This is why I find the Mannings to be just unbelievable.
My brother played high school football against Peyton, and I played against Eli. They always crushed us. Though one play I forced a fumble from Eli’s RB.
Any videos he has of Peyton in high school? I always want to see videos of great sports stars in high school, like LeBron or Kobe or Peyton, just to see if it is ridiculously apparent that they are just outstanding at their game even at the high school level.
Also, you could probably give shit to Eli by saying “Don’t hand off to a RB that fumbles to me!” 
Soccer referee. She or he is supposed to be able to track all 22 players at once and call all the fouls and penalties that are committed, and not be swayed by the multitude of ‘injuries’ that seem to happen regularly. Oh, and each ref runs about 12 miles during each match.
It’s been a while now but I dimmly recall reading a Sports Illustrated (I think) article that said the hardest thing to do in all of professional sports was to hit a pitch by a major league pitcher.
I’d think scoring a goal in hockey has to be pretty hard too.
I’m not sure there is any one thing that is the “hardest”. I don’t know even by what metric that could be decided.
Professional sports people are operating on a level that we simply cannot comprehend and acheiving that level, in any sport, by a lay-person is pretty much impossible.
The greater the number of discrete skill components needed, the harder the task. For baseball, It is entirely possible for anyone to lay bat on ball by fluke. The difficulty comes in doing it with enough regularity to be considered competent. Same with golf, Anyone can sink a 25 foot put by a fluke but few can do it with the same regularity as top pro. Your goal scoring in hockey seems objectively more difficult as it is far more unlikely that it happens by fluke.
I’d say Olympic athletes - track and field, swimmers, gymnasts - if only because of the overwhelming pressure they’re under. A professional team player can have a bad day; an Olympic athlete can’t have a bad second. They have to be absolutely perfect, or it’s all over.
Dollars to donuts only the America professional sports were considered when making that assessment.
In baseball - you’re a star if you’re successful 1/3 of the time (i.e. hit a ball into fair territory and make it at least to first base safely).
Is there any other sport in which a percentage that low makes you a star? Soccer penalty kicks, basketball free throws, and football field goal attempts are all much higher percentages. Pro golf and tennis - you will hit the ball almost 100% of the time, and reach your goal (successful putt, or getting the ball “in” over the net) much more than 33% of the time.
I don’t think that’s really a good metric since you’re being compared against other people that also have that same task.
Not sure why PKs in soccer are the correct comparison. An average shot is more along the lines of 10-20% depending on the shooter and the playstyle of the team.
Alternatively you could argue that only one of the 156 golfers can win a Major tournament
Only one in 128 tennis players does not exit a Grand Slam tournament beaten.
You could make NFL All Pro or win a Super Bowl without actually touching the ball in a game, let alone score a touchdown.
You are a star if you are substantially better than average player of the sport, the actual average doesn’t matter.
Oh, I have long said that Catcher is the hardest position in baseball. The pitcher gets all the time in the world to scratch, get themselves ready, and throw a strike 60 feet 6 inches away. The catcher has no time at all to catch that ball from an awkward position and throw a strike 120 feet away.
Once I hit 45, I had a better appreciation for Carlton Fisk catching in MLB at age 45. There’s no way in hell my knees could take that!
Dumb question: Aside from equipment-rules and the fact that it would look extremely unprofessional, is there any reason a catcher can’t sit on a stool of some sort? Far better on the knees, and he can still rise to his feet and throw the ball to any base just as easily.
I suspect that a stool wouldn’t be allowed to be on the field during play.
If you’re just going by how much the person sweats, consider “BEER HERE” dude walking through the bleachers carrying a case of overpriced, flat lager on a 90+ degree day.
Yeah, he’s sweatin’ but he’s also getting paid to watch the game. Not getting paid much, but he’s not paying to get in at all,
It wouldn’t be the toughest job, but I always feel for the payroll admin staff at Premier League football clubs. They’ll make maybe 30k a year while paying some players over 300k a week.
Completely agree with Snarky_Kong here. I’ve always found this logic completely bizarre. Yes, it’s basically a truism that even the best baseball hitters only get a hit once every three tries, but that doesn’t mean that hitting in baseball is “harder,” in any meaningful sense, than the tasks that athletes perform in other sports. It’s largely a function of the mechanics and the expectations of the game, and the way that success is measured.
Look at bowling in cricket. The fundamental aim of a bowler is to get a wicket; that is, to get the batter (or batsman, as we say in cricket) out. In a full-length game (a test match), a bowler might bowl 20 or 30 overs in each of the two innings. At 6 deliveries per over, that’s 120-180 deliveries per inning. And in an inning he might get two wickets (i.e., two outs), or three, or none. Five is considered really good - so good that 5W/Inn (5 wickets in an innings) is a separate statistical category all of its own.
So how do we measure success for a cricket bowler in the same way that we measure success for a baseball hitter? If he bowled 180 balls, and took 5 wickets, then if we measure success on a per-delivery basis, he’s getting a wicket about once every 36 deliveries, for a success rate of .028. This means that (according to the baseball metric) getting 5 wickets in a test cricket innings is more than ten times as hard as hitting .333 in baseball. What if we measure success on a per over basis? Then we have five wickets in 30 overs, for a success rate of .167, which means that cricket bowling is still twice as hard as baseball hitting. And remember, getting five wickets is not the norm; even the best bowlers in the world only achieve this feat once every four or five innings that they bowl.
Interestingly, while a key statistical measure of bowling success is precisely the type of statistic I’ve outlined above - the numbers of wickets calculated as a function of the number of balls bowled - it is not expressed quite the way I’ve done it above. Instead of saying that a bowler takes .028 wickets per delivery, or .167 wickets per over, the bowling average in cricket is expressed as the number of deliveries bowled per wicket.
So, the great Australian fast bowler Dennis Lillee, widely accepted as one of the best bowlers of all time, retired with a test bowling average of 23.92, meaning that he took a wicket (got a guy out) about once every four overs (24 deliveries) during his career. Low-20s for a bowling average is considered historically great. The amazing New Zealander Richard Hadlee had a slightly better average than Lillee, at 22.29. Of all bowlers who have taken more than 200 test wickets, the best bowling average is Malcolm Marshall of the West Indies, with an average of 20.94.
Is this harder or easier than being a hitter in baseball? I don’t know, but I do know that just pointing to the 1-in-3 statistic for baseball hitters is a pretty dumb way to try and answer the question.
Similarly, in hockey save percentages usually range from about 0.900-0.930 (90%-93%) - so players score on between one-fifteenth and one-tenth of their shots. Does this mean that scoring a goal in hockey is three to five times harder than hitting a baseball?
Yes, yes, it does.