Why does baseball demand so much more training than other sports?
It’s always struck me as odd: the whole minor-league system for professional baseball, compared to the developmental systems of other American sports. Football, you’d think, would need to offer a young player time to learn their team’s system, to grow much stronger, even to mature a little to stay out of trouble during the week (when the average day ends at 3:30pm). But by and large college football players are drafted as 21- or 22-year-olds and play in the NFL the next fall.
Yet baseball, drafting players at that same age, puts them in the minor leagues for years, spending enormous sums to train hundreds of young men, most of whom teams know with statistical certainty will never make it to the major leagues.
Are there tons more pro-level baseball players than football players? Is baseball harder to learn, even for someone who has played it for, say, fifteen years?
I don’t think so.
The only explanation that half-satisfies me is that drafting baseball players is much more of a crapshoot. For some reason, a college player who can hit a 90 m.p.h. fastball isn’t certain to hit a 95 m.p.h. fastball as a professional, and the whole system has to compensate for that failure rate; conversely, in football, a college wide-receiver who runs the 40-yard dash in 4.5 seconds will do so as a pro. Therefore baseball teams draft—have to draft—as many players as they (and the minor league system as a whole) can support.
But I say only “half-satisfies” because the crapshoot argument doesn’t explain why more training is needed. Why can’t the country’s best college pitcher as of June start for a major league team the following April when year in and year out, the country’s best college quarterbacks get drafted and command offenses in the NFL the next season.
So what is it about baseball?
