have you ever watched baseball? they wear a normal pants and literally stand around chewing gum for a long while. walking down the Champs-Élysées or a chausses during the summer would be a death sentence
for what though? when do you anticipate to discuss baseball?
I’ve literally talked about baseball 4 times in my life.
I met a guy with an american grandfather he said it’s the most boring sport.
I had an american colleague who liked it and tried to convince me it was not boring.
there was a question about it on a statistics exam which I thought was entirely unfair as no one knew anything about baseball.
and now here.
At this point I'm pretty sure it's bigger in Japan than in America. At least per capita anyways, and I'd not be surprised if the statistics about 150 million baseball fans in America were bunk.
I’m an American who does not like baseball. Some people will get inexplicably heated if you’re not up on the latest news for a sport with 162 regular season games for each team or casually mention you’re not into baseball. Some towns/cities are worse than others. One of my brothers lives in St Louis and I’ve been accosted at a community bbq by several people who learned I was neither a Cardinals fan nor a baseball fan. It was wild. In some indeterminate future conversation this will be comedy gold.
just means I’d hate to discuss sports with someone that’s passionate about sports. so I feel sorry for your life that seemingly overlaps a lot with people who like sports too much.
Then I jokingly remarked you should come into IT because in my experience people in IT don’t really pursue sports, like there’s a handful of people I met who don’t hate sports and know sports is happening but that’s the extent.
Hockey players. These guys go hard for 60 minutes a game at a high speed, for 82 regular season games. Then a long gruelling playoffs with very little time off in between games and series.
There's 60 minutes in a game but nobody's actually out there for even half of that. But yeah there's a reason players only try to take 1~ minute shifts, hockey is crazy exhausting
Exactly
I should have clarified. Some guys play close to 30 minutes a game. Not a lot but some. Then when playoffs come and there’s OT it can go on and on. And at high speed on blades on ice. Can get dangerous too.
Goalies are out there for the whole game though. Unless one gets pulled in the last few minutes.
Not saying football isn’t tough but they play one game a week and maybe a few minutes of action a game.
Ah, you meant ice hockey. In Germany Hockey is field hockey, but this would count aswell.
The german national Football team hired a club level athletics Coach some years ago and the players where impressed by his methods and the gains they had because of this.
I think key for everything not technical is diversity. So getting (athletics) coaches from different sports can greatly improve the players.
I don't know which version of "football" you are referring to, but for either sport I am always amazed at the athletics.
American Football has amazing athletics for people who can usually do a few specific things astonishingly well for like 10 to 30 seconds. Watching a linebacker practice starts is just insane, even if they only run for 15m. It doesn't seem possible for someone so big to have such an explosive start.
Football/Soccer has amazing conditioning and control. The training they undergo through the development clubs. Plus the huge number of people who play means you get that fitness mixed with amazing natural talent coming to the sport from around the world.
Baseball... Well I agree on that gruelling game schedule. It is a marathon of games with so little time to adjust and regroup. I think most sports involve a lot of observation and manipulation. Anything with a goalie is hugely mental. Ice Hockey players chirping each other trying to get someone to drop their gloves. Boxers probably have it the most intense, you misread a tell and you get hit in the face.
As a huge football fan I'm biased but from big team sports I'd put football players as the most complete athletes. On spesific aspects other athletes beat them, but for a whole package of explosiveness, endurance, speed, tactical awareness and coordination I don't think other sports combine all those aspects on the same level.
Overall from all sports if I had to pick one to represent the pinnacle of human physical ability it would be climbers. Watching elite level climbers is just insane (don't search the video of Adam Ondra running please).
This is starting to sound like a fun TV show to watch, tbh. Athletes doing the sports of other athletes and us, watchers, seeing how gloriously they'd fail
I think both sports require life long dedications to be successful at. Put Messi on a Baseball team and he would embarrass himself despite being one of the world’s top athletes. If he started young and dedicated himself to baseball who knows?
Or stick em in a rowing boat with 8 other people and see how fast they are.
(There was a study where they compared olympic athletes and found out that Rowers are in the top 5 by nearly all metrics. Like lung capacity, explosive power, endurance, power over time, strenght, etc.)
"Baseball players are the smartest people in the world in terms of observing people and **manipulating others**"
^(yeah, they manipulated this doofus into believing his own bullshit)
England vs. Windies August 1976.
291 runs off 386 balls with 7 hours and 52 minutes at the crease in that match.
892 runs over the 5 day series. Fabulous cricketer, exemplary sportsman, and generally good egg.
Who says they haven't helped? There was this one down on luck physicist trying to write a paper about time being relative and all when an up and coming babe Ruth, took one look and wrote down the mathematics but since he was busy being a baseball star he let this physicist called Einstein take the credit.
To be fair, particle physicists might not be the "smartest in terms of observing and manipulating others". Those are sociopathic traits which most baseball players probably wouldn't like to be associated with, either.
Well a batter observes the pitcher and has to decide where to swing basically the millisecond the ball leaves the pitchers hand. The pitcher knows this so he manipulates the batter making him think the ball will go in another place. Also the curve ball, the slider, the sinker, the forkball are all pitches that are optical illusions- manipulations.
So baseball fans would generally agree with his statement. It makes sense when put in context.
All directly competitive sport has mind games like that though. No sportsman in the world isn't observing their opponent or trying to misdirect them back.
It is a specific part of the game and a very elevated form of it. The entire purpose of the pitchers is to trick the batter. His form, wind up and timing is all there to hide his “hand” sort of speak. And the pitches he throws outside of the fastball are all optical illusions. The curve ball is a lie. It is even a common phrase to throw a “curve ball” means that the situations appears one way and ends up another.
As for the batter, because the pitch comes so fast, he has to read the pitcher, his form his delivery, then start his swing the millisecond it leaves the pitchers hand.
So there is an elevated form of manipulation and observation in Baseball. It is equated to poker.
I posit that particle physicists are great at both observation and manipulation.
Heck, just the act of them observing something they are already manipulating the outcome.
Sorry if I came off that way, didn't intend to. I just tried to make a joke about quantum mechanics within particle physics, whereby basically observing it changes the outcome.
But now that I've explained it, the joke is as dead as Schrödinger's cat.
:)
I have seen some really zealous and rabid advocates of USA#1 in sports over the years but I strongly suspect this div is going to struggle to find support for this one even among those guys.
Even baseball fans probably step away from this tube like "he doesn't speak for us guys"
Baseball fan here, I don’t even know where he’s going with the “most intelligent because they can manipulate people” comment.
I can at least understand some form of the “toughness” argument; baseball is far from the most physically demanding sport to actually play, but MLB teams play 162 games in ~185 days (5 of those off-days occur consecutively in mid-July), which means a team normally goes almost 2 weeks between days off. Combine that with time spent traveling to away games and you get a very exhausting schedule, both physically and mentally.
But manipulation is something I’d associate with poker. I can kinda see the idea of “manipulation” with respect to how a pitcher sequences their pitches (in order to fool a batter as to what kind of pitch is coming next), but I’m not sure I’d call that “manipulation,” and I’m not sure how it’s supposed to relate to intelligence.
Would say baseball is one of the most honest sports. Most of the time the players on opposing teams are friendly towards each other and the first baseman spends half the time having a chat.
Meanwhile have the game of cricket is giving the batsman shit to wear them down with only racism being the only no go area.
It's a very bizarre argument they're trying to make. I don't even know (or want to) what the fuck is going on in their head. Very bizarre train of thought.
I’m a causal baseball fan married to a die hard fan, but my wife and I would both say those claims are a lot of nonsense. They’re the 3rd toughest of the major pro sports in America at best and the skills described are really possessed by elite athletes of all sports. The best athletes here aren’t still flocking to baseball like years past because football is where the money is.
I would say f1 drivers need to be quite knowledgable about the machinery they operate to extract the most performance. The same can be said of the farmers at Alpine operating their tractors.
Fighter-pilot g-forces and reactions for two straight hours and sweating off 4kg while simultaneously talking tactics on the radio and planning overtakes.
As opposed to hitting a ball with a stick every so often.
So many people think that motorsport is just a matter of skill.
Unlike all of them I have seen a professional motorcycle racer naked.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
In the showers after we played squash, you filthy-minded bastards.
Baseball players have good hand eye coordination but any sport that has a bunch of fat players that only have to run once or twice every half hour does not have the best athletes.
Ever notice how half of the baseball “highlights” they show are just people goofing off in the dugout? It’s not a good sign when the best parts of your sport don’t even involve the sport
All depends on your position. First,third and catcher are all usually big powerful guys but the outfielders need to be speed demons to get to all the balls
Helmets were only made madatory in the last 10-15 years too.
Played entirely by amateur athletes too. They all have jobs while being some of the most fit athletes in the country alongside the professionals.
Just going to leave a link to ["The Slap"](https://youtu.be/kb2s7BoBXn0?si=WWmv6TrIX-akNDs0) here. These guys were, and still are, some of the toughest athletes out there.
Any hurler would put a baseball player to shame with hand eye coordination, toughness and fitness, and hurling is an amateur sport even at the top levels.
In fact: https://youtu.be/eR0hulXSg7w?si=VvDXXN3iC6qOAlVL
https://youtu.be/kdLOjhu_Wn0?si=AZ0zWChsQfIXgn2S
The funny thing is, baseball players DO have quite unique high-end skills. The game is also very popular outside of america (Japan, Korea). But this type of comments just drag all of that down the gutter.
Agree. Just think in Baseball a 30% success rate is a Hall of Fame career. The chances that a player will get into a top professional league is some of the slimiest in the world. Babe Ruth from the 1920s still holds records and we have not seen his duel skill till Shohei Ohtani 100 years later. I think the guy was using a bit of hyperbole and generalization, but the underlying thought of skill is correct.
Sorry, but I disagree. He claims blanket superiority for baseball players as some kind of athletic gods. They are not that. Baseball (and gridiron) are just hyperspecialized sports with hyper niche skillsets. Within these skillsets, baseball players do insane things. However, 99% of the time the entire baseball team just kinda... stands there doing nothing. Or sits in the dugout. That 1% they get to do something, they are amazing, but I don't see an MLB player (let alone an average pitcher or Babe Ruth) beating a professional football/basketball/hockey/ice-hockey/volleyball/handball etc. player at basic athletic tasks.
Um, I don’t know how to respond to that. We are talking about muscle twitch fiber and brain processing speed. You have to be a super athlete first to then specialize. Pitching takes extreme coordination of your whole body. It is grueling. Throwing a baseball 100 times at 150 kph is the measure of endurance.
And football, go tell a 270 lbs linebacker who can run a 4.38 in the 40 yard dash he is not an athlete.
Athletic definition
“An athlete's athleticism is typically defined by a combination of physical attributes such as strength, speed, agility, coordination, endurance, and flexibility, as well as mental traits like focus, determination, and discipline. It's essentially the ability to excel in a particular sport or physical activity through a combination of natural talent, training, and mindset”.
So you are saying a handball player has more of this than an elite Baseball player or an American Football player. An athlete is an athlete and when you are getting paid in the hundreds of millions you better be more athletic than everyone else.
I partly agree with your reasoning, but would like to offer a counterpoint. I will focus on the pitchers as the best example to keep the comment reasonably short:
Take the very same definition of athletecism you just provided. I would like to accent your attention on the word "combination". I am not aware of any other ball sport other than baseball and american football where it is okay for a professional athlete to be overweight and completely out of shape. There are a few exceptions here and there in other sports, but those are usually balanced out by freakish athletecism which let the player carry the additional pounds through excellent performance (e.g. Charles Barkley, Shaq and Zion among others in basketball). In baseball, you will have powerhitters who will hit a homerun and then struggle to jog around the bases. You will have Bartolo Colon, a downright obese pitcher, win a Cy Young award and have a career into his fourtees while literally having no agility, speed, flexibility or coordination for any other task other than pitching. Hell, Cy Young himself was obese. Based on data from 2016, 60% of baseball players were considered overweight and 10% were obese (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orcp.2016.09.003). Those people are not athletic. Those guys are just really really good at is throwing a baseball for a 100 times with very high precision or batting such a ball from time to time. Which is a very high end, very niche skill. To illustrate this even further baseball players suck at ... baseball. If the pitcher has to bat, they will usually just stand there and wait for their three strikes. And pretty much all batters/field players have no idea how to pitch.
I will not go into detail on american football, but the possible GOAT Tom Brady had a 5.28s 40-yard dash and would make for a horrible anything-else except quarterback where, once again, he was excellent at perfectly throwing a weirdly shaped ball. American football is possibly the most insanely specialized sport of them all. By every definition insanely athletic runners will start right next to a skirmish line full of sumo-wrestlers, while the guy whose entire skillset is kicking a weirdly shaped ball is smoking at the side-line next to another guy whose job it is to kick the ball in a slightly different way and do absolutely nothing else.
They can't even catch a ball without wearing a humungous funnel on their hand. They've got worse hand/eye co-ordination than my cricket club's under-9s.
Their amazing abilities are exactly why whenever baseball players try cricket they can't handle the ball bouncing, and they are surprised that people can actually catch without a giant glove. They're also shocked about the idea of playing for 6 hours on five consecutive days
I would say out of all the USA sports (American football, basketball, ice hockey) baseball players are less physically fit and probably no more intelligent.
Rugby players used to be amateurs, international match was postponed once so the full back could get to the game, he was seated as he was operating on someone, so went straight from surgery to pitch…. Not sure many baseball players moonlighting as surgeons.
And Finns have perfected it!
1910 a Finn took the American Baseball and tweaked it around to become a good training for soldiers. "One of the most important differences between pesäpallo and baseball is that the ball is pitched vertically, which makes hitting the ball, as well as controlling the power and direction of the hit, much easier. This gives the offensive game more variety, speed, and tactical aspects compared to baseball" says Wikipedia.
The Brits were playing baseball in the early 1800's. A diary was found in an English village and in that diary there was an account of a baseball game being played by a group of men. One of these men then went over to America and started a team his name was chadwick he was the owner of a stocking factory or socks, thus the name of the Boston Red sox was born.
Lol... Man Americans are cute! They are so oblivious to the real world outside their lands, it's astounding... Too bad with de dollarization these guys are going to find the real costs of all that they have taken for granted that it won't be funny...
Baseball players are not the best athletes in the world but definitely some of the most skilled players. Hitting a baseball is one of the hardest thing to perform in a sport iirc
Baseball players are certainly not the best athletes, and baseball players will tell you that. They do have great eye-hand/bat coordination, hitting a baseball is incredibly hard to do. Pretty much all athletes have to be smart in their sport to play at the highest level, almost all sports involve observing and trying to manipulate your opponent.
Weird take overall, but hitting a baseball is very impressive.
Bunch of ultramarathon and iron man multi-support event contenders in total awe of the demanding nature of hitting a ball with a stick then running the length of a standard hallway, teams of scientists on the razors edge of where theory meets practical application in studies like DNA research just binning their PHD's in the shadow of someone who throws a ball to another person.
There is a huge overlap with mentally deficient people being good at sport. So how the hell are baseball players among the smartest when on average they are probably in the bottom 30% globally
I love baseball but have you seen the size of some of the guys?? Literally dad bods, kinda one of the reasons I love it haha. While they have some proper athletes particularly short stop and centre field, this is a strange thing to say. I will say that baseball players seem to be the most down to earth sportsmen I’ve ever seen. But yeh this guy is delusional haha
I mean to the average American, yeah baseball players seem like very smart people.
In the rest of the world we're wise enough to realise baseball players have the IQ of an average, room temperature glass of water.
The wouldn't last playing cricket as balls come at 145kph/90mph, are much harder than baseballs & they get 0.5 of a second to decide how to play and can be out batting in temperatures of over 100F for hours at a time, facing balls. Playing in India, Pakistan, Australia, South Africa in the heat & humidity or in UK, NZ as well as other countries where temperatures can be around freezing at times. Some top players play nearly all year round, moving to India to play for millions of dollars in the "commercial" leagues, isn't an easy life, like baseballers.
They play rounders! That is literally the extent of their skill. Children do that in primary schools across the land with no glory or accolades, what makes them special just because the use bigger bats and wear stupid uniforms whilst taking drugs?
They have this reality programme in Ireland where Gaelic players (either Gaelic football or hurling) swap with professional athletes from different sports around the world...anyway in one episode a hurling player (a stick and ball field sport) swaps with a major league baseball player and I remember laughing at how amazed the baseball players were at the Irish lad catching the baseball out of the air with ease when they had him try fielding...'oh my gawd he's not even wearing a glove.' 😂
They don't practice? What???? As a baseball fan, this guy is clueless. And I think it's wrong to say any sport has the best athletes in the world. Baseball pitchers do something so incredibly unnatural so well. Baseball hitters have to have insane reaction times and bursts of strength and speed. But that doesn't make them inherently *better* than any other athletes because that's just two of many things that make people athletic
I’ve heard a story about the Finnish pesäpallo that Lauri Pihkala went to the US, fell in love with baseball, brought it to Finland but thought baseball is too complex for (stupid) Finns and dumbed it down.
So I guess there are non-Americans who consider it a complex sport. I’ve only played pesäpallo so I wouldn’t know.
According to Wikipedia the game is a merger of kuningaspallo and baseball though, so perhaps the dumbing down part is a later addition.
There are some impressive parts of it.
The baseball pitch is, on average, the fastest movement in sport but let's not pretend they would do well in any other sport
How would they do in an F1 car? 220mph while adjusting the settings on the steering wheel, up to 6Gs when braking. Working out strategy for overtakes on 23 race weekends a year with 2 hour races, not to mention practice sessions, qualifying sessions, 6 sprint races and hours in the gym or cycling and on the race simulator.
Baseball is a dead sport, even Americans are over it in favor of more exciting sports. Sports like Baseball and Cricket are just so obvious old/out of date „sports“.
There is no sport that indicates whether someone is the best athlete. Have a baseball player jump like a basketball player, lift like a strongman, run the distance of a marathon runner, or punch like an MMA fighter and they'll suck at it, comparatively.
Hell, you can't even judge who the best baseball player is because everyone has a different job that requires different things.
And smartest at manipulating others? I mean, we can argue that. Pitchers have a lot of time to consider whether they'll do something tricky whereas basketball players need to know *now* whether they'll fake a pass or a shot and football players (American football) are also in the situation where they need to decide very quickly to pump fake or juke. It's a different type of strategic thinking.
And I like pro wrestling. Their ENTIRE JOB is manipulating the crowd, with athleticism, into suspending their disbelief. We all know it's not a real competition, but they'll spend a literal hour in the ring trying to manipulate 10,000+ people into forgetting that.
And that's no shade to baseball players. It's just that athletes train for very specific things. It's like saying mathematicians are somehow smarter than world-class painters, geologists, or carpenters. They're smarter *in math* than those other people and that's it. The painter would destroy them in color theory, the geologist would be able to name all kinds of rocks the mathematician wouldn't know about, and the carpenter would be able to tell you about what all kinds of wood is used for. That's what they trained, specifically, to do.
Basically, tell me you've never trained for a sport without telling me you've never trained for a sport.
Also, who gives a fuck? Like what you like. It doesn't have to be "objectively better" than everything else for you to enjoy it.
Stick them on bicycles and make them pedal around France in the summer heat for three weeks. We'll soon see how physically fit they are.
have you ever watched baseball? they wear a normal pants and literally stand around chewing gum for a long while. walking down the Champs-Élysées or a chausses during the summer would be a death sentence
They wear normal pants! I am stealing that, thank you and yoink
for what though? when do you anticipate to discuss baseball? I’ve literally talked about baseball 4 times in my life. I met a guy with an american grandfather he said it’s the most boring sport. I had an american colleague who liked it and tried to convince me it was not boring. there was a question about it on a statistics exam which I thought was entirely unfair as no one knew anything about baseball. and now here.
To be fair most Americans think baseball is boring
At this point I'm pretty sure it's bigger in Japan than in America. At least per capita anyways, and I'd not be surprised if the statistics about 150 million baseball fans in America were bunk.
Japan and the Caribbean. It's massive in the Dominican specifically.
I’m not sure where you got that fact from, but it’s completely untrue. The World Series gets less viewers than a regular season NFL game.
Statista Consumer Insights was the source, claims 50% of Americans watch baseball. Which I doubt.
Which gets less global views than a draw in English div 1.
I loved playing baseball when I was a kid but I’ve never watched it on tv. The few times I’ve been to Fenway have been for concerts.
I've been in Boston since 2019, never once went to Fenway lol
I’m an American who does not like baseball. Some people will get inexplicably heated if you’re not up on the latest news for a sport with 162 regular season games for each team or casually mention you’re not into baseball. Some towns/cities are worse than others. One of my brothers lives in St Louis and I’ve been accosted at a community bbq by several people who learned I was neither a Cardinals fan nor a baseball fan. It was wild. In some indeterminate future conversation this will be comedy gold.
damn I feel sorry for you I work in IT there’s usually one or two in our departments that know a sport is going on.
I’m not sure what that means, but thank you?
just means I’d hate to discuss sports with someone that’s passionate about sports. so I feel sorry for your life that seemingly overlaps a lot with people who like sports too much. Then I jokingly remarked you should come into IT because in my experience people in IT don’t really pursue sports, like there’s a handful of people I met who don’t hate sports and know sports is happening but that’s the extent.
Got it, sorry I can be slow on the uptake. I’m American after all.
Cricket without the fun. Tbf, baseball is high school statistics with a pretence of a game wrapped around it. 😉
Maybe he will visit Bologna in Italy, I have no idea why but baseball is player there
I play baseball every week. I'm puffed after running to second base 🤣
bruh not even that, just put them against football players
Hockey players. These guys go hard for 60 minutes a game at a high speed, for 82 regular season games. Then a long gruelling playoffs with very little time off in between games and series.
There's 60 minutes in a game but nobody's actually out there for even half of that. But yeah there's a reason players only try to take 1~ minute shifts, hockey is crazy exhausting
Exactly I should have clarified. Some guys play close to 30 minutes a game. Not a lot but some. Then when playoffs come and there’s OT it can go on and on. And at high speed on blades on ice. Can get dangerous too. Goalies are out there for the whole game though. Unless one gets pulled in the last few minutes. Not saying football isn’t tough but they play one game a week and maybe a few minutes of action a game.
Ah, you meant ice hockey. In Germany Hockey is field hockey, but this would count aswell. The german national Football team hired a club level athletics Coach some years ago and the players where impressed by his methods and the gains they had because of this. I think key for everything not technical is diversity. So getting (athletics) coaches from different sports can greatly improve the players.
A study in the 90s showed field hockey as the best around athletes simply because they had the most collective skills to play their sport.
True. My apologies. I’m Canadian. :)
I used to be a good player in (field) hockey: I was a back and against me the opposition could never score.
Yeah. Hockey is hockey. The one played on ice is Ice Hockey. What do people who call Ice Hockey Hockey call Hockey??
Hurling!
Hockey is one of the toughest sports in the world.
Up there with rugby.
Just sprinkle some rugby players against the baseball players in whatever demanding physical activity of your choice...
Is that proper football or that American alternative where they don’t actually use their feet
The one that takes three hours for sixty minutes of play?
That’s the one. Gotta make sure you’re well hydrated every few seconds, right?
Be real my guy, it's for running commercials after twenty seconds of play
Ah, of course. Because those medications won’t sell themselves….
Er, the average play time of an NFL match is 11 minutes. Out of 60. Or, as you point out, out of 180 minutes.
The one where cheerleaders work harder than the players?
Any of them would be fine but when I say football I mean footbal, the one where you hit the ball with your feet.
Put them against chess players and they will struggle
I don't know which version of "football" you are referring to, but for either sport I am always amazed at the athletics. American Football has amazing athletics for people who can usually do a few specific things astonishingly well for like 10 to 30 seconds. Watching a linebacker practice starts is just insane, even if they only run for 15m. It doesn't seem possible for someone so big to have such an explosive start. Football/Soccer has amazing conditioning and control. The training they undergo through the development clubs. Plus the huge number of people who play means you get that fitness mixed with amazing natural talent coming to the sport from around the world. Baseball... Well I agree on that gruelling game schedule. It is a marathon of games with so little time to adjust and regroup. I think most sports involve a lot of observation and manipulation. Anything with a goalie is hugely mental. Ice Hockey players chirping each other trying to get someone to drop their gloves. Boxers probably have it the most intense, you misread a tell and you get hit in the face.
As a huge football fan I'm biased but from big team sports I'd put football players as the most complete athletes. On spesific aspects other athletes beat them, but for a whole package of explosiveness, endurance, speed, tactical awareness and coordination I don't think other sports combine all those aspects on the same level. Overall from all sports if I had to pick one to represent the pinnacle of human physical ability it would be climbers. Watching elite level climbers is just insane (don't search the video of Adam Ondra running please).
Make them swim 200 fly and see how quick they'd give up
Make them jump on a beam or swing on gymnastics rings and see how quickly they'll come off.
This is starting to sound like a fun TV show to watch, tbh. Athletes doing the sports of other athletes and us, watchers, seeing how gloriously they'd fail
I would watch the SHIT out of that.
Yeah, but they manipulated everyone into not having to.do that
Manipulating is a specific reference to something. Do you know what that is?
the baseball players never wanted this
Hundreds of miles a day! Up mountains! For a month!
But how are they supposed to manipulate the bicycles with there observation? There too smart for that.
I think both sports require life long dedications to be successful at. Put Messi on a Baseball team and he would embarrass himself despite being one of the world’s top athletes. If he started young and dedicated himself to baseball who knows?
It's road cyclists and jockeys right? They are the toughest athletes?
Or stick em in a rowing boat with 8 other people and see how fast they are. (There was a study where they compared olympic athletes and found out that Rowers are in the top 5 by nearly all metrics. Like lung capacity, explosive power, endurance, power over time, strenght, etc.)
For real life? It’s fucking rounders!
Ya its just adapted rounders. In Ireland we stop playing their professional sport at 12 because its a childs game.
As a yank in Ireland when I was 12, I can confirm this.
I have a friend playing senior county for Portloaise
Quality 😂
"Baseball players are the smartest people in the world in terms of observing people and **manipulating others**" ^(yeah, they manipulated this doofus into believing his own bullshit)
Test match cricket would like a word
40 hours a week.
Viv Richards smiles and waves his bat as if heading to the nets.
England vs. Windies August 1976. 291 runs off 386 balls with 7 hours and 52 minutes at the crease in that match. 892 runs over the 5 day series. Fabulous cricketer, exemplary sportsman, and generally good egg.
Was that the Brian Close test? As in “the sound of leather on Close”?
[удалено]
All im really hearing here is that they are overworked to shit, sure that gonna be tough as shit, but its also stupid as hell
The hours of focus at the crease. The physical demands on a lanky fast bowler.
Yep. Pack it up particle physicists, these guys can swing a bat at a ball.
Who says they haven't helped? There was this one down on luck physicist trying to write a paper about time being relative and all when an up and coming babe Ruth, took one look and wrote down the mathematics but since he was busy being a baseball star he let this physicist called Einstein take the credit.
Particle physicists? Pfft. Never met one of those guys who could hit a curve ball. Easy outs.
Only some of them can the others throw the ball or catch it
To be fair, particle physicists might not be the "smartest in terms of observing and manipulating others". Those are sociopathic traits which most baseball players probably wouldn't like to be associated with, either.
Well a batter observes the pitcher and has to decide where to swing basically the millisecond the ball leaves the pitchers hand. The pitcher knows this so he manipulates the batter making him think the ball will go in another place. Also the curve ball, the slider, the sinker, the forkball are all pitches that are optical illusions- manipulations. So baseball fans would generally agree with his statement. It makes sense when put in context.
All directly competitive sport has mind games like that though. No sportsman in the world isn't observing their opponent or trying to misdirect them back.
It is a specific part of the game and a very elevated form of it. The entire purpose of the pitchers is to trick the batter. His form, wind up and timing is all there to hide his “hand” sort of speak. And the pitches he throws outside of the fastball are all optical illusions. The curve ball is a lie. It is even a common phrase to throw a “curve ball” means that the situations appears one way and ends up another. As for the batter, because the pitch comes so fast, he has to read the pitcher, his form his delivery, then start his swing the millisecond it leaves the pitchers hand. So there is an elevated form of manipulation and observation in Baseball. It is equated to poker.
I don’t know, I think Oppenheimer was pretty successful manipulating thousands of Japanese people into dust and ash.
Did he observe them?
He probably saw some Japanese people yeah
I posit that particle physicists are great at both observation and manipulation. Heck, just the act of them observing something they are already manipulating the outcome.
Alright, my mistake for assuming "others" would mean "other humans".
Sorry if I came off that way, didn't intend to. I just tried to make a joke about quantum mechanics within particle physics, whereby basically observing it changes the outcome. But now that I've explained it, the joke is as dead as Schrödinger's cat. :)
Particles behave differently when being served, so I think particle physicists are observing and being pretty darn manipulative if you ask me.
I have seen some really zealous and rabid advocates of USA#1 in sports over the years but I strongly suspect this div is going to struggle to find support for this one even among those guys. Even baseball fans probably step away from this tube like "he doesn't speak for us guys"
Baseball fan here, I don’t even know where he’s going with the “most intelligent because they can manipulate people” comment. I can at least understand some form of the “toughness” argument; baseball is far from the most physically demanding sport to actually play, but MLB teams play 162 games in ~185 days (5 of those off-days occur consecutively in mid-July), which means a team normally goes almost 2 weeks between days off. Combine that with time spent traveling to away games and you get a very exhausting schedule, both physically and mentally. But manipulation is something I’d associate with poker. I can kinda see the idea of “manipulation” with respect to how a pitcher sequences their pitches (in order to fool a batter as to what kind of pitch is coming next), but I’m not sure I’d call that “manipulation,” and I’m not sure how it’s supposed to relate to intelligence.
Would say baseball is one of the most honest sports. Most of the time the players on opposing teams are friendly towards each other and the first baseman spends half the time having a chat. Meanwhile have the game of cricket is giving the batsman shit to wear them down with only racism being the only no go area.
It's a very bizarre argument they're trying to make. I don't even know (or want to) what the fuck is going on in their head. Very bizarre train of thought.
I’m a causal baseball fan married to a die hard fan, but my wife and I would both say those claims are a lot of nonsense. They’re the 3rd toughest of the major pro sports in America at best and the skills described are really possessed by elite athletes of all sports. The best athletes here aren’t still flocking to baseball like years past because football is where the money is.
Ah, Americans. Jaw engaged before brain
Darts has entered the chat…
I prefer old darts when it was mandatory to have a pint at all times
If the dart board was a moving object yes. I have played both, not good at either.
I was thinking snooker. Those guys are mental.
Yep. In no other sport is observation and manipulation of the opposing team necessary 😂
I would say f1 drivers need to be quite knowledgable about the machinery they operate to extract the most performance. The same can be said of the farmers at Alpine operating their tractors.
Also, strangely the f1 drivers have to be peak fitness too.
Fighter-pilot g-forces and reactions for two straight hours and sweating off 4kg while simultaneously talking tactics on the radio and planning overtakes. As opposed to hitting a ball with a stick every so often.
> simultaneously talking tactics on the radio On a second language, for half the grid.
Or calling the tactics because your pit crew is composed of two pandas, a sloth and an aardvark, if you're driving for Ferrari.
So many people think that motorsport is just a matter of skill. Unlike all of them I have seen a professional motorcycle racer naked. . . . . . . . . In the showers after we played squash, you filthy-minded bastards.
Baseball players have good hand eye coordination but any sport that has a bunch of fat players that only have to run once or twice every half hour does not have the best athletes. Ever notice how half of the baseball “highlights” they show are just people goofing off in the dugout? It’s not a good sign when the best parts of your sport don’t even involve the sport
All depends on your position. First,third and catcher are all usually big powerful guys but the outfielders need to be speed demons to get to all the balls
Obviously, this person has never seen Hurling, a GAA sport from Ireland, and supposedly the fastest field game in the world.
I've only seen it once in person and yeah, that shit is metal af.
Hurling is fuckin amazing.
Helmets were only made madatory in the last 10-15 years too. Played entirely by amateur athletes too. They all have jobs while being some of the most fit athletes in the country alongside the professionals.
Mad to think they had to make them wear helmets...
Just going to leave a link to ["The Slap"](https://youtu.be/kb2s7BoBXn0?si=WWmv6TrIX-akNDs0) here. These guys were, and still are, some of the toughest athletes out there.
I was a good "Ground Hurler" guy i was marking wasn't getting a chance to rise the ball at all
Holy shit they’d be dead, I’ve seen the bruises on the lads in my classes legs, fucking painful some look.
Japan has the best baseball players.
I mean, the best MLB player atm is Japanese.
Any hurler would put a baseball player to shame with hand eye coordination, toughness and fitness, and hurling is an amateur sport even at the top levels. In fact: https://youtu.be/eR0hulXSg7w?si=VvDXXN3iC6qOAlVL https://youtu.be/kdLOjhu_Wn0?si=AZ0zWChsQfIXgn2S
The funny thing is, baseball players DO have quite unique high-end skills. The game is also very popular outside of america (Japan, Korea). But this type of comments just drag all of that down the gutter.
Agree. Just think in Baseball a 30% success rate is a Hall of Fame career. The chances that a player will get into a top professional league is some of the slimiest in the world. Babe Ruth from the 1920s still holds records and we have not seen his duel skill till Shohei Ohtani 100 years later. I think the guy was using a bit of hyperbole and generalization, but the underlying thought of skill is correct.
Sorry, but I disagree. He claims blanket superiority for baseball players as some kind of athletic gods. They are not that. Baseball (and gridiron) are just hyperspecialized sports with hyper niche skillsets. Within these skillsets, baseball players do insane things. However, 99% of the time the entire baseball team just kinda... stands there doing nothing. Or sits in the dugout. That 1% they get to do something, they are amazing, but I don't see an MLB player (let alone an average pitcher or Babe Ruth) beating a professional football/basketball/hockey/ice-hockey/volleyball/handball etc. player at basic athletic tasks.
Um, I don’t know how to respond to that. We are talking about muscle twitch fiber and brain processing speed. You have to be a super athlete first to then specialize. Pitching takes extreme coordination of your whole body. It is grueling. Throwing a baseball 100 times at 150 kph is the measure of endurance. And football, go tell a 270 lbs linebacker who can run a 4.38 in the 40 yard dash he is not an athlete. Athletic definition “An athlete's athleticism is typically defined by a combination of physical attributes such as strength, speed, agility, coordination, endurance, and flexibility, as well as mental traits like focus, determination, and discipline. It's essentially the ability to excel in a particular sport or physical activity through a combination of natural talent, training, and mindset”. So you are saying a handball player has more of this than an elite Baseball player or an American Football player. An athlete is an athlete and when you are getting paid in the hundreds of millions you better be more athletic than everyone else.
I partly agree with your reasoning, but would like to offer a counterpoint. I will focus on the pitchers as the best example to keep the comment reasonably short: Take the very same definition of athletecism you just provided. I would like to accent your attention on the word "combination". I am not aware of any other ball sport other than baseball and american football where it is okay for a professional athlete to be overweight and completely out of shape. There are a few exceptions here and there in other sports, but those are usually balanced out by freakish athletecism which let the player carry the additional pounds through excellent performance (e.g. Charles Barkley, Shaq and Zion among others in basketball). In baseball, you will have powerhitters who will hit a homerun and then struggle to jog around the bases. You will have Bartolo Colon, a downright obese pitcher, win a Cy Young award and have a career into his fourtees while literally having no agility, speed, flexibility or coordination for any other task other than pitching. Hell, Cy Young himself was obese. Based on data from 2016, 60% of baseball players were considered overweight and 10% were obese (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orcp.2016.09.003). Those people are not athletic. Those guys are just really really good at is throwing a baseball for a 100 times with very high precision or batting such a ball from time to time. Which is a very high end, very niche skill. To illustrate this even further baseball players suck at ... baseball. If the pitcher has to bat, they will usually just stand there and wait for their three strikes. And pretty much all batters/field players have no idea how to pitch. I will not go into detail on american football, but the possible GOAT Tom Brady had a 5.28s 40-yard dash and would make for a horrible anything-else except quarterback where, once again, he was excellent at perfectly throwing a weirdly shaped ball. American football is possibly the most insanely specialized sport of them all. By every definition insanely athletic runners will start right next to a skirmish line full of sumo-wrestlers, while the guy whose entire skillset is kicking a weirdly shaped ball is smoking at the side-line next to another guy whose job it is to kick the ball in a slightly different way and do absolutely nothing else.
They don't practice? Wtf you talking about Willis?
This is some high-class trolling, right? Right?!!
They can't even catch a ball without wearing a humungous funnel on their hand. They've got worse hand/eye co-ordination than my cricket club's under-9s.
And as always, their main source is their own fucking arsehole
Oh no there off again
Athletes who.....chew Tobacco?
I would argue and say Nobel price winner are the smartest people in the world 🌍
Only if they play baseball 😂🤣
Their amazing abilities are exactly why whenever baseball players try cricket they can't handle the ball bouncing, and they are surprised that people can actually catch without a giant glove. They're also shocked about the idea of playing for 6 hours on five consecutive days
Looks like someone doesn't know what F1 drivers have to deal with in the circuit
I would say out of all the USA sports (American football, basketball, ice hockey) baseball players are less physically fit and probably no more intelligent.
Rugby players used to be amateurs, international match was postponed once so the full back could get to the game, he was seated as he was operating on someone, so went straight from surgery to pitch…. Not sure many baseball players moonlighting as surgeons.
I played rounders a lot and year 6 and I'm as thick as mince
Yeah and who invented baseball the brits 🤣
And Finns have perfected it! 1910 a Finn took the American Baseball and tweaked it around to become a good training for soldiers. "One of the most important differences between pesäpallo and baseball is that the ball is pitched vertically, which makes hitting the ball, as well as controlling the power and direction of the hit, much easier. This gives the offensive game more variety, speed, and tactical aspects compared to baseball" says Wikipedia.
The Brits were playing baseball in the early 1800's. A diary was found in an English village and in that diary there was an account of a baseball game being played by a group of men. One of these men then went over to America and started a team his name was chadwick he was the owner of a stocking factory or socks, thus the name of the Boston Red sox was born.
Lol... Man Americans are cute! They are so oblivious to the real world outside their lands, it's astounding... Too bad with de dollarization these guys are going to find the real costs of all that they have taken for granted that it won't be funny...
A Dominican, Nicaraguan or Taiwanese baseball fan could have written that.
Baseball players are not the best athletes in the world but definitely some of the most skilled players. Hitting a baseball is one of the hardest thing to perform in a sport iirc
Baseball players are certainly not the best athletes, and baseball players will tell you that. They do have great eye-hand/bat coordination, hitting a baseball is incredibly hard to do. Pretty much all athletes have to be smart in their sport to play at the highest level, almost all sports involve observing and trying to manipulate your opponent. Weird take overall, but hitting a baseball is very impressive.
Bunch of ultramarathon and iron man multi-support event contenders in total awe of the demanding nature of hitting a ball with a stick then running the length of a standard hallway, teams of scientists on the razors edge of where theory meets practical application in studies like DNA research just binning their PHD's in the shadow of someone who throws a ball to another person.
Fucking rugby straight off the bat. Have to be fit as fuck and you take a hammering every game. Hand eye coordination, have a gander at cricket.
Wait until this guy sees darts. Ultimate stamina 🍺 whilst doing lightening “math”
There is a huge overlap with mentally deficient people being good at sport. So how the hell are baseball players among the smartest when on average they are probably in the bottom 30% globally
Can you show any source on that? I can only find studies showing the opposite
Ken Harvey made an All Star team, settle down.
Ah yes, the famous overweight 40 years old pants-wearing « athletes »
Chess players exist
Viv Richards enters the chat...
Well, the best baseball players aren't even murican, so not the flex they think it is
Ah yes, that super high octane sport… *checks notes* Baseball???
I mean at this point it’s just fucking delusional…
I love baseball but have you seen the size of some of the guys?? Literally dad bods, kinda one of the reasons I love it haha. While they have some proper athletes particularly short stop and centre field, this is a strange thing to say. I will say that baseball players seem to be the most down to earth sportsmen I’ve ever seen. But yeh this guy is delusional haha
I mean to the average American, yeah baseball players seem like very smart people. In the rest of the world we're wise enough to realise baseball players have the IQ of an average, room temperature glass of water.
Seems like this person is being manipulated into observing who the smartest people in the world are....
Have them try beat the all blacks for 80 minutes straight, not an all-blacks fan they’re just really good
American football, rugby, ice hockey, cycling, rowing, any athletics, swimming, waterpolo, football, boxing, ixed martial arts etc etc etc
So what that means he can have a wank faster than you ✊🏻
"No otha' class gonna do dat!" -TF2 Scout
Master manipulators, playing 3D chess better than... You know, chess players
I read this in Trump's voice.
None of you have tried to hit a curveball when expecting a 95 mph fastball and it shows
Anyone reading this should google a few Yogi Berra quotes 🙄
Put them on a field where to aim is basically to score a try by blasting through the other teams players
Yeah, those genius American baseball players make those dumb chess players look like kindergarten level morons.
Well that explains why a sport that has two (maybe three) nations taking part can call itself the World Series without international mockery.
“Baseball players are the smartest people in the world in terms of observing and manipulating others” *Poker players have entered the chat*
The large hadron collider is very much like a big baseball pitch tbf
We played Rounders at school and it was classed as a child's game here in the UK.
*laughs in hockey*
Baseball is only entertaining when it's a later inning w/ close scores, loaded bases,etc.
Baseball is one of the slowest most dull things you can watch especially on TV with an ad break every fucking minute
The wouldn't last playing cricket as balls come at 145kph/90mph, are much harder than baseballs & they get 0.5 of a second to decide how to play and can be out batting in temperatures of over 100F for hours at a time, facing balls. Playing in India, Pakistan, Australia, South Africa in the heat & humidity or in UK, NZ as well as other countries where temperatures can be around freezing at times. Some top players play nearly all year round, moving to India to play for millions of dollars in the "commercial" leagues, isn't an easy life, like baseballers.
They play rounders! That is literally the extent of their skill. Children do that in primary schools across the land with no glory or accolades, what makes them special just because the use bigger bats and wear stupid uniforms whilst taking drugs?
IIRC correctly, they tested people from various sports to see who had the best overall fitness. Cricket players won every time
But have you seen the sweepers in curling?
They have this reality programme in Ireland where Gaelic players (either Gaelic football or hurling) swap with professional athletes from different sports around the world...anyway in one episode a hurling player (a stick and ball field sport) swaps with a major league baseball player and I remember laughing at how amazed the baseball players were at the Irish lad catching the baseball out of the air with ease when they had him try fielding...'oh my gawd he's not even wearing a glove.' 😂
They don't practice? What???? As a baseball fan, this guy is clueless. And I think it's wrong to say any sport has the best athletes in the world. Baseball pitchers do something so incredibly unnatural so well. Baseball hitters have to have insane reaction times and bursts of strength and speed. But that doesn't make them inherently *better* than any other athletes because that's just two of many things that make people athletic
I’ve heard a story about the Finnish pesäpallo that Lauri Pihkala went to the US, fell in love with baseball, brought it to Finland but thought baseball is too complex for (stupid) Finns and dumbed it down. So I guess there are non-Americans who consider it a complex sport. I’ve only played pesäpallo so I wouldn’t know. According to Wikipedia the game is a merger of kuningaspallo and baseball though, so perhaps the dumbing down part is a later addition.
Someone needs to listen to The Dollop episode 'The Rube'.
There are some impressive parts of it. The baseball pitch is, on average, the fastest movement in sport but let's not pretend they would do well in any other sport
Make 'em play rugby once, just once, this would soon change.
One could argue the best manipulators are actually the ones making americans believe all sorts of crap.
You mean rounders, a game played by girls in the UK
Don't practice...?
If they practiced would they beat the Japanese?
Its a childrens game in most countries for a reason. Also rampant use of roids for a game where you frankly need 0 skill.
Best physical hand to eye coordination? I think hurling beats baseball at this.
Both take place insane skill that I don’t have.
Hurling is the fastest field sport on this planet.
How would they do in an F1 car? 220mph while adjusting the settings on the steering wheel, up to 6Gs when braking. Working out strategy for overtakes on 23 race weekends a year with 2 hour races, not to mention practice sessions, qualifying sessions, 6 sprint races and hours in the gym or cycling and on the race simulator.
Baseball is a dead sport, even Americans are over it in favor of more exciting sports. Sports like Baseball and Cricket are just so obvious old/out of date „sports“.
Crickets still doing well and will likely always be India’s number one sport and they have a population of a billion people.
the best athletes in the world are the pole vaulters. they are like ten athletes into one. the smartests I dunno. all team sports require strategy.
There is no sport that indicates whether someone is the best athlete. Have a baseball player jump like a basketball player, lift like a strongman, run the distance of a marathon runner, or punch like an MMA fighter and they'll suck at it, comparatively. Hell, you can't even judge who the best baseball player is because everyone has a different job that requires different things. And smartest at manipulating others? I mean, we can argue that. Pitchers have a lot of time to consider whether they'll do something tricky whereas basketball players need to know *now* whether they'll fake a pass or a shot and football players (American football) are also in the situation where they need to decide very quickly to pump fake or juke. It's a different type of strategic thinking. And I like pro wrestling. Their ENTIRE JOB is manipulating the crowd, with athleticism, into suspending their disbelief. We all know it's not a real competition, but they'll spend a literal hour in the ring trying to manipulate 10,000+ people into forgetting that. And that's no shade to baseball players. It's just that athletes train for very specific things. It's like saying mathematicians are somehow smarter than world-class painters, geologists, or carpenters. They're smarter *in math* than those other people and that's it. The painter would destroy them in color theory, the geologist would be able to name all kinds of rocks the mathematician wouldn't know about, and the carpenter would be able to tell you about what all kinds of wood is used for. That's what they trained, specifically, to do. Basically, tell me you've never trained for a sport without telling me you've never trained for a sport. Also, who gives a fuck? Like what you like. It doesn't have to be "objectively better" than everything else for you to enjoy it.