Not being an athlete, I don’t know how it must feel. 90+ pitches where you throw as hard as you can must be tough, but then again, I’m not at the physical peak of human prowess so I can’t use my own body to judge.
Would a pitcher be able to pitch night after night for several nights? I mean, is the only reason why they don’t do it because it will shorten their overall pitching career and not simply because it’s too sore the next day?
Football’s violent, we all know that. Having 300+ pound guys slamming into each other repeatedly can’t feel good. But a week off? And then there’s that thread where people calculate that a 60 min game only has about 11-16 mins of actual action in it. Plus, there are offense players and defense players, so most of them aren’t even in the game for half the time! My question is, would it really be so tough if football games are played on consecutive nights? Do they really need a whole week off?
Oh, and to make it simple, let’s say for both the baseball and football games, the games are played in the same city, so no traveling required.
Relief pitchers do pitch multiple nights in a row, but they throw far fewer pitches.
For a starter, their arms are pretty tired the next day. If you’ve toss 100+ pitches at full velocity it’s going to make you arm sore (a lot of pitchers ice their arms down after the game to cut down on the damage).
Football is harder. Player do play in less than a week, since some games are played on Thursday, but the difference is that a pitcher isn’t slamming his body against another well-armored body, nor is he falling onto the ground. It’s the difference between heavy exercise and smashing against a wall; the latter will hurt more and for longer.
Football players usually only have one day off, then return to practicing on Tuesday.
It depends what part of the season. Late in the season the football players ache every morning.
They have to play over injuries and wear and tear. It is a cruel and rough game.
These guys play every bit as hard as your NFL do, do it without the body armour and for more than 10 minutes in a game.
It is not unusual for State of Origin players to back-up and play for their club side the next day.
However, playing 2-3 days later is much rarer.
The theory is that, if uninjured, the day after a match the player is just a capable provided the warm down/warm up has been done properly. After a couple of days the body’s healing process for the inevitable bruises, strains, muscle tears etc of contact sport predominates. Playing during this healing/recovery phase is considered to ill-advised.
I’ve read that a full-speed hit or tackle in the NFL is the equivalent of being in an auto collision.
I find rugby players (and Aussie football players) to be impressive (and insane), though I wonder if, because they don’t wear pads, if the hits in those sports are quite as hard.
This doesn’t directly answer the question about why football players only play once per week, but it does illustrate the impact playing the game has on their bodies.
Here’s an article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on life after football:
Depending on the position they played, former NFL players have a life expectancy of only 53 to 59 years old (whereas the average life expectancy for a U.S. male is 75).
The average NFL career is about 3 1/2 seasons. Every season played is estimated to take 2 to 3 years off of a player’s life expectancy.
You can think that rugby is every bit as violent as American football, but you’d be wrong. There are many more restrictions on how you can tackle in rugby. The reason NFL players wear so many pads is that the game would be lethal otherwise. Teddy Roosevelt threatened to ban the college game after 18 players died in 1905. After some changes were made only 6 died the following year.
The OP asks why players can’t play on consecutive days. That is principally due to total work expended during the game, not the execution of a couple of explosive tackles, although I would concede that death is a valid reason why you wouldn’t play the next week.
So is falling off the third rung of a ladder, it just doesn’t sound as impressive.
Undoubtedly, but would it be any tougher than another one-armed sport e.g. tennis?
In the 2010 Australian Open mens final, won in (3) straight sets by Federer, there were 216 points. Federer hit 116 serves (74 first serves). I’d reckon every first serve would have been as hard (in terms of work expended) as any MLB pitcher. Then he had to play out the rest of the point. Federer played 7 singles matches in 13 days. And he didn’t have a particularly tough tournament (2 four set matches)
The torque put on the shoulder and elbow of a major league baseball pitcher is substantially greater than the torque placed on the elbow and shoulder of even Andy Roddick, the fastest server in men’s tennis. That’s because tennis players aren’t so stupid as to do something so unnatural as the baseball overhand curveball.
Football players could play more often, but there is no reason to do so. The game evolved as a weekend activity, and has remained such. This allows two things: greater recovery game to game and more practice leading up to each game.
A tennis player has the racket to increase the speed. A pitcher does it on arm strength alone. While a pitcher can’t throw as fast as a top tennis player can serve, once you remove the mechanical advantage of the racket and the additional help from gravity, it is a greater strain.
In addition, the pitcher is not just throwing the ball straight at the hitter. He’s throwing curves, sliders, etc. – much more stressful on the arm than just hitting the ball with a racket.
I could hit a tennis ball all day when I was younger, but I couldn’t pitch more than a handful of pitches.
One difference between rugby and football is the size of the players. Looking at the UK national team, it looks like they top out at about 250 pounds; pro football linemen seem to be around 290 or more. That extra forty pounds takes its toll. A 260-pound running back is going to have one or two of those guys landing on him whenever he runs the ball, or will have to throw his body in front of them (when they have a running start) to block it. I’m sure some of the players on the team could play every day (kickers and punters, of course, and maybe some of the defensive backs), but too many are banged up to manage it.
