People always underestimate what it takes to be a pro athlete. It can be hard to tell since they are playing next to other superhumans. A guy who lived across the street from me was a journeyman long snapper on several NFL teams. He was my sister’s age so I remember his playing days. For decades he was the greatest athlete my hometown produced (since then there have been several 1st round picks and decently successful athletes in several sports). I have seen film of him in his high school days. He was a monster. Big, fast, quick; he looked like a man among boys. Every player in the NFL, including practice squads, were probably the best athletes by far on their teams until college.
An average Joe hitting against MLB pitching would hit .000, .050 if they are lucky. A good defensive catcher can earn a living at the .250 level. A good defensive catcher better be able to throw out a runner at 2nd which the average guy off the street can not do. All the things you list are important and they are willing to overlook some offensive shortcomings but in no way can you be an average athlete and perform on a major league level.
Curling. The best curlers already shoot at a remarkably high level. The key aspects typically revolve around shot choice, ice reading, end over end strategy and considerations around team/opponent capabilities. All of those activities lie outside the physical part of the game. So you could either coach, or become decent enough to throw Lead stones but skip each end.
Or someone like the Patriot’s “football research director” Ernie Adams.
Given that part of the question is that you won’t be able to achieve the physical talents to play at a pro level, you’ve now left me with the image of a brilliant Hearthstone player who two or three times smashes his face into his iPad selecting the wrong card.
This reminds me of a well-known Magic: The Gathering streamer who, upon drawing the perfect card (like a 1/40 chance) to win the game, got so excited that he took off his headset and dropped it onto his keyboard, ending his turn and thereby losing the game 
Baseball is tough, but football is tougher. A more complex rulebook with changes every year and different rules for every level of the game. Baseball umpires make mistakes, but usually know all the rules. Football officials very often forget that there are two rules that apply to some situations, the second being rarely used.
Yeah, I think people are really understating how good pro athletes are.
I know guys who are just incredible, incredible ballplayers who weren’t good enough to get drafted, much less play in the bigs. Anyone who even makes it to Junior-A hockey will, on skates, look almost magically agile. A NBA washout is the guy who scored two thirds of his high school team’s points.
An average Joe could not be a major league catcher. Every baserunner in the major leagues would steal the next base at literally every opportunity. If second base is open, they’re going, and they’re going to make it 100% of the time, even guys you think are fat and slow like Prince Fielder. Second base is 127 feet from home plate. I don’t think people realize how damn big a pro baseball diamond is; 127 feet is a very long way to throw. If you have a grown-up’s softball diamond near your house, the kid that isn’t for kids but where adult men play slo-pitch, 127 feet is halfway to the outfield fence. Can you make that throw? The average Joe cannot throw a baseball 127 feet with any reliable hope of getting it near the base. He’d also give up ten passed balls or “wild pitches” every game, at least. It would be a catastrophe, and I’m not even getting into all the foul pops that would not get caught, plays at the plate that would not be made, and bunts/squib hits a real catcher would make the out at first on that our average Joe would at best limit to a single, and quite often blunder into something far worse.
No matter how good he was at calling the game it would make no difference; taking away one or two baserunners a game by good pitch calling (which would be really quite amazing) would be outweighed by the fact that every single runner who ever reached first base would promptly make it to second base on the next pitch and ten times a game every runner would get a free base.
I’m playing that way this very night. My skip has a bad back, so he’s throwing lead (and using a stick) and I’m throwing skip stones. We’ve won a few games that way.
In college, catchers trying out didn’t get a second look unless the time it took from receiving the pitch until the 2B/SS caught it (a few inches on the first base side of second base, low to the ground) was 2.05 seconds or less. Unless you could hit college pitching at a .350 clip. With power. Catcher is the most demanding defensive position in baseball (with the possible exception of SS.)
A lot of the answers in this thread are a bit of a joke. It’s like people have never played the sport they are commenting on, or last played it in fourth grade.
Catcher is so different from SS I don’t think it ever merits comparison; it’s as if they are different sports. I sincerely doubt Ozzie Smith would have been much of a catcher, but Gary Carter would not have been a good shortstop, either. On the other hand I’ve no doubt Ozzie would have been fine at second or third, and could have learned to be a pretty good outfielder with a little time out there. Catcher is just a wholly different skill set.
But hell, an ordinary Joe couldn’t even play left field. It would be a comic nightmare. There’s a great scene in Moneyball when Billy Beane is signing up Scott Hatteberg, and they’re sitting in his living room and he just told Hatteberg he has to play first base:
HATTEBERG: I’ve never played first base.
BEANE: It’s not that hard! Tell 'im, Wash!
RON WASHINGTON: It’s incredibly hard.
Every position is hard because the standard is near perfection. You make 19 out of 20 plays? YOU SUCK. That’s bad by Rookie League standards. An ordinary Joe would not make 19 plays out of 20. I’d be impressed if he made 9 plays out of 10 that fell within twenty feet of him. Other teams’ hitters would stop trying to hit normally and would deliberately hit the ball to left field. It would be a fiasco.
Every major sport? Same thing. Soccer? It would be a disaster of unparalleled hilarity. They’d be better off playing short a man. Hockey? Even if we assume the person is “average Joe who can skate pretty well” he’d be a joke.
The average person will have a problem with the warm up throws the outfielders toss effortlessly to each other between innings.
To continue with your point the average person probably wouldn’t be able to throw out just about everyone at third also. So each single would be a triple. And thats not even mentioning laying down bunts. Getting the throw down to first is not an easy play either.
I guess my point was that you can’t plug in even a great Major Leaguer player at catcher and expect them to be even adequate. A second baseman might be able to play SS in an emergency, but those long bullet throws from the hole? Fuggetaboutit, Any other position? Not a chance.
Yeah golf is the answer to the OP. Being physically fit can help but you don’t need it like other sports. One of the longest hitters is Bubba Watson and he is no Greek god by any stretch. And even the biggest distance only gets you some advantage not like overwhelming advantage.
Most MLB teams, for this reason, ensure a utility player gets some practice playing catcher just in case both roster catchers can’t play or one gets hurt in an extra inning game or some such thing.
You see some successful pro golfers with round physiques (Watson, Craig Stadler, Phil Mickleson at times, and, of course, the poster child for this: John Daly). However, just because they aren’t sculpted doesn’t mean that they lack significant athletic skills, particularly hand-eye coordination and the ability to create and replicate the correct swing.
Even if you put Tiger Woods’ golf smarts in the body of an average Joe, without that training and innate skill, average Joe will almost undoubtedly still not be able to become a great golfer.
Physical gifts always improve with training. For example in soccer to have hope of being a pro you need to rack up tens of thousands of hours practice as a kid and once you’re a pro you’ll be training everyday and just by this you’re going to be in much better physical shape than the man on the street. But whilst there are plenty of soccer players who have physical gifts that the average joe could never get, no matter how much they trained, in my opinion there are plenty of players who are physically no better than the average joe, had they been through the same training regime from an early enough age. The reason is that whilst physical gifts give you an edge, the mental aspect like skill and attitude are more important.
Matt Le Tissier is possibly my favourite soccer player of all-time. He was supremely skilled and incredibly creative in his play. When the Premiership released a DVD celebrating the 1st ten years of the Premiership, he had scored so many amazing goals that they had a list of the top ten goals just by Matt Le Tissier, the only list specific to one player on the DVD! However he had no discernible physical gifts and for a soccer player was in bad physical shape. In his career he was one of the top players of the early Premiership-era and played for England. Of course given his talent he could’ve achieved a lot more than he did, but that was only in part due to his poor physical shape and gifts - he showed no motivation for wanting to leave Southampton, despite constant interest from bigger clubs.
In soccer these days there’s more of a trend for the top players to be both supremely-gifted physically and in the mental aspect (e.g. Cristiano Ronaldo), but I still think someone could go very far even with average physical gifts if they had the mental aspect nailed down. One caveat though, soccer isn’t a sport that can be transitioned into, you have to start from a very young age.
I totally agree: in fact I specifically said a best-ever mind in an average Joe body could never be a major league catcher.
But an average Joe body couldn’t be a major league anything (that requires physical action). I was just trying to think of what would be most effective, understanding that ‘most effective’ in this case is still not major-league level.
It’s a good point that throwing to second is an important part of catching. But I’m still can’t think of any other sports position that has a better ratio of mental to physical requirements.
I think a lot of people are misunderstanding the question. Re-stated: Let’s say you had all the mental gifts (strategic knowledge, focus, killer instinct, whatever) of a world class athlete, but for whatever reason couldn’t actually play the game where your expertise lies.
What sport would give you the most ability to leverage the non-physical aspects of playing? Coaching, strategy development and scouting come to mind as obvious examples.
My candidate: skippering an America’s Cup yacht. Racing sailboats requires a high degree of technical, strategic and tactical skill. The people actually handling the boat have to be highly trained as a team and very physically fit, but they typically don’t make the difference between winning and losing. Boat design, strategy, and tactical choices on the water make up the main differences, as far as I can tell.
Replace the words “crew chief”, “NASCAR”, and “driver” with “manager”, “Major League Baseball”, and “baseball player”, and it’s exactly the same. Some of the very best managers - Tony LaRussa, Billy Martin, Tommy Lasorda - were mediocre to average players, who analyzed the game and themselves in depth, to make up for the physical gifts they didn’t have.
Of course, “mediocre Major Leaguer” still means “whole order of magnitude better than Joe Sixpack”.