Hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports
February 8, 2026
Hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports
28 comments
60’6″ to the plate, normal stride, 55 feet to the plate, right handed pitcher. Looks good.
Now do it with Randy Johnson and his 20 feet long limbs.
As someone who couldn’t make it out of T-ball I indeed can confirm it’s incredibly hard.
I personally would shit my pants if I saw a 100mph pitch
“Nah, [Player who did poorly today] sucks. I myself could go down there and do better!”
The human brain is crazy.
Throwing a baseball is also crazy. Guys can chuck a baseball hundreds of feet and some of them are accurate enough to place it right at someone’s chest. That’s wild to think about. The slightest movement in the arm or fingers would push it a few feet this way or the way. And that all happens almost without thinking about where you’re “aiming”. You kinda just look and throw.
Absol-fucking-lutely! Though I usually phrase it as “hitting a MLB pitcher’s pitch is the most difficult thing to do in sports.”
They should do a game between MLB players with slow pitch softball rules, plus the count starts at 0-1, hitting it over the fence is an out, and there’s a 5 run cap per inning
Cody Bellinger is the real GOAT because he can do this high off his ass.
Getting a hole in one, winning the tour de france, winning the vendee globe, or beating a grand master in chess would all seem harder than hitting a ball with a stick, at least to me.
Absolutely. You can throw and catch a TD, score a basket, or shoot a puck into the net. But standing 60.6 feet away waiting on a 100 mph pitch? Good luck.
It depends on the speed and break of the baseball when it comes to difficulty. They are far fewer professional Golfers in the world than pro baseball players. Golf at high level is probably just as hard or harder on a professional course with tight fairways, deep rough, lots of hazards and impossible greens etc.
Just saying.
Its also one of the most satisfying things to do, i might suck and have zero hopes of ever playing ball in any meaningful capacity but going to the batting cages just to smack some balls around is a great time
I have no doubt that getting to the point where you even get *a* hit in the majors requires an insane amount of natural talent and hard work.
The *hardest* thing in sports though? Given that multiple dudes accomplish it every day during a season, that seems a stretch.
Steroids don’t help you hit a ball. They don’t make your eyes seen better or help you to adjust to that nasty cutter. They help you recover. They might help you hit harder. They don’t help to you actually make contact.
The idea that a batter is waiting to see a ball leave the pitcher’s hand before registering that this is an At Bat and beginning the entire process on their end makes this feel like it was a math problem project made by someone with a loose idea about the concept of baseball.
If the NBA ever decided to actually enforce their travel rules, I think you’d find simply playing basketball today would be harder
Now do the breakdown for softball.
If a QB has a completion % of 30 he’s been benched after 3 games
If a NBA player shoots 30% they are out of the league in 2 years
If a MLB hitter can sustain 30% their whole a career they are a HOF lock
Yeah but on an episode of sports science they had a minor league baseball pitcher throw to a minor league baseball hitter and the best softball pitcher in the world throw to that same minor league hitter and it was more difficult for him to hit off the best softball pitcher in the world than a random minor league pitcher.
Makes playoff baseball even more interesting? You’re telling me there are MFers out there hitting home runs and walk offs like it’s nothing? I still think back to the 2022 Phillies and how dominant they looked.
In high school I went up a pitcher who ended up getting drafted. He was throwing low 90’s at the time. God damn the ball moves fast at those speeds. It was nothing I could handle and I was on varsity.
The talent gaps between players are tremendous
This puts people like Tony Gwynn who can “just” “see it and hit it” into X-Men territory.
Someone said to me once, “you hit a golf ball 100% of the time and look how hard it is to do well”
Thousands of people have hit baseballs. Not a lot of people have run a sub-4 minute mile.
somebody said college football and mlber Charlie ward was a better athlete than bo jackson eventhough Bo was an Allstar in both Badeball and football. They thought basketball was the hardest sports. Bo prob wouldn’t be a bad basketball player either. Low post menace.
What about a cricket bowl? Similar speeds but the bowler bounces it at your feet and bounces it into you and then a million variables come into play in that last 6 -10 feet, most of them controlled by the bowler putting the ball where he wants it, different grips, different styles, hitting the seam, polishing one side of the ball by rubbing it against your pants throughout the game to change the drag and spin, the ball is used for 100 bowls and deteriorates and becomes even more unpredictable. The condition of the wicket (ground) where the ball bounces changes and the bowler takes advantage of this, there is two ends of the wicket so you’re trying to remember two different conditions and areas to watch. They opposing team can change bowlers every over (6 balls) so you’re constantly facing different styles of bowling. Then a new ball is introduced and everything changes again and you’ve got to change gear to dealing with a fresh ball that is dangerous because it does what the bowler wants it to do more readily than a ball flogged all over the field for half a day. and you have to face this potentially 100s up to 1000s of times over a 5 day test match
Except I think they proved that pro players are better at it not because they have faster reaction times but that they have incredible vision and are able to make predictions about where the ball is going based on the angle the ball is in the moment they see it appear over the top of the shoulder in the pitcher’s hand. I remember they had Jenny Finch pitch softballs to pro baseball players and they struggled to hit it because their visual systems were not trained on underhand delivery. The players did improve over time, however, and their hypothesis is that they would eventually have been able to retrain their brains to adapt to it.
28 comments
60’6″ to the plate, normal stride, 55 feet to the plate, right handed pitcher. Looks good.
Now do it with Randy Johnson and his 20 feet long limbs.
As someone who couldn’t make it out of T-ball I indeed can confirm it’s incredibly hard.
I personally would shit my pants if I saw a 100mph pitch
“Nah, [Player who did poorly today] sucks. I myself could go down there and do better!”
The human brain is crazy.
Throwing a baseball is also crazy. Guys can chuck a baseball hundreds of feet and some of them are accurate enough to place it right at someone’s chest. That’s wild to think about. The slightest movement in the arm or fingers would push it a few feet this way or the way. And that all happens almost without thinking about where you’re “aiming”. You kinda just look and throw.
Absol-fucking-lutely! Though I usually phrase it as “hitting a MLB pitcher’s pitch is the most difficult thing to do in sports.”
They should do a game between MLB players with slow pitch softball rules, plus the count starts at 0-1, hitting it over the fence is an out, and there’s a 5 run cap per inning
Cody Bellinger is the real GOAT because he can do this high off his ass.
Getting a hole in one, winning the tour de france, winning the vendee globe, or beating a grand master in chess would all seem harder than hitting a ball with a stick, at least to me.
Absolutely. You can throw and catch a TD, score a basket, or shoot a puck into the net. But standing 60.6 feet away waiting on a 100 mph pitch? Good luck.
https://streamable.com/0ko6c
It depends on the speed and break of the baseball when it comes to difficulty. They are far fewer professional Golfers in the world than pro baseball players. Golf at high level is probably just as hard or harder on a professional course with tight fairways, deep rough, lots of hazards and impossible greens etc.
Just saying.
Its also one of the most satisfying things to do, i might suck and have zero hopes of ever playing ball in any meaningful capacity but going to the batting cages just to smack some balls around is a great time
I have no doubt that getting to the point where you even get *a* hit in the majors requires an insane amount of natural talent and hard work.
The *hardest* thing in sports though? Given that multiple dudes accomplish it every day during a season, that seems a stretch.
Steroids don’t help you hit a ball. They don’t make your eyes seen better or help you to adjust to that nasty cutter. They help you recover. They might help you hit harder. They don’t help to you actually make contact.
The idea that a batter is waiting to see a ball leave the pitcher’s hand before registering that this is an At Bat and beginning the entire process on their end makes this feel like it was a math problem project made by someone with a loose idea about the concept of baseball.
If the NBA ever decided to actually enforce their travel rules, I think you’d find simply playing basketball today would be harder
Now do the breakdown for softball.
If a QB has a completion % of 30 he’s been benched after 3 games
If a NBA player shoots 30% they are out of the league in 2 years
If a MLB hitter can sustain 30% their whole a career they are a HOF lock
Yeah but on an episode of sports science they had a minor league baseball pitcher throw to a minor league baseball hitter and the best softball pitcher in the world throw to that same minor league hitter and it was more difficult for him to hit off the best softball pitcher in the world than a random minor league pitcher.
Makes playoff baseball even more interesting? You’re telling me there are MFers out there hitting home runs and walk offs like it’s nothing? I still think back to the 2022 Phillies and how dominant they looked.
In high school I went up a pitcher who ended up getting drafted. He was throwing low 90’s at the time. God damn the ball moves fast at those speeds. It was nothing I could handle and I was on varsity.
The talent gaps between players are tremendous
This puts people like Tony Gwynn who can “just” “see it and hit it” into X-Men territory.
Someone said to me once, “you hit a golf ball 100% of the time and look how hard it is to do well”
Thousands of people have hit baseballs. Not a lot of people have run a sub-4 minute mile.
somebody said college football and mlber Charlie ward was a better athlete than bo jackson eventhough Bo was an Allstar in both Badeball and football. They thought basketball was the hardest sports. Bo prob wouldn’t be a bad basketball player either. Low post menace.
What about a cricket bowl? Similar speeds but the bowler bounces it at your feet and bounces it into you and then a million variables come into play in that last 6 -10 feet, most of them controlled by the bowler putting the ball where he wants it, different grips, different styles, hitting the seam, polishing one side of the ball by rubbing it against your pants throughout the game to change the drag and spin, the ball is used for 100 bowls and deteriorates and becomes even more unpredictable. The condition of the wicket (ground) where the ball bounces changes and the bowler takes advantage of this, there is two ends of the wicket so you’re trying to remember two different conditions and areas to watch. They opposing team can change bowlers every over (6 balls) so you’re constantly facing different styles of bowling. Then a new ball is introduced and everything changes again and you’ve got to change gear to dealing with a fresh ball that is dangerous because it does what the bowler wants it to do more readily than a ball flogged all over the field for half a day. and you have to face this potentially 100s up to 1000s of times over a 5 day test match
Except I think they proved that pro players are better at it not because they have faster reaction times but that they have incredible vision and are able to make predictions about where the ball is going based on the angle the ball is in the moment they see it appear over the top of the shoulder in the pitcher’s hand. I remember they had Jenny Finch pitch softballs to pro baseball players and they struggled to hit it because their visual systems were not trained on underhand delivery. The players did improve over time, however, and their hypothesis is that they would eventually have been able to retrain their brains to adapt to it.