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Athleticism in baseball vs. football
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Post by jimed14 on Mar 1, 2015 13:49:17 GMT -5
A random tidbit that caught me by surprise ( link): As a comparison, Andrew Luck ran the 40 in 4.67 and Donta Hightower clocked in at 4.68. Just a reminder that even the best baseball athletes still compare poorly to those in the NFL. I think the 40 is a pretty crappy way to determine that because unless a player trains for it, he's not going to be great at it. I bet baseball players never do. |
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Post by soxcentral on Mar 1, 2015 15:05:53 GMT -5
I know this is pulling the thread a bit more off-topic but quickly want to add that younger players are judged on the 60 yd in baseball, not the 40. A 6.7 or lower time would be above average for high school going to college age kids.
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Post by brianthetaoist on Mar 1, 2015 15:08:25 GMT -5
Malcolm Butler ran a 4.65 40-time at the Alabama pro day, a big reason why he didn't get drafted. Then he came up to the Patriots tryout/camp and ran a 4.4 or 4.45 ... so these times are pretty variable, and, like I said, football selects based on these measurable outcomes, as the Butler example shows. That said, football players *are* bigger and faster than baseball players, significantly so. No shame in that ... football uses far less skill than baseball, generally, so it's all about the size/speed combination.
But, thinking about this a little more, the Red Sox really do have an athletic team. Hanley-Castillo-Betts are all very athletic, Napoli's a great athlete, Bogaerts, Panda's fat but a really good athlete ... when Swihart starts catching, they'd have a top-shelf athlete at just about every position.
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wcp3
Veteran
Posts: 3,862
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Post by wcp3 on Mar 1, 2015 20:27:43 GMT -5
40-times are fun ... but it's an extremely overrated statistic. Extremely overrated.
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Post by costpet on Mar 2, 2015 8:56:09 GMT -5
Sounds like the debate about which athlete is better, baseball or football, can be answered this way: If you've never played football before, how quickly could you learn the game. Say, you started at 14 as a freshman in HS, how good would you be at the end of the year? I think, if you have the right coaching, you could do very well. Now, try starting baseball at 14. How would you do? Learning to catch and throw and hit and all that at that age would be almost impossible. It takes a long time to learn baseball skills, starting when you're 5-6 years old. If you start at 14, forget it.
Then there's the debate about pitchers. How athletic do you have to be at that position. You don't have to run fast, or know how to hit or even field very well. Just do one thing, be fast and hit the corners.
The skill set of Major league baseball players far exceeds that of NFL players. Like Ted Williams once said, the hardest thing in sports is hitting a Major league fastball. If you fail 70% of the time, they put you in the Hall of Fame.
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Post by Guidas on Mar 2, 2015 9:54:43 GMT -5
Having played both, baseball until I was 18 and football into college, I can tell you it's much harder to hit the slider than to hit a running back running a bubble screen.
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Post by suttree on Mar 2, 2015 10:11:22 GMT -5
In terms of fine-tuned skills, mental toughness, and grinding it out physically, nothing compares to baseball. However, there is no position harder to fill in professional sports than NFL Quarterback.
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Post by wcsoxfan on Mar 2, 2015 10:31:23 GMT -5
Sounds like the debate about which athlete is better, baseball or football, can be answered this way: If you've never played football before, how quickly could you learn the game. Say, you started at 14 as a freshman in HS, how good would you be at the end of the year? I think, if you have the right coaching, you could do very well. Now, try starting baseball at 14. How would you do? Learning to catch and throw and hit and all that at that age would be almost impossible. It takes a long time to learn baseball skills, starting when you're 5-6 years old. If you start at 14, forget it. Then there's the debate about pitchers. How athletic do you have to be at that position. You don't have to run fast, or know how to hit or even field very well. Just do one thing, be fast and hit the corners. The skill set of Major league baseball players far exceeds that of NFL players. Like Ted Williams once said, the hardest thing in sports is hitting a Major league fastball. If you fail 70% of the time, they put you in the Hall of Fame. I think you are confusing 'developed skill' with 'athleticism'. By this same train of thought you could conclude that if placed in the same situation above, but with the jobs of returning shopping carts at a grocery store or becoming a neurosurgeon, the neurosurgeon is the better athlete because it takes longer to learn - which of course makes no sense whatsoever. Even when it comes to skill you could spin this to show that football requires more than baseball: 'what would take longer to learn, hitting a 78 mph fastball off the local highschool pitcher, or tackling Adrian Peterson in the open field' - which also isn't a fair comparison. If you tried to make it fair you could say: 'what takes longer to learn: sacking an NFL quarterback or hitting a Felix Hernandez change-up' - but even here you are talking apples to oranges. If anything - it's much much easier to learn the basics of baseball over football because it is such a simple game (I've also always felt that chess to checkers is a fitting comparison). There really isn't a correct answer to the above as it is purely subjective and there are multiple competition levels for which you would have to account. |
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Post by jimed14 on Mar 2, 2015 10:52:31 GMT -5
Personally, golf is the hardest sport. It doesn't matter how much of an athlete you are, it just takes a billion hours of practice. Of course it doesn't help that swinging a bat is about the opposite of swinging a golf club. I sometimes think I'd be more natural at golf if I never swung a bat.
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Post by costpet on Mar 2, 2015 10:55:16 GMT -5
All I'm saying is that you have to develop your baseball skills at a much earlier age. You can start playing football at 14 and play well. That's impossible in baseball. That takes much longer to learn well, therefore it's a much harder game.
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Post by jmei on Mar 2, 2015 12:47:02 GMT -5
The initial comparison was never meant to suggest which sport was easier or harder to learn. I meant athleticism in the sense of faster, quicker, jump higher, etc., and by those measures, football players generally win out (at least in part because they're judged on such metrics and so spend much more time training for them). Baseball is probably harder to learn/master because it involves significantly more nuanced fine motor skills, but that's not usually what people (including myself) refer to when they're talking about athleticism.
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Post by rjp313jr on Mar 10, 2015 15:27:28 GMT -5
Yup baseball is a harder game than football and so is golf, but they are arguably both not even sports or at least what some people think of as sports...
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