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1. Tim Stauffer, Trot Nixon's Coming (Dan Lee) Posted: January 03, 2012 at 07:36 AM (#4027451)The interesting thing about baseball that is more or less unique in sports (there are always a few in every sport) is the "wily veteran" phonomenon. Sometimes aging superstars see their skills diminish and hang on in lots of sports, but I contend that only in baseball could a Jesse Orosco-type talent play at a high level for as long as Jesse did.
Kevin Willis played his last NBA game at age 44 and was never really great, just a good player for a very long time. 21 seasons, one All-Star appearance, sixth all-time in games played. I think he's a decent inter-sport comp for Orosco.
I would think a guy like Morten Anderson is just like Orosco. A speciality player.
I guess you've never heard much about George Blanda.
The nature of football makes playing into your 40s much more difficult than it is in baseball. The phyiscal abuse becomes overwhelming.
My friends and I joke pretty much anytime someone has a son about how they should raise their child to have a sports career. So far our list includes;
MLB - LOOGY, left handed hitting catcher
NHL - stay at home defenseman
NFL - Kicker, long snapper
But Blanda wasn't just a kicker, he was also a quarterback who led one comeback drive after another at the age of 43, and won the MVP award to boot, which AFAIK is the oldest that any pro athlete has ever done that.
But yeah, physically the toll the NFL takes makes lasting into the 40s a lot harder, I would think.
His former teammate Leonard Little retired last season at age 36, though it had been a couple years since he had killed anything.
If it were easier to put up those numbers in football, everybody would be doing it, and it wouldn't be impressive.
Neyer is confusing "proof" and "evidence" in his title. I'm not convinced there is even any evidence here. Weeden has succeeded at college football, and also succeeded in minor league baseball (his first two seasons at least). He has not succeeded at the big league level in either sport, and whether he will in the NFL is an open question.
Even if he does, what does it prove? Nothing more than that Weeden is better at football than he is at baseball. Albert Pujols would probably be a failure if he tried to play football now (please Albert, don't even try, you have rings to win with the Angels). At the very least, he would not cross sports and be among the top half dozen players in the NFL, as he is in MLB. That does not mean football is harder than baseball.
If you look at the prime ages of the players, I think that you'll see that baseball players "peak" a lot later than football players. You can reasonably extrapolate that there are more skills which take longer to develop in baseball - a star in MLB at 22 is a rare thing, where a star in the NFL at 22 is relatively common.
A player of any sport develops because he's mentally prepared to contribute at a star level at a certain age. Those years that he achieves this mental state in which his body can still compete and perform are his "prime".
He might not have had the opportunity, but I'm not so sure he couldn't have produced if he'd had one. At 6-2 and 215, he wasn't all that short, and he wasn't any more immobile than many of the leadfoots that are out there today.
OTOH Blanda wouldn't have won a roster spot on the basis of his placekicking, since his heroics with Oakland were pretty much a function of field goals from inside the 40. Outside the 40 he was only 3 for 13 during his MVP season, although he did make his sole attempt past midfield.
But anyway, it's all kind of comparing apples to oranges, since prior to today's conditioning techniques and mega-bucks to keep players motivated, there were very few baseball players who were productive after they turned 35. In 1950 I don't think that there were even half a dozen players over that age in the starting lineups of the 16 Major League teams.
There are three different kinds of columns on Baseball Nation -- features, news, and short things like this. They're distinguished on the main page, but you can't tell which is which from a link until you click on it.
But it isn't necessarily about skill. In football, there are undoubtedly skills you can develop that aid your professional development. Unfortunately, at the same time your body is undergoing serious consistent physical abuse that robs you of much-needed athleticism (particularly at some positions) that improved techniques can't overcome.
It's true in almost everything. One thing I absolutely hate is when I'm asked if my class is hard. I have no idea. I don't think so, but I took to organic chemistry like a duck to water. Art history, now that was hard. All the art looks alike and the names sound the same. How to make sense of it?
The point is: your hardest class will likely be one in which you have lesser talent and low interest.
Which is harder: baseball or football? Well, are you Willie Mays or Joe Montana? It's a non-sensical question.
You got it, not to mention it depends on which position(s) in the two sports you're talking about.
Although it's still kind of fun to break it down and figure out which specific athletic or motor skills are required more in one sport or the other, and to what extent the most important skills in one sport are transferable to the other sport in a way that would help a player excel.
Mays was, by all accounts, the best high school football player in Alabama in his day. Also a top basketball player. Different times, less specialization. But a very few athletes can excel at multiple sports.
I'd guess that the greatest athletes can probably get by in other sports. Mays was probably a bad example, although I'd point to all the state players of the year that end up college washouts, not to mention the NFL. And I'd guess that Joe Montana could have been a decent minor league pitcher, at minimum. Hitting is such an unusual skill that athleticism probably doesn't translate very well.
And certainly very very few offensive linemen could sniff an NBA court or minor league field (not to mention NHL ice) BUT very, very few of the pros in those other sports could do what an offensive lineman does, either.
...which makes me think that if you took any super-athletic NBA player who wasn't afraid to get hit, you'd have a reasonable chance to find a star wide receiver. Dwight Howard would be an absolute freak as a tight end. Antonio Gates and Tony Gonzalez were good college power forwards, so I guess the power forward-tight end idea is nothing new.
Imagine Michael Jordan going up to catch a "jump ball" against a 6'1" cornerback. Good luck stopping that.
People say this as if it is a failure. Hitting .202 in AA without having played baseball in years is stupendously impressive. Who's the best athlete in the majors right now? I bet he couldn't perform at that level in, say, the Turkish pro basketball league.
Putting an inexperienced baseball player directly into AA is cruel. Those guys have survived several weeding out processes and WERE PLAYING BASEBALL while doing so. I played Division 1 college baseball and if you threw me into AA at age 31, I'd not have hit .100.
Deion Sanders probably prolonged his amazing NFL career by playing part-time, but he did so while being a fairly mediocre MLB player. Not that he would have been an MLB star if he'd specialized in baseball, but not even the Neon One could do it all. You have to choose, it seems. I imagine Jordan could have had an OK pro baseball career if he'd given up basketball, though that would seem like Matisse giving up painting to sing in cafés ...
Edit: As Double-Spin says :)
And, of course, there is Gordie Howe, who scored 15 goals during the season he turned 52 years old.
Baseball, meanwhile, is hard because the very skills needed for success are hard- the only thing harder than throwing a pitch for a strike is hitting said pitch, especially if it's going 95+ MPH or is cutting like a knife.
And this was without him spending that much time learning pitch recognition, how to read catcher and steal bases, or how to field. It's possible Sanders never had the tools to draw walks and produce a ton of runs at the plate, but a Hall of Fame cornerback should have been a plus center fielder with a big pile of SBs. I think a hypothetical Sanders who commits to baseball in college makes at least three All-Star games.
I believe Allen Iverson was the same in Virginia- but as a junior. He was also a standout chair-thrower IIRC, but I don't think you get Letters for that.
Well, relatively more human-sized, maybe.
I'm 5'9", 200# - there are still sometimes RBs and defensive backs my size, but no linemen in 80 or so years.
Are you saying you wear the uniform of the Swedish bikini team? Picture evidence NOT necessary.
Neither Greg Maddux nor Orel Hershiser has ever cashed in a World Series of Poker event. Clearly poker is way harder than baseball.
Not so fast, before 2001 there was much less vetting of athletes birth certificates than there is now.
Pretty sure Gordie was at least 57...
How soon they forget.
Yeah, well, call me when Johnny Chan even makes it to a world curling championship.
That is an awesome fact.
I knew he had done it at least once, but Wikipedia said 12, so I went with it.
Bob Knight was intending to endow a scholarship for that at Indiana, but he ran into controversy.
Chris Weinke says hello.
Paging Mike Piazza, Mike Piazza to line 1.
And Kazuhito Tadano.
He had been retired for five years. Warren Moon and Vinny Testaverde also started games when they were 44.
This here is Bob Fitzsimmons. The photo has been cropped to omit his enormous balls. Fitz came to America from New Zealand and won the middleweight championship of the world in 1891. He was 27 years old. 6 years later at 33, he moved up in weight and KO'd Gentleman Jim Corbett to win the heavyweight title, still barely above the middleweight limit at 167 lb. The in 1903 at the advanced age of 41, ol' Fitz took the measure of George Gardner and brought home the light-heavyweight strap. His next fight in 1904 saw Fitz score a KO over boxing HOF'er Jack O'Brien before age and ring wear finally caught up with him. Middleweight champ, lightheavyweight champ, and heavyweight champ - it took almost 100 years for Roy Jones Jr to equal Speckled Bob's remarkable feat.
How about Archie Moore, who held the light-heavyweight title into his mid-40s? And I'm guessing some of you kids may have heard of this guy.
There were also jokes about his wanting to hang on long enough to play on the same team as his grandson.
Am I just completely misremembering this, or can oldtime hockey fans here confirm it?
``Dearest Edna, I must leave you. Why I cannot
say. Where I am going you cannot know. How I will get there I haven't
decided yet. But one thing I can tell you, any time I hear the wind
blow it will whisper the name... Edna. And so let us part with a love that
will echo through the ages.
That Woodrow was one smooth operator.
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