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This is what the grinders tell themselves. They still get beaten regularly (not all the time) by those with superior native talent. Those people don't focus as

This is what the grinders tell themselves. They still get beaten regularly (not all the time) by those with superior native talent. Those people don't focus as you suggest, and they still win. The NFL MVP last year could certainly have been an MLB MVP, had he chosen to go that way. When he quit college baseball, he was told by pro baseball players (e.g. A-Rod) that he was "wasting his baseball talent". Patrick Mahomes was born with a lot of native talent, so his time spent playing baseball didn't hurt him... It's fine to play sports, but only so long as it's fun. If it ain't fun, you don't have enough native talent for it, and you're wasting your time. (This isn't the case for other competitions that don't attract so many competitors. In those cases, sure, grind if you want.)

deleted 7y ago
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elgenie 7y ago
Mahomes was a third/fourth round draft type out of high school and the MLB draft is a loooong way away from even making it for a single day in the majors. Claiming that he could “certainly” be an MLB MVP is ludicrous.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  The baseball draft is somewhat clueless; that's why they have 40 rounds rather than two or seven like a sport that has any idea at all about who's going to succeed. Yeah there were probably about a hundred guys standing in line in front of Mahomes for eventual MVP status. (He sort of jumped the line on the football side, winning in the first year he started.) Still, that's a lot closer than thousands of baseball grinders will ever get. He certainly had a chance. Reading is fundamental.
  - elgenie 7y ago
    If "certainly had a chance" means "played baseball and was an OK prospect", sure, but then you're not saying much of anything. The truth is that it's a lot closer to five thousand guys, a shoulder, and an elbow between a third/fourth round high school pitcher and an "eventual MVP". Take a look at the third rounds of 2010 [1], 2011 [2], 2012 [3] drafts, which are fairly representative: only ~40% have made the majors at all, and there's one All-Star reliever (zero chance at MVP) and one reserve All-Star catcher (with zero MVP votes in his career) of the lot. There are 750 active MLBers at any one time and the odds are 60-40 against a third/fourth round high school pitcher, the riskiest kind of prospect, joining them. And of the 58 league MVPs awarded since 1990, exactly three have gone to pitchers. [1] https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year_ID=2010&draft_type=junreg&query_type=year_round https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year... [2] https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year_ID=2011draft_type=junreg&query_type=year_round https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year... [3] https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year_ID=2012&draft_type=junreg&query_type=year_round https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year...
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      Only 2/3 of first rounders make the majors, and there are political reasons to give them a chance, so it's not obvious that 40% means anything. You're the one who decided he'd be a "third/fourth" rounder anyway. He was a 37th rounder out of high school because he had already declared for college. You keep calling him a high school prospect, but if he had played four years in college that's not what he would have been. Also his father was in the majors for a decade. Numerous major league players thought he was talented enough for the majors. If you're telling me that MVP voting is set up to exclude pitchers, fine, he wouldn't have been an MVP. That seems rather far from the point, which was "athletic talent exists and dominates specialized practice". He did play baseball through his sophomore year of college, and he did wait to specialize on football until his junior year.
      - elgenie 7y ago
        The scouting consensus is that he'd be a third/fourth rounder out of high school absent football [1]. That's being rather more charitable to his prospect stock than it probably deserves, considering he barely played in college as a freshman on a mediocre team (0 outs recorded, 2 walks, 1 HBP; 0-2 as a hitter [2]) and then didn't accumulate any stats as a sophomore before quitting. [1] https://www.kansascity.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/sam-mellinger/article192126014.html https://www.kansascity.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/sam-mell... [2] http://www.big12sports.com/fls/10410/ http://www.big12sports.com/fls/10410/
        jessaustin 7y ago
        Great link! “We’d be pretty similar pitchers now,” said Michael Kopech, a high school rival of Mahomes’ and now baseball’s No. 10 prospect according to MLB.com. “He was just a bulldog. To be honest, I think anyone who ever played with or against Patrick would’ve assumed he would’ve been a pro in any sport he played.” Again, native talent not specialized practice. Or you could go with the example in TFA, Kobe Bryant who played more soccer than basketball until his junior year of high school. He still had some basketball success!
  - slg 7y ago
    >The baseball draft is somewhat clueless; that's why they have 40 rounds rather than two or seven like a sport that has any idea at all about who's going to succeed. That is just factually wrong. The MLB draft has 40 rounds because there are over 5 thousand players in professional baseball which is more than double the NFL and more than 10 times the NBA. Athletic skill traditionally follows a normal distribution which means the similarity in players' skill levels converges the deeper you go into the bell curve. The result is there is generally a smaller gap in talent between the 500th and the 1000th player selected than their is between the 1st and 100th player selected. If Mahomes had the skill of a 3rd rounder, there were way more than a 100 guys in front of him for an eventual MVP. Here [1] is an article looking at the value of MLB draft picks that supports my point. [1] - https://blogs.fangraphs.com/an-update-on-how-to-value-draft-picks/ https://blogs.fangraphs.com/an-update-on-how-to-value-draft-...
    - elgenie 7y ago
      To be fair, (part of) the reason that affiliated baseball has 5000 players is the same as reason that the MLB draft has 40 rounds: the gap between high school / college baseball and MLB is incredibly greater than the one between college basketball and the NBA. Power law phenomena in known skills at the long tail of a normal distribution are a red herring in this case; the much much bigger factor is uncertainty about the probability of developing skills years later (can a pitcher add a breaking ball that complements his fastball? will a hitter be able to track MLB curveballs thrown faster than 95% of the fastballs he's seen?). Draft position and prospect status are based on imperfect guesses at the shape of the very very very wide distribution of potential outcomes for an individual player with very little data to go on. The MLB draft is what what the NBA draft would be if they had to select 9th graders based on their performance at HORSE with a kickball on a 9 foot rim and a dunk contest on an 8 foot rim.
      - slg 7y ago
        I would argue the difference between amateur and the top level professional baseball is so much wider than other sports just due to happenstance. MLB is older than the NCAA while the NBA and NFL are both younger than the NCAA. Therefore MLB needed to build up its own developmental leagues while the newer professional sports could rely on their college equivalents. Today almost every American born player in the NBA or NFL played in college while a whole lot of their MLB counterparts were drafted out of high school. That isn't due to some inherent difference in each sport or the ability of people to project forward a player's skill. It just the way the leagues happen to be setup. All that said, you are certainly right that a projection of a player's skill is inherently more difficult to make the earlier that prediction must be made.
sandworm101 7y ago
Ya, I do not believe in an elite group with "native" talent granting them superiority. That might make you the best person in your home town but means nothing on the national level. By the time you are looking at nationals, all the non-talent people have been filtered out. Everyone now has the correct body type. They all have near-perfect reflexes. There is also no grinding. The guy who wins nationals doesn't do so because he tried harder than the guy in second place. Everyone is trying as hard as is humanly possible, to the point that trying any harder means inevitable injury. What matters is strategic training, good coaching, and access to resources. Want to be a good swimmer? Join a club and try hard. Want to be the best swimmer in your city? Get a private coach and a 50 meter lane all to yourself every afternoon. Want to win a medal? Be rich. Live across the street from the 50m pool, have control over that pool's water temperature, have 24/7 access to a full gym, a dietitian, and a sports medicine doctor who won't make you sit in a waiting room.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  You don't have to believe it for it to be true. Maybe swimming is an outlier, though I kind of doubt it. TFA is about basketball. It's obvious that a 7' athletic guy with good coordination will be a better basketball player the first time he touches a basketball than a slow 5'5" dude with poor balance would be after ten years of grinding. The long tail dominates competition. All elite swimmers look the same to you, so we can safely conclude that you are neither an elite swimmer nor an elite swimming coach. You seem to think it's possible to buy one's way into swimming dominance. It's not. Michael Phelps didn't win 23 gold medals by being rich and getting better coaching than all the competitors in 23 different Olympic fields. He is the child of a teacher and a cop (divorced), who held a national record by the age of 10, having learned to swim at age 7. He is a supremely talented swimmer.
  - tsimionescu 7y ago
    Sure, Michael Phelps is extremely talented and physically fit. But do you think he could be an excellent marathonist as well? Or that he could become an excellent sprinter without training for sprinting every single day and (re-) dedicating his life to this? The GP post indicated was mentioning not that raw talent is unimportant, but that it is assumed at the top level. All of Phelps' competitors are extremely talented swimmers. Training and diet and dedication in general are also extremely important, and the final difference may well end up being there (assuming you have enough raw talent). Of course, it is also important to remember the incredible amount of medical technology thrown at these competitors, and the difference that things like clothing can make even for swimming.
philwelch 7y ago
Maybe he should be a latter day Bo Jackson or Deion Sanders and give it a try?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

elgenie 7y ago

Mahomes was a third/fourth round draft type out of high school and the MLB draft is a loooong way away from even making it for a single day in the majors. Claiming that he could “certainly” be an MLB MVP is ludicrous.

jessaustin 7y ago
The baseball draft is somewhat clueless; that's why they have 40 rounds rather than two or seven like a sport that has any idea at all about who's going to succeed. Yeah there were probably about a hundred guys standing in line in front of Mahomes for eventual MVP status. (He sort of jumped the line on the football side, winning in the first year he started.) Still, that's a lot closer than thousands of baseball grinders will ever get. He certainly had a chance. Reading is fundamental.
- elgenie 7y ago
  If "certainly had a chance" means "played baseball and was an OK prospect", sure, but then you're not saying much of anything. The truth is that it's a lot closer to five thousand guys, a shoulder, and an elbow between a third/fourth round high school pitcher and an "eventual MVP". Take a look at the third rounds of 2010 [1], 2011 [2], 2012 [3] drafts, which are fairly representative: only ~40% have made the majors at all, and there's one All-Star reliever (zero chance at MVP) and one reserve All-Star catcher (with zero MVP votes in his career) of the lot. There are 750 active MLBers at any one time and the odds are 60-40 against a third/fourth round high school pitcher, the riskiest kind of prospect, joining them. And of the 58 league MVPs awarded since 1990, exactly three have gone to pitchers. [1] https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year_ID=2010&draft_type=junreg&query_type=year_round https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year... [2] https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year_ID=2011draft_type=junreg&query_type=year_round https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year... [3] https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year_ID=2012&draft_type=junreg&query_type=year_round https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year...
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    Only 2/3 of first rounders make the majors, and there are political reasons to give them a chance, so it's not obvious that 40% means anything. You're the one who decided he'd be a "third/fourth" rounder anyway. He was a 37th rounder out of high school because he had already declared for college. You keep calling him a high school prospect, but if he had played four years in college that's not what he would have been. Also his father was in the majors for a decade. Numerous major league players thought he was talented enough for the majors. If you're telling me that MVP voting is set up to exclude pitchers, fine, he wouldn't have been an MVP. That seems rather far from the point, which was "athletic talent exists and dominates specialized practice". He did play baseball through his sophomore year of college, and he did wait to specialize on football until his junior year.
    - elgenie 7y ago
      The scouting consensus is that he'd be a third/fourth rounder out of high school absent football [1]. That's being rather more charitable to his prospect stock than it probably deserves, considering he barely played in college as a freshman on a mediocre team (0 outs recorded, 2 walks, 1 HBP; 0-2 as a hitter [2]) and then didn't accumulate any stats as a sophomore before quitting. [1] https://www.kansascity.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/sam-mellinger/article192126014.html https://www.kansascity.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/sam-mell... [2] http://www.big12sports.com/fls/10410/ http://www.big12sports.com/fls/10410/
      - jessaustin 7y ago
        Great link! “We’d be pretty similar pitchers now,” said Michael Kopech, a high school rival of Mahomes’ and now baseball’s No. 10 prospect according to MLB.com. “He was just a bulldog. To be honest, I think anyone who ever played with or against Patrick would’ve assumed he would’ve been a pro in any sport he played.” Again, native talent not specialized practice. Or you could go with the example in TFA, Kobe Bryant who played more soccer than basketball until his junior year of high school. He still had some basketball success!
- slg 7y ago
  >The baseball draft is somewhat clueless; that's why they have 40 rounds rather than two or seven like a sport that has any idea at all about who's going to succeed. That is just factually wrong. The MLB draft has 40 rounds because there are over 5 thousand players in professional baseball which is more than double the NFL and more than 10 times the NBA. Athletic skill traditionally follows a normal distribution which means the similarity in players' skill levels converges the deeper you go into the bell curve. The result is there is generally a smaller gap in talent between the 500th and the 1000th player selected than their is between the 1st and 100th player selected. If Mahomes had the skill of a 3rd rounder, there were way more than a 100 guys in front of him for an eventual MVP. Here [1] is an article looking at the value of MLB draft picks that supports my point. [1] - https://blogs.fangraphs.com/an-update-on-how-to-value-draft-picks/ https://blogs.fangraphs.com/an-update-on-how-to-value-draft-...
  - elgenie 7y ago
    To be fair, (part of) the reason that affiliated baseball has 5000 players is the same as reason that the MLB draft has 40 rounds: the gap between high school / college baseball and MLB is incredibly greater than the one between college basketball and the NBA. Power law phenomena in known skills at the long tail of a normal distribution are a red herring in this case; the much much bigger factor is uncertainty about the probability of developing skills years later (can a pitcher add a breaking ball that complements his fastball? will a hitter be able to track MLB curveballs thrown faster than 95% of the fastballs he's seen?). Draft position and prospect status are based on imperfect guesses at the shape of the very very very wide distribution of potential outcomes for an individual player with very little data to go on. The MLB draft is what what the NBA draft would be if they had to select 9th graders based on their performance at HORSE with a kickball on a 9 foot rim and a dunk contest on an 8 foot rim.
    - slg 7y ago
      I would argue the difference between amateur and the top level professional baseball is so much wider than other sports just due to happenstance. MLB is older than the NCAA while the NBA and NFL are both younger than the NCAA. Therefore MLB needed to build up its own developmental leagues while the newer professional sports could rely on their college equivalents. Today almost every American born player in the NBA or NFL played in college while a whole lot of their MLB counterparts were drafted out of high school. That isn't due to some inherent difference in each sport or the ability of people to project forward a player's skill. It just the way the leagues happen to be setup. All that said, you are certainly right that a projection of a player's skill is inherently more difficult to make the earlier that prediction must be made.

sandworm101 7y ago

Ya, I do not believe in an elite group with "native" talent granting them superiority. That might make you the best person in your home town but means nothing on the national level. By the time you are looking at nationals, all the non-talent people have been filtered out. Everyone now has the correct body type. They all have near-perfect reflexes. There is also no grinding. The guy who wins nationals doesn't do so because he tried harder than the guy in second place. Everyone is trying as hard as is humanly possible, to the point that trying any harder means inevitable injury. What matters is strategic training, good coaching, and access to resources. Want to be a good swimmer? Join a club and try hard. Want to be the best swimmer in your city? Get a private coach and a 50 meter lane all to yourself every afternoon. Want to win a medal? Be rich. Live across the street from the 50m pool, have control over that pool's water temperature, have 24/7 access to a full gym, a dietitian, and a sports medicine doctor who won't make you sit in a waiting room.

jessaustin 7y ago
You don't have to believe it for it to be true. Maybe swimming is an outlier, though I kind of doubt it. TFA is about basketball. It's obvious that a 7' athletic guy with good coordination will be a better basketball player the first time he touches a basketball than a slow 5'5" dude with poor balance would be after ten years of grinding. The long tail dominates competition. All elite swimmers look the same to you, so we can safely conclude that you are neither an elite swimmer nor an elite swimming coach. You seem to think it's possible to buy one's way into swimming dominance. It's not. Michael Phelps didn't win 23 gold medals by being rich and getting better coaching than all the competitors in 23 different Olympic fields. He is the child of a teacher and a cop (divorced), who held a national record by the age of 10, having learned to swim at age 7. He is a supremely talented swimmer.
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  Sure, Michael Phelps is extremely talented and physically fit. But do you think he could be an excellent marathonist as well? Or that he could become an excellent sprinter without training for sprinting every single day and (re-) dedicating his life to this? The GP post indicated was mentioning not that raw talent is unimportant, but that it is assumed at the top level. All of Phelps' competitors are extremely talented swimmers. Training and diet and dedication in general are also extremely important, and the final difference may well end up being there (assuming you have enough raw talent). Of course, it is also important to remember the incredible amount of medical technology thrown at these competitors, and the difference that things like clothing can make even for swimming.

philwelch 7y ago

Maybe he should be a latter day Bo Jackson or Deion Sanders and give it a try?