Things average Americans would say about soccer nowdays.

haha hey bill o'reilly is probably makin mad money off that tactic, maybe it's not such a bad idea to start reachin into his bag of tricks

 

why on earth would you only count shots on target?

Goals, as a % of all shots, work out at just 13%.

The raw stat idea of believing a shot on target equals a better quality shot than one off target is also a particular peeve of mine, but that's a different story.

 

Considering that unless you hit a home run, you have to have multiple hits in order to score .... I'd say quite a few people give an F about it.

That's an entirely different line of discussion than the point that was originally made. This is why you're having difficulty in this discussion and why people are poo pooing everything you say.

Oh, and scoring a Hole in One is much more difficult than netting a goal .....

... it's not that it is a better quality shot, but rather, that a shot on target is the only shot that has a chance of ending in a score.

That, and soccer scoring is pretty liberal when it comes to 'what constitutes a shot' ... or I should say, is rather inconsistent.

 

I'm a ****** for liking girly sports

 

The hardest thing in sport is to win a hot dog eating championship.

Also, I am sure if a 10-year old Messi had been exposed to hot dogs, he would have been a hot dog eating champion now.

 

while true, my point is that it's rather meaningless when used as a statistic to indicate which team has had the better chances and is player better.

A shot that flashes just wide/over is often a better chance than a tame effort that's easy for the keeper.

A team might have six shots on target and five off, but that tells you nothing about how good those chances were. If a very dull game had a penalty put wide by one team, and a speculative 25 yard effort that was easy for the keeper, which team had the better chances?

Unless you are looking at lop-sided stats, and saying the 10 shots to 2 indicates how much one team is on top, they are pretty useless stats as they tell you so little about the game.

 

Nope. Runs can score in innings without hits. Boston scored a run in Spring Training this year on a single by a guy who scored on the play thanks to two errors.

As for the amount of scoring being used to measure how hard it is score, keep in mind that in some sports plays are automatically worth multiple points. A baseball team could score 4 runs on more scoring plays than an American Football team that scored 10 points.

 

I'm struggling to determine what it is you keep saying, is it (1) hitting a home run is the hardest thing in sports (hint: YOU ARE WRONG), or (2) baseball has more useful stats than soccer (hint: YOU ARE RIGHT). Either way, this is a pretty boring discussion.

 

(3) you have no clue what I originally made as the point.

"The hardest thing in sports to do, is hit a baseball" <--- THAT is the actual comment I made ... It's not my fault you and others in this thread have gone way out in left field (no pun intended) and latched on to statements that ya'll have manufactured and then argued against. No wonder the lot of you are confused.

Kind of hard to be wrong about something I'm not even saying ... MerenguePie is the one that manufactured the homerun comment, not me.

A single is a hit, no ?

The conversation was about hits. I never once said that you couldn't score without having multiple hits. I only said that, in of itself, the only way a hit can be the sole producer of a run ... is by home run.

 

Hitting a baseball is the hardest thing in sports??! Do you seriously want to continue this discussion or do you recognize that you basically don't know what you are talking about when you make a statement like that?

 

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/2003-03-02-ten-hardest-hitting-baseball_x.htm#joe

interesting article about it

I'm personally not going to make the claim that hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in all sports (kind of an ambiguous statement to begin with) but it's pretty damn difficult, at least in major professional leagues.

 

Okay, what's more difficult to achieve, hand-eye coordination or foot-eye coordination? Plus, while it's absolutely true about having to hit a 95 mph baseball being 'hard', fact is the starting situation is always the same (i.e. the hitter waits for the pitcher to throw the ball). In soccer there are only four dead-ball situations: the kick-off, a corner, a free-kick and a penalty. I.e. passing a ball might seem relatively simple, doing it during a game is a lot more difficult. Mind you, I'm not saying passing the ball in soccer is 'the hardest thing in sports'.

 

First of all, I didn't originate the comment. I re-stated it in thread.

Second, there's work done by a physicist that backs the claim. Excuse me if I tend to lean towards his findings rather than your opinionated conjecture on the matter, and of myself. Given the two, I'd tend to think you don't know what you're talking about in relation to him. Go back in the thread (last two pages) ... it's there.

Also, a pitch comes from a variety of angles, velocities, start points, and in a multitude of spins/or lack there of that shape the trajectory in all sorts of ways. By no means is the starting point the same. Every pitcher is different.

 

One problem is finding a like-for-like comparison.

After all, hitting a home run is much harder than just hitting the ball, so a statement saying hitting the ball is the hardest thing to do in sports is fundamentally flawed. It's not even the hardest thing to do in baseball.

Many sports aren't play-based so it's much harder to offer a direct success/fail stat for things that happen, unless you count things that are rare events anyway. It's pretty fair to say that scoring a direct free kick from 30 yards is pretty difficult, and probably does have a lower success rate than 30%, but it's not a fundamental part of playing the game.

You pretty much end up narrowing it down to hitting the ball being the hardest thing is sports out of all the things is sports that are multiply-repeated fundamental parts of their game, and have a distinct sucess/failure measure.

 

A single is a hit, and the second sentence of my post was not an example of the first sentence. A hit that is not a home run needs something else to score a run. That something else may or may not be another hit and may or may not occur on the same play.

RichardL had a good post. There are plenty of distances from which a basketball shot has a lower success rate than the average batting average in baseball, but the long basketball shots are not required to succeed.

 

I admit, the entire thing went way further down the road than it was supposed to.

As a simple "clean the slate and move on" statement ... Given the lack of time to process the multiple variables involved in a pitch/swing, you're very pressed to find something in sports that matches hitting a baseball (actually hitting it). Yeah, it's harder to hit a home run than simply hit a ball. It's also harder to intentionally slap a ball in the gap left by the 2nd baseman holding the runner on second ... however in both cases you've got to first, hit the ball. The ball is smaller, moves faster, and moves in many more varying paths than a moving soccer ball does.


I mean hell, my 4yr old boy can dribble, pass, and shoot a soccer ball.


But yeah, given the realm of where this discussion wandered off too I'm not inclined to keep going (unless of course you'd like to continue discussing, as you actually a good person to have discussions with). I mean hell, the other guys were making comments up and then arguing them.

Your second sentence actually leads into what I was saying about the hit itself. A singular hit (that isn't a home run) doesn't produce a run, in of itself. In order for a singular hit to result in a run you need multiple hits (or something else to occur). That was the point.

How though, does that not show that it is hard to score a run with a hit ?

Of course.

Here's a nice little stat:

As of today, the team with the worst FG% in the NBA is Charlotte ... at .417

^ if that were a batting average .... yeah.

 

It's mostly a phraseology problem.

The phrasing is oversimplified and misleading because they mean (whether it's true or not) that it's the hardest basic task. You can go through an entire career without ever hitting a homer (or a bicycle kick, or even a goal) and be perfectly adequate as a player.

Hitting is different. It's a basic task of the game, an endeavor hard enough that if you do it 30% of the time, you're a star, even if you do almost nothing else well, and yet also basic enough that if you can not do it successfully 20% of the time (the so-called 'Mendoza line') nothing else you do can realistically make up for it.

The soccer equivalent, I would think, would be successfully receiving a pass, maintaining possession of the ball, and maybe successfully passing to a teammate. I figure a stat could be drawn up for the first part of that, except it would be a little bit trivial--the success rate would be a whole lot higher. The second, the passing part, OPTA does track, and success rates above 50% are pretty standard. I think it's probably safe to say that the basic receive ball-settle ball-pass ball combo is not as 'difficult' as is hitting a baseball.

 

"The hardest thing in sports to do, is hit a baseball"

Again Simply Wrong.

"Harder thing than that, is putting a soccer ball into the net"

How many successful hit in a baseball game?
How many successful goal in a soccer match?

Yup end of story.

 

How many opportunities for hits are there in a game vs how many opportunities for shots?? Unfortunately while I don't neccesarily agree with the argument being made ur rebuttal is an incomplete one

Also there is more actions that lead up to a goal than a baseball being hit...so my question is are we determining what single action in a sport is the hardest or what in general is the hardest?? Because generating a goal in a soccer game id say overall is much harder than just hitting a baseball, but id say that hitting a baseball ks much harder than shooting a soccer ball

 

I didin't start the argument, but it's at least a better argument.

"shooting a soccer ball" is too general. Just like a pitcher try everything he can to make the batter fail, the defenders try everything they can to make the shooter fail.
You have to create the opportunity itself in soccer which is why it's harder in the first place.

The difference is that in soccer, 1 goal = 1 score.
In baseball, between 1 to a few hit = 1 score.

Not to mention the hitting, scoring itself is also harder in soccer than baseball

 

yeah but at the same time, in baseball u have a bare minimum of three swings (if by some crazy happening u hit a pop fly on the first swing three times and someone catches for an out each time, and the pitcher manages to generate outs on the first three batters every inning). Honestly i don't even know if that's ever happened.

My point is I would imagine that the average amount of scoring opportunities a single soccer player gets to score is FAR lower than the average amount of opportunities a baseball player gets. Which to me says that just because soccer scores are typically lower than baseball doesn't necessarily mean that its easier to hit in baseball and convert it to a run than it is to score on a goal scoring opportunity in soccer.

 

This is too complex of an issue for DCU to understand.

 

And the phrase 'end of story' is itself a red flag. Most of the time it really means 'I like to oversimplify things.'