Hitting a baseball is literally the hardest thing to do in sports

[WrongVerb]

Hitting a baseball is the hardest skill to pull off in sports. Here’s why.

There are few aspects of life where you can fail seven out of 10 times and still be considered great at what you do. With a 30 percent score on the MCAT, you wouldn’t get into medical school. You’d likely lose money if you only won 30 percent of your Super Bowl bets. But in baseball, if you get a hit 30 percent of the time you step up to the plate, you might be headed to the Hall of Fame—and that’s because it’s perhaps the most difficult thing to do in any major sport.

Ted Williams, for instance, one of the greatest hitters to ever play Major League Baseball, finished his 19-year career playing for the Boston Red Sox with a .344 batting average. That’s a 34 percent success rate, tied for seventh best in the sport’s history. But even he famously said that hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports. So why is that the case?

[foster15]

Hitting a baseball is the hardest skill to pull off in sports. Here’s why.

Hitting a baseball only 30 percent of the time will get you out of baseball real quick. Hitting a baseball doesn't equal a hit. Why? Because baseball is the only game I can think of off the top of my head where one person stands out there alone and 9 other people are out there trying to stop that one person from succeeding. If it was one on one, than pitching would be the hardest thing to do in all of sports. Also, besides those 9 people trying to stop you, another 30 percent(an estimate on my part) of the area the ball might go if you hit it is foul territory.

If a single person can go against nine others in a fight, a football game, a basketball game, a hockey or soccer game and succeed 30 percent of the time, that would be much more impressive.

[texasdave]

Attachment 16373

Now this is what I call a shift.

[EnglishRed]

Hitting a baseball only 30 percent of the time will get you out of baseball real quick. Hitting a baseball doesn't equal a hit. Why? Because baseball is the only game I can think of off the top of my head where one person stands out there alone and 9 other people are out there trying to stop that one person from succeeding. If it was one on one, than pitching would be the hardest thing to do in all of sports. Also, besides those 9 people trying to stop you, another 30 percent(an estimate on my part) of the area the ball might go if you hit it is foul territory.

If a single person can go against nine others in a fight, a football game, a basketball game, a hockey or soccer game and succeed 30 percent of the time, that would be much more impressive.

As a cricketer I'm in awe of baseball hitters. I think the two sports share some similarities but major differences. A bowler like a pitcher will try and lead the batsman into swinging at a ball instead of leaving it by pitching the ball outside the line of the stumps and as a batsman I have to make that decision in a split second. A batsman is always waiting to find a ball he likes and hitting it through or over the fielders for 4 or 6. While it is MUCH easier to hit a cricket ball bowled at 90 mph from 57ft than a baseball thrown at 97mph from 60 ft due to the shape of the bat, heaviness of the ball the challenge of cricket is maintaining the concentration over long periods to manufacture a 50 or 100 run haul without getting out and being able to do that more than 30% of the time would mean you are a very, very good batsman at your level. Virat Kohli of India who is a generationally good batsman and who has broken a number of all-time records including fastest to 10,000 runs in a career, has played 145 Test innings and passed 50 runs in 49 of those innings, or 33% of the time. The equivalents in terms of value of contribution to your team would arbitrarily equate a half-century in cricket to a hit, a solo HR or RBI and a century to a 2 run HR or more.

i think it's very difficult to equate different sports in any meaningful way though and the mechanics of hitting a baseball do boggle the mind to someone like me who has never played the sport.I guess it may be the same for a baseball player looking at how someone like Virat Kohli can stand there for 6 hours without getting out scoring 100 runs off of 230 balls.

[texasdave]

Hitting a baseball is the hardest skill to pull off in sports. Here’s why.

Wrong. But you hear it year after year. If you score a goal on 30 percent of your shots in hockey, you are the best player that ever played.

Shooting percentage is simply the percentage of shots on net taken by a player that result in a goal. A player who takes 300 shots and scores 30 goals is shooting 10 percent. That would be better than the league average, which over the last several seasons is right about 9 percent.

[foster15]

Wrong. But you hear it year after year. If you score a goal on 30 percent of your shots in hockey, you are the best player that ever played.

exactly. Also, the same would probably apply to breaking serve in tennis. It occurs near 20 percent of the time consistently. Someone who could do it 30 percent of the time would be the greatest ever I'm thinking. And tennis is one on one. Hitting a baseball is 1 on 9. And scoring a goal shot is really 5 on 6 since your own goalie does almost nothing to help you offensively.

[TNRED]

Reds hitters have been living proof of that!