They got skillz....

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen. The Godfather of sports is back. Me and JP are in the midst of a heated debate in reference to my ideas for a baseball skills competition. I'll let you read below and respond accordingly. Let us know how you feel.

JP:

F I wrote a whole thing and my browser went nuts and lost it. I'll recap.

First I never said the NBA skills competition sucked. It's the best out of all of them, and receives by far the most media hype. The NFL does a skills thing, it's fairly dumb as they are all super athletes, fighting stand still dummies shows nothing. Fighting against Orlando Pace is a skill, anyone can swim move a padded dummy.

A) Hitting the hockey targets was cool to see once. They can all do it, all 4 targets get broken. Whoopiee do. It would be the same for pitchers. They can all hit targets with no pressure on them. It's part of weekly practice.... yipeeeee.

B) You can watch purpose hitting any day during normal BP. Players go oppo, move the runner over, bunt, pull balls, sac fly, home run. They practice a similar sequence everyday. The challenge is doing it with people throwing 95 mph heaters and 87mph sliders. That's why they are in the bigs...you get to see the true skills during games. Doing it with a 50 year old BP pitcher throwing 78 down the middle would get old in about 5minutes.

C) Speed challenges are dangerous to the speed guys, many of them (Like Jose) would be very likely to pull a hamstring or calf muscle (pulling a calf is hard, but jose does it every night). It would be just as effective for the teams to post all these times for you to read over since they do this crap in tryouts.

In short a skills challenge is a spring training practice. This may be exciting for a few minutes to people who don't know, but I couldnt careless.


The Godfather:

A. you played college baseball. which is awesome yet somewhere in between highschool and the pros. so honestly u fall somewhere inbetween John Massaro and Tim Lincecum which means although you and your team did these things in practice....no one would care. we wanna see the best of the best do it.... in front of national tv. with a time limit. if u disagree it could be cool i will gladly set up 4 targets the size of a baseball. pull out a stop watch and see how fast you can hit all 4. If hitting the bottom outside corner is so easy then why can't some major league players do it every time. its called missing location. it happens. didn't know u hit the spots every time. cool.

B. Purpose hitting has nothing to do it. a huge target in the outfield gaps is hardly purpose hitting. if u asked me to poke a 75 mph pitch to right field i could do it 5 out of 10 times. but hitting a line drive right in the gap at a target or maybe aiming specifically for certain targets that give u more points would be cool and would really test these guys. hitting opposite field : easy .... Being down 300 points in a competition and having 2 pitches to hit the right field wall with a line drive which is worth 350 points? exciting. sorry.

C. running around the bases 1 time and sprinting to 1st is no different then playing in the allstar game and trying to beat out a hit or stealing a base. Just because baseball players get hurt doesn't mean they wouldn't want to test there skills. they wouldn't have to do it. they'd have an option.

my point is the allstar game is boring. skills competitions are fun for the general public. honestly your reasoning had nothing to do with my ideas. you simplified everything. 99.9 percent of fans never played college baseball so these things would be fun to watch. end of story. not sure why you would even argue against that for no reason at all. do u just try to play devils advocate for everything?



Let us know your feelings on a skills challenge to go along with the home run derby. Lets get people to know and respect men like Freddy Sanchez.