fastpitch softball, where the mound is closer, and shutouts and no hitters are more common. Score one for the distaff side?!
How do you figure kicking fieldgoals of a certain distance into your equation?
(I’m having fun here, and am bored at work, not simply shamelessly upping my meagre post count.)
- Tour de France (or similar endurance bike races)
- Ironman competition (swim, ride, run)
- Marathon runs (or runs above 10K for that matter)
- Olympic Wrestling (none of that WWF crap!)
- Single handed around the world sailing (nerve wracking!)
- Soccer (you try running around for 90 minutes!)
- Downhill skiing (because I’ve done it)
Don’t believe for a second that baseball, football, hockey, basketball and especially golf are difficult sports. It’s not that they don’t require a certain amount of skill and tallent, it’s just that they don’t seem nearly as hard as the media tries to makes them look.
No, none of those sports are as hard as they look on TV…hell, I play in summer leagues (or winter leagues, whatever’s appropriate) in most of them pretty often.
The thing is, there’s a HUGE difference in the skill required to get a base hit or score a goal in hockey when playing at the professional level. I think that’s what we’re really talking about – the highest level of competition for each activity in question.
Krispy:
You said:
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Then I said:
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Your reply?
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Upon re-reading your first post, I now understand. But, a “base hit” is certainly not “what you said.” What you said was (note the underlined portion) “the bat (I guess) hitting a pitched ball.”
Anyhoo… :rolleyes:
I challanged your assertion based on three arguments:
[list=1]
[li]If you take the total amount of baseball field not covered by fielders, it’s got to be several hundred times larger than the cup on a golf green.[/li][li]That open space is also closer - golf greens are hundreds of yards away while a safe base hit could be a dribbler down the first baseline.[/li][li]In golf, the golfer can blame nothing but himself - the psychological pressure is tremendous, like nothing found anywhere in team sports.[/li][/list=1]
My conclusion - in terms of psychological performance combined with precise physical skill, no game is more demanding than golf.
You replied with contradiction:
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My earlier opinions stand as reasonable conclusions which you have not yet challanged. Care to debate?
Quicksilver:
Do you play golf? If anything, the media makes golf look easier than it really is! Standing over the ball, attempting to smack it almost a fifth of a mile to a target four inches across, knowing that you will use every major muscle group in your body, knowing that an error of 2 degrees will send you far off-target, knowing that there isn’t a single element of the equation that you can blame on anything but your own inability to perform… the psychological pressure is, again, unlike anything else in sports.
It just looks easy because you get to wear nice clothes :)!
Soccer players do their fair share of standing around. Basketball is a full contact sport without the benefit of padding and soft turf. Anyone who would suggest B-ball is not hard has never played the sport. Anyone suggesting that football is not hard has never lined up in front of a 300 pound gorilla bent on killing him.
That said, as boring as baseball is to watch, I have to agree with KO. A hitter is so outnumbered, getting on base without walking in MLB has to be at or near the top.
Let’s clarify a few categories with examples:[ul][li]The Impossible - a standing broad jump of 1 mile[]The Statistically Unbelievable - sinking every ball off the break in a game of 8-ball[]The Merely Lucky - the buzzer-beater from half court, catching a tipped passThe Truly Earned - laying down a successful suicide bunt, running a four-minute mile[/ul][/li]The problem I see is that each category tends to blend into its neighbors. Is a hole-in-one Truly Earned, or Merely Lucky? Ideally we’d like the act to be a matter of skill rather than just luck. This is a problem when looking at just frequency of success - it favors luck. One criterion for differentiating luck from skill: Can you (reasonably) practice the act? If you can, it’s skill, otherwise it’s luck. This puts a hole-in-one on the luck side.
As far as defining an act: a sports act is any action taken by the participant which a)is recorded; b)has a permanent effect on the outcome; c)is not composed of other sports acts. Also, an act is generic - it can’t depend on a particular time/place/person/record for its difficulty, although it is assumed that the competition is the best available.
My guess for toughest sports act: returning a smash in Ping Pong. Also: scoring a goal in soccer, intercepting a forward pass, returning a punt for a touchdown, not drowning in water polo, stealing home.
How about making more money in a year than most people make in a lifetime, holding out for more money, cry and complain about how hard your life is, and STILL have the balls to pretend you play “for the love of the game”.
Disclaimer: I was a baseball fan for many years, I have nothing but admiration for the Tony Gwynns and George Bretts of this world. Moreover, I recognize that the stars in EVERY sport have abilities WAY beyond mine.
That said, Ted Williams’ oft-repeated claim that hitting a baseball is the hardest feat in sports is a load of manure!
I recall an old Mike Royko column on this very subject. Essentially, Royko said, “of COURSE Williams would say that- he was a baseball player, and an egomaniac besides. If hitting a baseball is the most amazing feat in sport, and WIlliams was baseball’s best hitter, then… QED, TEd Williams was the most remarkable athlete of all time.” Anybody else get the feeling this dubious theory was just Ted WIlliams’ way of complimenting himself, yet again?
As I said, ALL top athletes amaze me. I can’t hit fastballs like TOny Gwynn, I can’t throw touchdown passes like Troy AIkman, I can’t make acrobatic baskets like Vince Carter, I can’t jump 28 feet like Carl Lewis, etc…
Still, I’m inclined to say that what Brett Favre does (running around a field, looking for a moving target fifty yards away, and throwing an odd-shaped ball to that moving target, while trying to avoid a bunch of 300 pound guys to are trying to stomp him into the ground) is a LITTLE harder than what Derek Jeter does.
Stopping a Jai-Alai ball with your crotch. and living. Things that go 120mph and are made of solid rubber hurt just a bit.
While I agree that hitting a baseball is extremely hard, my favorite play in all of sports, I submit to you, is equally if not more difficult: The hockey slapshot redirect goal. For those who know what I’m talking about, you must admit, it is a thing of beauty. If you don’t know, I’ll explain briefly. When a hockey player takes a shot at the net, or even a full slapshot, often times, the offensive forwards hanging around the goal crease will redirect the puck at the last split second, down, and under or next to the goalie. Now keep in mind, for the sake of this discussion, most slapshots average between 70 and 105 mph (which is the same as a baseball fastpitch). Plus the puck doesn’t exactly fly very well, it often wobbles in flight, or knuckles down quickly. Also, the redirect will usually happen in a distance considerably shorter than the distance from the mound to home plate. Agreed, that a certain amount of luck is involved with doing this successfully, however the puck is more often than not, redirected (just not always for a goal). The hand/eye coordination required for this, is to me, astonishing. I would have to say, that hockey players redirect pucks much more consistently than batters get base hits. (foul balls now, hmmmm, I dont know)
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These boards really do work! I feel less stupider already!
I always thought it was getting the horse to swim in water polo.
OK. Sorry. I’m leaving now.
Dammit! THe Quad! The Quad! What about the Quad? Doesn’t anybody care about the Quad!!!???
Its clear that Krispy is completely entreched in dogma and no arguement is relevant. Getting a hole-in-one is infinately less likely to occur than getting a base hit. Now, does that make it harder? I don’t know, but the odds of it occuring are one of the lowest in sports. Krispy seems to be using percentages to support against some of his arguements, but saying their irrelevane in others. Looks like a impossible battle.
Now, if you want to manufacture very rare, or impossible circumstances you could for any sport. I guess the question is impossible to answer without very rigidly defined rules.
Hitting a 95 mph fastball is the hardest thing in sports…
Figure the time you have to react to the pitch…
Damn i wish I were a mathmetician…
How long does it take something moving 95 mph to go 60’6"?
I boils down to about 1/10 of a second to decide whether and when to swing. Not sure I could even stand there and watch, let alone hit it.
The one I like to talk about is the home run cycle.( Hitting a 1 run,2 run, 3 run and Grand Slam in the same game)It’s never been done in the pros. ( at least one college player has done it.) I saw Tino Martinez, in a game vs Seatle several years ago, in which the Yankees just crushed the Mariners, get two shots at it. He had hit 1,2 and 3 run shots when he came up with the bases loaded in the 9th. He got out. The Yanks bat around, and when he gets up again, the bases are still loaded. He didn’t homer, though. That’s the only time in my life I have rooted for a Yankee to hit a homer. But for the single hardest act in all of sports, I’d have to say: (drumroll, please)
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Marrying O.J. Simpson
I don’t know if it is the hardest act in professional sports (and I don’t think the question is even answerable), but something that gives me a thrill everytime I see one is a shorthanded goal in hockey.
A hockey penalty is an intense two-minute segment, where the man-advantage team has its best offensive players facing the penalized team’s strongest defensive squad. It is damn tough for the defense to upset the offense’s concentraction and break out to score a goal down four skaters to five. When a team can score a shorthanded goal, that goal is earned.
Golf: After a casual and non-strenous walk from the green of the previous hole to the tee of the par three, swings a club with a flat face, hits a ball sitting on a tee. During this, the crowd of (I’m guessing) 2,000 is utterly silent so as not to disturb the player.
Baseball: After chasing a few foul balls out of play and diving to catch a sinking line drive out of a full sprint, the player then comes to the plate with a round bat, and with 40,000 fans cheering and jeering attempts to hit a pitch thrown at different speeds, from different angles, and different spins past 9 expert fielders.
Golf: Dozens, perhaps hundreds of amateurs record a hole-in-one each year on the same courses the pros play. Heck, it is possible that I could acheive this feat.
Baseball: I’ll never get the chance to try to hit a Randy Johnson fastball. I doubt that if I were able to make contact that I’d be able to get it past the Arizona defense anyway…
Having less than half a second to determine the trajectory of a ball (fast ball, curve, slider, swing and hit the ball with enough force to be qualified as a hit is tops on my list. The players goal is to hit the ball, and on the professional level how and where to hit the ball. And while a hole in one is difficult, anyone who has ever golfed knows that while getting a hole in one is great, that is not your specific goal. The goal is to get it close enough to the pin to putt it in. I don’t think you can claim that he was aimig FOR the hole, he was aiming NEAR the hole and it happened to go in. The amateur can get a hole in one, probably almost as often as the pro. However, it’s the rest of the game that makes that person a pro. Baseball is on a whole other level. Anyone who thinks it’s easy, go down to your local batting range into the fast pitch (which is probably around 70 mph, a change up in pro ball) and tell me how many balls you hit. And the machine doesn’t vary the pitch, give you curves or brush back pitches.
I won’t get into the hockey or soccer discussions, mainly becasue I loathe both of them and would probably just end up ripping on them.
While this probably can be it’s own posting, what do you consider a sport? I don’t consider running a sport. While I won’t deny it takes a gifted athlete, all you are doing is running. Cycling is more of a sport (with more strategy) but you are basically testing your endurance riding on a machine. Combine the two and increase the power and you’ve got Nascar. And if anyone claims THAT is a sport . . .