Basketball-long career+top level the quickest.
Baseball. First, because it’s my favorite sport, and second because it offers the best chance to have a long, fulfilling, injury-free, post-career life.
All of you people picking baseball better love long bus rides and cheap motel rooms… Pretty sure that basketball is the correct answer here unless you have a particular passion for one of the others.
Basketball, low injuries and of course you can get a nice shoe line that continues the revenue loooong after you finish playing. Plus it is an ace game!
Basketball definitely has the edge WRT money. But regardless of injuries, I’m thinking about longevity and long-term health. How many 80 year old former basketball stars are there out there, and how are they holding up?
I’m taking the liberty of interpreting the OP to mean that one has an equal chance of success in whichever sport one chooses.
Absolutely soccer, preferably pro in the Bundesliga or La Liga.
Yah, I voted baseball but Rick has convinced me. If the only guarantee is that I’m a first round pick, you have to go with the sport where that status guarantees big money and a reasonable shot at a long career. Too many high baseball picks never make big money and never get a shot with the big club.
Anybody have numbers for the success rate for first-round NBA picks (the baseball numbers were quoted upthread)?
Here’s an interesting article about exactly that.
In a nutshell:
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If you are drafted 1 - 7, you have a 70% chance of becoming either a star or a solid starter, and an additional 23% chance of at least being a serviceable player (only 7% chance of busting out). The numbers decline significantly for each following group of 7 picks.
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Guards tend to have longer careers.
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Big men are big risks.
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Don’t get drafted by the Atlanta Hawks.
Thanks DCnDC. That pretty much finalizes it, then. You have an almost 40% chance of being a star or solid started if you’re drafted in the first round in the NBA. Chances of being an NBA bench player or better over the 5-year period is almost 50% even if you’re drafted at the very end of the first round.
That’s a no-brainer compared to the success rate of MLB first-rounders, especially when you consider the discrepancy in average and minimum salaries.
The thing is, though, that the OP is positing the situation where YOU are an elite athlete with the option of choosing either sport.
I don’t know how many old basketball players are out there - I’d assume lots of them, it’s not like I keep track - but let’s suppose that it happens that unusually tall people don’t live as long so formal NBA players don’t live as long, on average. Or that black people don’t live as long, which also biases against NBA players - or whatever feature it is that makes NBA players live shorter lives. Okay, fine. But that’s a factor of your height/ethnicity/other demographic characteristics, not your sport. It won’t lengthen YOUR life to choose baseball over basketball because you’re as tall, or dark, or whatever as you are either way.
If there’s a smidgen of evidence that basketball, as a sport, makes you less likely to live a long time, I’ve never heard of it and it seems pretty dubious to me.
By comparison, choosing football absolutely DOES have a chance of shortening your life, and for some positions by a truly amazing amount.
I personally love football, but has been noted by others, I want to be able to walk normally (and be able to remember my kids’ names) when I’m 55.
I would have voted for baseball, because I don’t really care for basketball, but, as has been pointed out, the posit in the OP is that one loves all four sports.
Basketball it is.
If you bust out of the NBA, there are still good financial opportunities worldwide. I don’t know if this holds for any of the other listed sports in the poll.
There are relatively safe positions in the NFL. Kicker or punter come to mind. It also appears the the offensive guard positions have a significantly lower injury rate than other ‘regular’ positions.
Given that American Football (Gridiron) is far and away my favorite sport, I would choose to be an offensive lineman (specifically a guard). Offensive lineman make (on average) about $1,267,000.
Looks like I am an outlier. OH NO!
With the name Gagundathar, I have to believe you qualify as one of the big uglies right away. Possibly a linebacker or defensive tackle.
Since someone mentioned soccer, if that were in the poll instead of hockey, I’d pick that. I’ll use the criteria that I’m a young prospect bought by a club for a fairly big transfer fee, ie Phil Jones or Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, which is about the best comparison to being a top draft pick with no success guaranteed. It’s more fun to play than baseball and basketball, you play often, and the likelihood of long-term injury side effects seems low. I’d pick to play in England (more stability than Spain), and the Bundesliga would be my 2nd choice.
I’m pretty sure professional basketball circa 1952 is entirely different than professional basketball circa 2012.
I am able to perform at a first round level at all the sports in the OP? I say baseball because it’s the only sport on the board that I can play until I am in my (early) 40s even if I don’t make as much money as in Basketball initially I figure that the extra years of not having to work a desk job are worth it. Even if I am only a Jamey Carrol type I figure if I am a first rounder I have a better than average shot at being at least a utility guy for a whole lot of years. And who knows, maybe I will be the next Chipper Jones now that I am focusing on a single sport.
That’s a really good point, in Australia for example we have ex NBA and NCAA players earning good money playing in a pretty chilled out environment. In Europe they can and do earn a shed load of cash.
On the topic of old basketballers, there are plenty. Maybe because I have been involved in bball for many years in Australia I see them more often.
Soccer is a good one as well, plenty of money but for me bball is much more fun and you don’t have to play int he mud and snow.
Basketball, easily, for the reasons stated above. Players taken at the end of the first round in baseball get a little over $1m guaranteed, whereas the last pick in the first round of the NBA draft gets $2m guaranteed with a “virtual guarantee” of at least $1m more as long as you’re not a complete and total bust. Plus you’re in the pros immediately (first-rounders in basketball are rarely sent down to the Developmental League) so you get all the perks that go with that.
Not to mention that former first-rounders in basketball will often live off their draft position long after they’ve shown themselves to be more or less replacement-level players.
Japanese baseball.
That’s a good point.
NBA teams will stick with a high draft pick forever just because the draft in the NBA is a much bigger investment. They don’t draft many players, and the potential impact of a single player can be transformational on a franchise. There’s little willingness to cut bait, and if you do, someone else will give the top draft pick a shot.
Baseball’s draft is not nearly as big a deal, because it’s more an assemblage of a pool of talent than it is a targeting of one key player.
I looked up the 2002 major league first year player draft, which happens to be the one featured in the book “Moneyball” (I just went to 10 years ago; I didn’t mean to pick the Moneyball draft.) The #1 draft pick, Bryan Bullington, pitched just 26 games in the majors. Many, many other 2002 first rounders simply vanished; Chris Gruler, Clint Everts, Scott Moore, Drew Meyer, Ben Fritz, and others never played a game in the majors or only got a few cups of coffee. Baseball drafts are simply not predictable; a player out of high school or college is almost always unprepared for major league ball and it’s often hard to ascertain their level of talent.
But in the NBA, if you’re drafted in the first round, you’re gonna play. The 2002 NBA draft’s first round featured very few outright busts.