One doesn’t have to be a sports fan to appreciate the craftsmanship of a professional batsman: watch a hitter like Ichiro display the remarkable fineries of his craft in a crucial, gut-wrenching 8th inning at-bat. Watch him battle off three 98 MPH Verlander heaters with last-millisecond foul tips (the clumsy plunk of the bat sending the ball dribbling foul, a “lose- the-battle, win-the-war”, stoical sort of victory for the proud batter), biding his time, staying cool as he can (as cool as anyone staring down a firing squad can be), before honing in on that eventual curveball (a knee-buckler, a humbling whiff if you’re geared up for the Heater, if your macho goal is power-against-power and launching it over the fence), and with an eagle-eye, a predatory focus, and a quick flick of the wrists, serving that Uncle Charlie into the right field corner for the game-changing. momentum-flipping hit—from strike number three, out number three, rally averted, to plating the tying run from second and cruising into scoring position as the go-ahead run himself (keep the line moving boys, keep it moving). In this way (and hundreds of others)m Ichiro is a fine example of all the skills that the best hitters must have—instincts, careful preparation, poise under pressure, bodily mechanics and balance as consistent and precise as a calibrated super-spy watch, and hand-eye coordination that combines Zen-like restraint, raw strength, and samurai reflexes. Boxing is termed, “The Sweet Science”; perhaps the fine art of baseball hitting should be called, “The Graceful Gift.”
In 2005, the USA Today conducted a poll in which they asked professional athletes, “What is the hardest specific skill/ task to perform in sports?” The #1 choice-- ahead of handling a NASCAR racecar, pole vaulting twenty feet in the air, and hitting a long, straight tee shot-- was hitting a baseball. As sportswriter Gary Mihoces puts it, “Considering that a major-league pitch can reach speeds more than 95 mph, hitters have only 0.4 seconds to find the ball, decide where the ball is going and swing.”
Or to put it another way: imagine standing in a narrow box, within the range of your front door to your mailbox, and watching a miniature Ferrari kicking from 1st to 5th gear in a heartbeat, and perhaps cutting at a 45 degree angle, towards you or away from you (or not), and the object at a density of a heavy stone, and, not just ducking for cover, not watching in wonder as you would a jet plane that whizzes across your plane of sight at an air show, but in fact attempting to swing a heavy piece of lumber, starting from behind your head, and with time enough to react and maybe think half-a-word (like “slid-“ ), and aim right at the object, like target shooting at a hummingbird across your shoulder, and not just make contact—no, that’s just the tip of the iceberg!—and not even make solid contact, but in fact guide the object with a velocity, direction, and angle that gives you a fighter’s chance of putting it somewhere on the field away from the nine players who are carefully positioned in a way to best minimize your chance of doing so. And the players, nay the daredevils, who do this best, who become legends of the sport, still only do so at a one in three clip! Imagine measuring success in any other challenge or competition (free throw percentage? school grades? military victory?) as being well under 40% of the time!
Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941-- a God among men. Ichiro hit over .350 four times in his MLB career (including .372 in 2004)-- no player in that period has done the same. Let us stop and admire the dexterity of such batsman, if not as sports fans, than for the awe of this purest, most precise of physical abilities.
This is really good in terms of evidence of the difficulty of using a bat. You mention professional players using the bat yet you do not mention your self. You obviously regard the swinging of a bat very highly. A way to improve this would be to add a personal anecdote.
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