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HarrySanderson t1_ixf086u wrote

Reply to comment by throwtheclownaway20 in Olivia Pichardo is the first woman to make the roster of Division I baseball team by AmethystOrator

No, it's because men are better at sports?

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nowhereman136 t1_ixf2ddm wrote

On average yes, but averages don't mean much to the individual. I'm not automatically better than a female baseball player because I'm a man. She can throw farther, run faster, and hit harder than I can, even though she's a woman.

She may be so good, that she is better than the worst player on the team. If that's the case, than She deserves to be on the roster more than that guy, regardless of gender. I'm not saying the teams need to be 50/50 male/female, just to have the best players possible, regardless of gender.

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jl_theprofessor t1_ixf3w6y wrote

Women aren't banned from playing in the MLB. They don't because they are, on average, physically not as capable as men.

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Bayoris t1_ixh06z8 wrote

They were banned for 40 years until 1992. There was at least one woman playing AA ball prior to that ban. It’s possible a woman might have advanced to AAA or even the big leagues had they been given a chance. It’s true that they are on average less physically capable than men. But there are physically exceptional women. I could see a female pitcher possibly doing well by virtue of the fact that the men are not used to her style of delivery. For the same reason knuckleballers sometimes do well even though they throw slowly.

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Rob_Drinkovich t1_ixf2ysd wrote

But professional baseball players aren’t average men either, they are the the most elite of the elite. An elite female baseball player is much better than me, but could they compete with the elite males? Idk, if they could they would probably be on a team because owners only care about making money and an all star female player would make them a lot of it.

Sounds like this girl is as good as if not better than a lot of the D1 guys but that’s still not MLB level.

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Arete108 t1_ixg4we0 wrote

But what makes a great athlete varies by sport. For example, David Epstein in The Sports Gene had a whole chapter about how great MLB players have just freakishly good visual acuity. Like if the normal rate of 20/5 vision is I dunno 1 in 5,000 normally it's way more common in MLB, and that allows players to hit the ball better. So that's a skill that really doesn't have to do with increased upper body strength, it's visual acuity + brain software.

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camyok t1_ixh8tbk wrote

The thing is, even college sports are already operating at a level significantly above average compared to the general population, there simply won't be a lot of overlap between men's top 1 percent and women's top 1 percent.

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merlin401 t1_ixfkwdb wrote

That is irrelevant. Think of peak physical athletic ability has a normal curve distribution. The one for men is shifted significantly up from that of womens curve. There’s TONS of overlap but the only professional athletes are in the extreme extreme outlier of that curve. The top .001% men outliers are always going to be shifted further ahead of the women outliers on the their curve.

Also the original comment saying “men are better” at sports is kind of disingenuous. Physically there’s just no comparison. A smaller woman (or man for that matter) can be incredibly skilled and tactically sound but the physical limitation just makes it impossible to compete with a larger stronger faster human, even if that person is a worse student of the game

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Bayoris t1_ixh0o6h wrote

If baseball was a pure test of strength then women would not be able to compete. 100%. But it isn’t. Baseball pitchers rely on unpredictability. If you can throw a sinker or a knuckleball or a curveball then you don’t need a fastball.

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merlin401 t1_ixujoid wrote

I did say in another comment that maybe the one chance there is is for a woman to make it as a specialized pitcher known exclusively for a trick pitch (of which a knuckleball would be a good example). Sinker is not (which is essentially a fastball btw) and curve is not because traditional breaking pitches rely heavily on a complimentary fastball to set them up. Fastballs are essential to keeping people from sitting on the predictable motion of your breaking pitches and keeping people off balance. Knuckleballs are distinct because they have no predictable motion. But knuckleballs are super hard to throw: look how many men can master them, almost none.

Also pitchers are in a different way the worst example to pick. Pitchers have the highest rate of injury and catastrophic injury of any position in all of sports due to how much stress every pitchers puts on their elbow and shoulder. Knuckleballs may look easy on the body, but throwing pitches from 60 feet away on an elevated mound is hard and these pitches are included (they only look easy since we are used to seeing pitchers throw 90+ which virtually no one you or I know could even accomplish on flat ground, man or especially woman!

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MikeGolfsPoorly t1_ixi3fqz wrote

Which is why the only people drafted to be hockey goalies are sumo wrestlers. They're larger and stronger than most people, so even though they are worse students of the game, they obviously have no physical comparison, and it's impossible for anyone else to compete.

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merlin401 t1_ixuirut wrote

I mean this is such a stupid comment. Obviously, as you know, hockey goalies need massive amounts of agility and quickness that a sumo wrestler would not have, which is why teams aren’t stupid and this doesn’t happen. Similarly teams aren’t stupid and it’s why men are virtually exclusively drafted into mens sports even though anyone is free to be drafted

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MikeGolfsPoorly t1_ixwbdye wrote

> A smaller woman (or man for that matter) can be incredibly skilled and tactically sound but the physical limitation just makes it impossible to compete with a larger stronger faster human, even if that person is a worse student of the game

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Arete108 t1_ixg5522 wrote

Not necessarily. There was talk of Cheryl Miller as a potential NBA player before her health ruled that out.

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HarrySanderson t1_ixggklc wrote

That is absolutely ridiculous.. you are living in a total fantasy land if you think there is even a shred of a slither of a slice of truth to that

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