Why do baseball players take longer to mature?

Major League Baseball’s amateur draft will be held this Tuesday (June 7th). For the first time, it will be carried live on TV, by ESPN2. I can understand that the media, and hardcore fans alike, pay much less attention to this event than to the NFL’s, the NBA’s or the NHL’s because most if not all the players drafted are many years away from playing in the majors.

Now why do baseball players generally have to be “groomed” so much longer than football, basketball or hockey players? For all the Reggie Bushes, LeBron Jameses and Sidney Crosbys, very young baseball prospects ready for the show seem so few and far between. Is it because of the very nature of the game (the most individual of team games)? Is it because of the very nature of the system and tradition, long ago built on a network of farm teams? Is it because the caliber of the collegiate game is so much below that of MLB? Then again, if any of the above, why?

I’ve read somewhere that it’s simply because baseball is a “complex” game. Though I love the intricacies of the national pastime, I don’t buy this. Football is not that simple…

So, what’s the straight dope on this?

I wondered this too. My closest coworker is married to a Major League Baseball player or was because he got injured and bumped down to AAA for the moment. It does seem like the farm system does an awlful lot of grooming and they wait to see what happens.

My best guess is that baseball is less physical than the other major American sports so they have more time to wait and they don’t have to rush so much to tap into raw physical ability.

Well firstly you have to realize that professional football does have a sort of minor league. It has NCAA football, the career path of a professional football player goes High School–>College–>Pros. For the overwhelming majority of them, that means they start their professional careers around the age of 21, possibly 22, which isn’t an abnormal age for a decent prospect to have made it to the “Show” from the minor leagues.

Part of the reason it takes so long is, in baseball natural ability is great, but it’s just simply not enough to succeed. To be a successful hitter in the major leagues or a successful pitcher, you pretty much have to actually face major league caliber pitching and hitting (respectively) on a regular basis or you just won’t develop the ability to hit or pitch at the major league level.

Around four years is a pretty reasonable transition period from High School to the Show, for a prospect that is actually going to on and be successful in the MLB. Look at most of the MLB greats, almost none of them have a season starting prior to age 21. Right now, the youngest major leaguer is 21, and that’s about typical. 19-21 is about the typical age of the youngest person on a major league roster in any given season. I believe Alex Rodriguez was the last 18-year old to play in the majors, and despite the talent that he is, even he only had a few games at the age of 18 and then went back down to the minors to develop further.

Realistically, I’m not really sure that baseball players mature at a slower rate than football players. I do think they mature at a slower rate than basketball players because even a single phenomenal out of High School basketball player represents a situation that just plain doesn’t happen in the Major Leagues. I believe the last Major Leaguer to come up straight from High School and not be a total embarrassment was in the 1960s, and while clubs have tried it very occasionally since then, none of them ever do well at all, go back to the majors and then come back a year or two later.

Robin Yount is one of the most modern examples I can think of when it comes to a really young player coming up to the majors and doing really well. He played over 100 games his rookie season at the age of 18, but even he had spent a season in the minors before that.

I’m not sure there’s a factual answer to this question.

My opinion is that it’s a composite: As Martin Hyde said, you have to be able to play up to the major-league level to succeed, and as the OP said, it’s the most individual of the team sports. If I spend all season on a football D-line, and I never sack a quarterback, well, my team may or may not survive. If I spend all season in a major league lineup, and I never hit a single, my team would likely be in much greater trouble.

There’s also the Aluminum vs. Wood issue. College players use aluminum, the pros use wood bats. Perhaps it takes a while to learn how to swing a heavier bat at a faster pitch, and from a fielder’s perspective, how to react to a ball coming off of wood vs. aluminum. In this way, the game is different from college to the pros – one of the most fundamental parts of the professional game is functionally different from the high school and college levels. I believe that basketball is much closer (though with a different 3-pt line) and football is virtually identical between college and the pros.

Just some speculation.

I also think MLB has by far the deepest level of talent of the three major American professional sports leagues, in large part I feel this is because of the farm system, and also of course because of its head start over basketball and football as a widely popular sport.

Who does the scouting in the NFL? Well, NFL scouts. But who do they scout? They scout, almost exclusively, college athletes.

Which means the first level of scouting has been done by college football coaches, and in general your average college football program just simply does not have the resources that a major league baseball club has in regards to going out and finding talent. I don’t care where it is in the country, what level of High School ball it is, what team it is, I’d be willing to bet money that EVERY High School baseball team that exists in the United States and has existed for more than a few years has probably had a scout see them in some capacity at some point.

And then of course you have Canada, Puerto Rico, Japan, South Korea, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Mexico and et cetera. In some places in the D.R., kids as young as 13 are trained every day practically all day to become ballplayers.

The farm system has its tentacles everywhere they aggressively go after talent to a degree that college football programs just can’t mimic. Furthermore, college football is more limited in how it develops players. When you are brought into the professional baseball fold, once you make it to AA ball you’re going to be playing fairly regularly with guys who have been to the show, genuine, Major Leaguers. Not the cream of the crop major leaguers, but major leaguers nonetheless.

It’d be akin to NFLers practicing and doing workouts with college teams, that level of interaction between one level of football and one level of baseball just doesn’t happen.

And since every Major League club has a AAA, AA, at least two A, and at least 2 Rookie league affiliates (and sometimes), they have a huge organization that can house TONS and TONS of prospects and give them a chance to develop. The NFL teams don’t have as much room for people to exist in a developmental capacity. Keep in mind that the Minor Leagues aren’t just feeders for the Major Leagues, Minor League baseball is financially healthy and it actually makes money (most Minor League teams are owned independently, but because they are operated as for profit businesses the farm system isn’t a total drain on the Major League club, which still has to pay all the player and manager salaries on every one of its affiliate rosters.)

In addition to the Minor League system, of course, MLB gets the benefit of the NCAA recruits as well. Many productive baseball players go straight from HS into the minors, but a good number come from college ball as well–and college has proven to be a good training ground for ballplayers. Most guys who come to MLB from college spend a very short time in the minors if they’re genuinely MLB caliber talent (sometimes not even a full season in the minors.)

Speaking of Minor League Baseball, I think it’s always a great time to go to a Minor League game. You get to see all kinds of ridiculous hijinx and there’s usually all kinds of zany promotions going on.

This is a video of a serious managerial meltdown in the minors that puts even the most ridiculous managerial outbursts in the majors to shame.

IMHO, there are several reasons, and there probably isn’t as great a difference as it may seem.

On the last point first, there aren’t that many NBA, NFL, or NHL players that make a significant impression during their rookie years. A lot of the “big” college stars simply don’t cut it at the major league level, and most college players don’t start for at least a year or two. So you do see some player development - it just happens at the major league level.

For MLB, there are relatively few players who play at the major college level and are more physically and mentally mature than the majority who are drafted out of high school. So the MLB draft strategy is often to draft talent and then develop skills, which takes time.

Then there is the schedule, which for MLB is significantly longer than college and especially high school - around 100 more games each year, which wears out players both physically and mentally. The NFL and NCAA both play once a week, and so that schedule is closer to what a college player is used to. In MLB, the games are about once a day once the season gets rolling. The NBA is also a big step up in the number of games, but it’s closer to double what a college player plays each year. Not trivial, but the step from amateur to pro is larger in baseball. The NHL also plays a significantly higher number of games compared to amateur leagues, but they also have a considerable minor league system, comparable to MLB.

Finally, I do think that there is more to learn about playing baseball compared to other sports. That’s not to say that pro players in all sports don’t need to learn a lot more than they did at lower levels. It’s just that baseball players need to learn the intracacies of hitting and defensive play - what the opposing batters are likely to do, how the opposing pitcher throws, etc. In football, although the offenses and defenses are much more complex in the NFL, a player only needs to know offense or defense. NBA and NHL players also need to play both offense and defense, so this may not be as strong an argument. I do know that I played baseball for ten years (definitely not at anywhere close to the pro level!), and I was amazed at some of the things I learned about how MLB players learn and play from “Men at Work.”

By the way, it should read “Thursday” and not “Tuesday” in the OP. My mistake.

Thanks for the insight so far. I understand there may not be a definitive factual answer to this question, but I appreciate the different ways of looking at it.

Which brings a related question: has baseball not developed as a huge collegiate sport like football and basketball precisely because there are farm systems? Because, to quote Martin Hyde, the NCAA doesn’t have to act as the minor league?

You understate a bit how many superstars start at a very young age: Of the top 20 position players (20th century) ranked according to adjusted OPS (on base average + slugging average with era and ballpark adjustments-more or less the 20 best hitters ever), 8 of 20 had their first full season at ages 19 or 20, with 5 more at 21. The truly great tend to have so much talent that their minor-league performance pretty much propels them into the majors pretty rapidly. For pitchers they certainly do need more seasoning than position players (plus it has been shown that pitchers who reach the majors at very young ages often develop arm problems from overuse of their still-maturing bodies).

But overall I concur with the reasons provided in this thread; I think the skills required to be a great baseball player are a little more subtle than they are for most other sports (golf is probably an even more extreme outlier in the “old” direction, for similar reasons). Tennis, which probably is the “youngest” of the major sports, makes for a good comparison: they seem superficially similar (a object is propelled towards you and you have to hit it back), but looking at the nitty-gritty the baseball strike zone operates on a much finer scale than does a tennis court.

In tennis you basically have a ton of room to hit the ball back: you aren’t worrying too much about whether you should hit it or not, because that decision is (usually-on serves always) out of your hands, except on volleys (and who volleys anymore? Note the great serve and volleyers often had long careers, tho there are some baseliners in there too). An inch here or there doesn’t make much of a difference, you are often swinging at balls as high as your head or off your shoetops. A baseball hitter has to learn what pitches he can hit, and which ones he can’t, within a relatively small area, and for a pitcher what gets guys out and what doesn’t. You don’t have quite that level of subtlety in tennis, where it is more see the ball hit the ball. Thus you have 16-20 year olds contending for majors, when in baseball they are still in the minors (or college). I think a tennis player gets more out of repetitive drill (against a wall or versus a ball machine) than does a baseball player; even those newfangled machines who can throw nasty sliders don’t help much with learning all about the mental battle of hitter vs. pitcher.

In basketball I think a superior athlete can shine at a very young age as well; they just need to adjust to guys in the NBA who are tall and just as good athletes as them, and this adjustment period in basketball doesn’t take very long. Football quarterbacks are actually a good supporting example because of (again) the subtle skills needed, which usually don’t show up even in a talented rookie. Not sure where hockey fits in all this; there certainly have been a lot of young hotshots from Gretzky to Crosby, but there are guys who play effectively well into their 40’s too.