Before his team’s highly-anticipated matchup against Colorado State University, Deion Sanders, the University of Colorado’s head football coach, was asked what was the most challenging part of his athletic career. His answer? Hitting a baseball.
Sanders is the only athlete to compete in both the Super Bowl and the World Series. After playing both sports at Florida State University, he was selected fifth overall in the 1989 NFL Draft by the Atlanta Falcons.
However, before playing in his first professional football game, Sanders signed with the New York Yankees in the spring of 1989. He soon became the only athlete ever to hit a home run in the MLB and score a touchdown in the NFL in a seven-day period.
While he went on to play in the 1992 World Series with the Atlanta Braves, Sanders’ baseball career was middling compared to his time on the gridiron.
Sanders signed with the San Francisco 49ers after five years with the Falcons, and his career took off. In the 1994-95 season, he tied the franchise single-season record for pick-sixes, won Defensive Player of the Year and led the team to a championship.
Sanders was hired this past offseason as the head coach at CU, a team spiraling after a one-win season in 2022. In his first four weeks as head coach, Sanders has led the Buffaloes to a 3-1.
With all this athletic history in mind, Sanders still picked hitting a baseball as the most challenging aspect of his athletic career, playing and coaching.
He isn’t the only superstar athlete to note the difficulty of hitting a baseball.
In an interview before his team’s game against the Chicago Bears on Sunday, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes said, “Hitting a baseball has got to be one of the toughest things to do in the world.”
In 2014, Mahomes was drafted by the Detroit Tigers but elected to attend college and play football at Texas Tech University. Mahomes excelled as a pitcher in high school but has also gotten pretty good behind center in the NFL.
Mahomes, a two-time Super Bowl champion and two-time NFL MVP, has baseball in his blood, as his father pitched in more than 300 games in the MLB and led the New York Mets to a National League Championship Series appearance in 1999.
After all his success at Texas Tech and Kansas City, Mahomes agreed with Sanders, saying it was most challenging to hit a baseball.
So, why is hitting a baseball so tricky?
First, it is one of the few things in life where you can be successful three out of every ten tries and still be considered very good.
A quarterback cannot be 3/10 on his throws to receivers. A student cannot receive a 30% on any of their exams. If an architect gets 30% of their measurements correct, they probably won’t be an architect for long.
Ted Williams, regarded as one of the greatest — if not the greatest — hitters of all time, finished his career hitting a .344 average, tying for seventh of all time. Even Williams himself admitted hitting a baseball was the hardest thing to do in sports.
With the average velocity of a Major League pitch coming in at over 90 miles per hour, and with the pitcher’s mound only 60.5 feet away, batters have 150 milliseconds first to decide if the pitch is a strike and then swing.
On top of extremely good hand-eye coordination required by the sport, baseball players also must have the ability to decide whether to swing and be able to decipher what pitch is being thrown. Things get tricky when they have to decide in a matter of milliseconds where the ball will be and whether or not to swing at it.
Many athletes have tried their hand at playing baseball and other professional sports. Bo Jackson, Danny Ainge and John Elway played baseball at some point in their professional careers. Elway even told the Indianapolis Colts that he would become a full-time New York Yankee if he wasn’t traded to the Denver Broncos.
However, when the arguably most outstanding athlete of all time is not successful at the plate after winning six NBA championships and five NBA MVPs, it’s pretty clear that hitting a baseball is one of the most challenging things to do in sports.
Michael Jordan, who never reached the MLB, hit a .202 average with three home runs and 114 strikeouts for the Double-A Birmingham Barons, an affiliate of the Chicago White Sox.
While many of history’s greatest athletes, such as Deion Sanders and Bo Jackson, have been successful in multiple sports, for many superstar athletes, hitting a round ball with a rounded bat has been something they struggled to do.
Only a handful of athletes in history have been able to learn the art of hitting in baseball, both for contact and for power, showing the athleticism and dedication a Major League player must have to succeed.
