Baseball’s Fight with Fatigue
wsj.com
wsj.com
What you will find is that you, a normal human, can keep this up for about one hour, before you collapse of exhaustion or hurt yourself.
That the super humans who play professional baseball are able to do this day in and day out for more than half a year is insane.
Look at the average baseball player. So many of them are plump or overweight. I'd argue that soccer players running 10-15 miles every game have a bit more to deal with.
baseball needs some yoga and proper nutrition.
You mean kilometers, not miles.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/06...
It's easy for us to dismiss the effort professional athletes put out when you only see them on TV a few times. However, it's somehow different when we see Steve Jobs or Tim Cook on stage a couple times each year. We recognize all of the hard work Steve/Tim likely put in behind the scenes.
For some reason, a lot of people don't recognize that same level of effort for professional athletes. They just assume they show up for the game and perform at a high level.
For every hour on the field, there's probably two hours of study (mental preparation) and two hours of treatment and/or rehab (physical maintenance). Pair that with a rigid schedule every day, fatigue is a real concern.
We all know the overnight success myth. The myth exists for professional athletes as well. Athletes that make it to the highest level didn't simply wake up one morning and have all the tools to succeed. Hours and hours and hours of training, both mental and physical, had to occur. It's like anything else - you don't simply get good. It takes practice.
It also takes commitment, dedication, and perseverance to succeed at a professional level - just like everything else in this world.
One of the reasons that Prince Fielder can hit as many home runs as he does is that he has a lot of mass; it's also one reason that steroids were effective. Not (just) for strength, but the more mass you have to swing into the ball, the farther it will go.
But humans were meant to run. That's why we stand upright, that's why we sweat. Running long distances on a flat grass field, to a trained athlete, is going to be less fatiguing than standing still in the sun waiting for something to happen. Pitchers throw 100+ pitches at 90+ MPH and for the most part, are dead accurate. Even if the ball is spiraling through the air to confuse the batter. And the players, other than the starting pitcher, are out there almost every single day, and sometimes play two games per day. Baseball has a ridiculously packed schedule.
So I would disagree that soccer players have it rougher. Running is easy.
Unless you're someone like Mark Prior who had their body give out when their career was just getting started. Why are you only highlighting the outliers, the genetic freaks (amongst genetic freaks no less)?
The thing with baseball pitchers is that there's an enormous selective pressure on their bodies (primarily shoulder & elbow) being able to withstand the brutal toll throwing all those pitches causes. The absolute best pitchers (talent wise) might never even make it to the MLB because their arm falls apart before they get a chance. There are pitching motions which hurt my arm just doing them in slow motion, now imagine heaving a baseball 90+ mph repeatedly for your entire life.
This is a far different selective pressure than what e.g. soccer players would have where quickness & speed on their feet is what matters.
The problem with these discussions is that people are using words like "taxing" to only narrowly mean what they want it to mean.
No doubt that a starting pitcher's pitching arm takes a lot of abuse, but they can have much longer careers than almost any other athlete.
A soccer player (or NBA player or many NFL positions, etc) is going to deteriorate steadily as they age after hitting some peak year. For some sports there'll be a slight bubble after that ast the intersection of athleticism decreasing and increasing wisdom but not for all. Sure, someone might endure a catastrophic injury and some players are made of glass (e.g. Greg Oden in the NBA) but generally players will wash out either when their athleticism is not high enough for their level or it deteriorates below the level necessary.
A baseball pitcher's curve is different. Their arm/shoulder will either be able to withstand the long term abuse or it won't and if it's the latter they'll wash out pretty early on (likely long before they ever see an MLB field). Once they clear that hurdle the actual deterioration rate is much slower in the general case. It also helps that pitching is a position where accumulated wisdom can really help, a lot like the quarterback in american football and that can help balance out declining athleticism as well
You have to go to the ballpark nearly every single day for almost 8 months. I'm from Detroit and I'm looking at the Tiger's schedule right now. In September they have TWO days in the entire month without a game. By that time they will also be playing doubleheaders or make up games because of weather. In May they go 21 consecutive days with a game. Even if it's not as physically demanding as hockey or american football, that's exhausting. Imagine having to go to the office that much.
On top of that you're playing until nearly November if you're in the World Series and then spring training starts in Feb (it's already started). There's nearly no offseason.
[1]http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/baseball/major-league-...
Divide that by 40 (assuming a career from 25-65) and you still have $532k/year.
[1] http://www.ramfg.com/RAM-Financial-Group-Solutions-Professio...
You'll still come out ahead with the baseball career, just not by quite as much.
http://www.baseballamerica.com/minors/players-sue-for-better...
While major leaguers’ salaries have increased by more than 2,000 percent since 1976,” the lawsuit says, “minor leaguers’ salaries have, on average, increased only 75 percent since that time.”
That leaves minor league salaries typically ranging from $1,100 a month in short-season leagues to $2,150 a month for Triple-A, figures asserted in the lawsuit and confirmed by two major league front-office officials.
So in pursuing professional baseball, you really do open yourself to a significant risk of finding that you're 26 and spent the last five years making very little money and now you don't have a job, or any professional skills beyond the offseason job you may have worked.
But as to baseball: they have games. What are they complaining about? :)
If you pick an endurance sport such as cross country skiing, swimming, or rowing instead of a game (sport is "something with a start and a finish"; a game is something you play), you will easily be training every day for four hours or more for 8+ months in a stretch without ever entering a real competition.
All that for two or three races that count a year or, if you are really good, for one race every four years at the Olympics (rowing is extreme here, as it doesn't do races at different distances, and as it is rare for people to enter in more than one race in an event. Underperform in that race, and it is 4 years of training to get another try. Swimmers and cross-country skiers have it slightly better, as they typically enter in multiple races at an event).
The only plus these sports have over professional baseball is that sportsmen do not travel that much.
On an unrelated note, it would be nice if they expanded the playoffs to include 16 teams with the first two rounds being a best out of 5, concluding with the NLCS/ALCS and World Series being a best out of 7, of course. It would get more fanbases interested in their team if they at least made a playoff appearance more often.
The sport could use a shot in the arm in terms of viewership as the average age of your typical MLB viewer is ~54 years.
[1]http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-04-01/fixing-baseb...
Source: http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/official_info/official_rules/pitcher_... (Rule 8.04)
Not that MLB is listening to me. :-)
Since coming to North America I've always felt one of the problems with Baseball and Hockey is they just play too many games, so no game is significant enough. When your team loses to a certain team, you don't care enough because you know they'll play them multiple times more.
Baseball is 162, Hockey is 82 games in "regular season"
NFL is only 16 games, which to me, makes it much more exciting because each win or loss really matters, and as a spectator I actually care.
If you're at a bar drinking, or at the game, you're literally paying to watch other people have the time of their lives.
Worth thinking about
Particularly in a country where NFL football reigns supreme, the NHL starting an 82 game season in October is just a loser. Starting the compressed season in January, with the NFL regular season over, made so much more sense.
Not only are there so many games, but they're all on TV. The NFL mostly stacks their games on Sunday so "football sunday" has become a social event for people. Leagues like the MLB, NBA and NHL spread their games all over the week and with modern cable packages on pretty much any given day you can find a game to watch - the specialness is lost.
This is one reason why I think it's a bad idea for the NFL to start spreading games around - sure there was always MNF but they've had TNF now for a while and there's always talk about adding more. They want those primetime slots but all it does is weaken The Event effect of sundays.
I love the excitement and unpredictability of NFL football as much as the next red blooded American, but there's something a little bit unsatisfying about a team's entire season routinely hanging in the balance of a single referee's call or a ball bouncing right instead of left.
I like the idea of off-setting that with more teams in the playoffs, but that would be the biggest hurdle to climb in terms of reducing the number of games in a season. You could argue that maybe the players union could strike, citing to grueling of a season, but their compensation is directly tied to revenues, so they'd be opposed to a reduction in games as well.
[0] http://deadspin.com/rob-manfred-wont-rule-out-a-shorter-base...
Your linked article also carefully tiptoed around the other elephant in the room, that being, as the pix demonstrates, not just a sea of old people, but a sea of old white people except for one Hispanic (old) guy. As whites become a minority race and the average age of a MLB viewer goes up one year per year, the pro level will die out pretty soon. How this interacts with billion dollar municipal bond offerings to pay for stadiums and such is interesting to contemplate.
Note, its probably a net gain to the sport overall, even if only 5% of the couch potatoes join or attend a local amateur game or take their kids to little league after MLB shuts down. Even if only 1% take a ball to a local park, it'll still be a net gain for the game overall.