Mastery gets you close, but it’s ultimately luck that results in the one.
Personal Example: I used to play in several darts leagues - never exceptionally, but good enough - and once ‘Robin-Hooded’ a dart (where one goes into the back of another) in front of some guy who absolutely lost his mind over the “incredible shot”… Fact is, I could sit there for a day with great grouping and just slide off to one side a thousand times before hitting the one perfect throw out of sheer luck… Phil Taylor himself wouldn’t be able to do it with any regularity…
Bonus Fun Fact: you don’t want to Robin-Hood in darts because it a) it ruins the flights and shafts, and b) you only score for the dart if the point is in the board so you get a big ol’ goose-egg for a Robin-Hooded dart…
This guy is obviously very precise, the balls are very close everytime. This is the skilled part, the part that takes practice
But it's also a game of chance. There is no way this guy can get the trick repeatedly multiple times, even after all this practice. If they can, you could call it mastery. Mastery implies repeatability, like a musician can play a difficult pieces with no mistake at every concert, or like a F1 driver can drive 60 laps without crashing.
That's not to day a master can't make a mistake from time to time, even the best racing drivers crash, but if you can do a skill only once in a while it's hard to say you master it.
That’s pretty dumb to say, because by that definition nobody has ever achieved mastery of baseball. Nobody hits home runs every time. In fact nobody even gets a hit more than half the time.
I would argue that you can't master a sport like baseball.
By the first definition of "master" on the Wiktionary, a master is someone who has control over something or someone. Like you said, you don't really control the ball, you just try to hit it and get home runs sometimes.
But I admit it's not that important, it just comes down to the definition you want to use.
My point is that there is a difference between things you can fully control and this trick which still has an element of chance even if you're very good at it.
I think just about everything has an element of chance. I can’t even really think of something that has no chance involved that anyone would say can be “mastered”
Zero musicians can play difficult concert pieces with no mistakes. At a certain point we just stop calling them mistakes and call them nuances of our style.
This isn't practice. This is just doing it over and over again until it works once. If he practiced to be able to do it every or even most of the time, that'd be next level.
He is reproducing the skill of hitting a ball towards a tiny fast moving target with pretty good accuracy. Is Steph curry not a master three point shooter because he misses the majority of the time?
That's different, you're saying he has mastery over batting, I could agree with that to a certain extent. The person I'm responding to wasn't talking about that however, look...
people don’t bother to film all the failed attempts that lead to mastery.
So what I meant is we don't know if the kid in the video mastered the skill, cause it seems this was a one and done thing. Doing something 1 time and then moving on with your life isn't mastery, agree?
Mastery is a subjective measurement and never generally implies consistent guaranteed success. Are you seriously contending that you or I has as much chance of getting a hit if the two of us and this guy went out and tried this right now?
Yeah, OP is utterly disregarding the fact that most of those swings went in the same direction. Many of them came within feet. Some came within inches. (From our perspective)
If there was a post where a baseball player hit the ball and it hit the scoreboard and the number blew up into sparks, it would deservedly be upvoted even though it was a one-time shot and the player had hit thousands of balls in his career... but because this guy is intentionally trying to do something as/more difficult - it isn't impressive.
This isn’t mastery however. Unless he continues to do this until he can consistently hit the pitched ball this is just trial and error until one success.
Was Barry bonds not a master hitter because he made an out most of the time? Is Steph Curry not a master 3 point shooter because he misses most of the time?
4.1k
u/FriendOfDirutti 17h ago
This isn’t next level at all. It’s literally just hitting a ball a bunch of times until you hit the other one.