Unless this is a compilation of the close shots, with dozens more clips that were totally off. Which I think is likely given how every close shot elicits a reaction from the batter.
Iirc, I was following their attempts on Instagram, and this took more than one night.
They also have a series where they’re hitting a ball off a tee, then a player in the outfield hits it back to them, and they catch it. They kept adding an additional hit in between, to the point it was taking them hours to complete.
A skilled hitter (not necessarily pro, just good, maybe somebody who played competitively in school) can swing at pitches and have quite a bit of control over the trajectory of the hits. A skilled hitter can deliberately hit line drives, pop flies, control left and right, etc. all with quite a bit of repeatability. And this is when we're talking about hitting a pitch. This is a teed ball so it just sits there stationary, eliminating a whole bunch of variables the batter doesn't need to account for. So it's moderately impressive to have enough control to deliberately aim at a moving target, but it's not "next fucking level" impressive. It's, "clearly this guy has swung a bat a lot of times" impressive. So I imagine the hits shown in this clip are obviously cherry picked as the close ones, but I bet there's not as many takes in between these clips as most people think either. I bet they pulled this off in less than 100 total tries.
Sounds about right. Thanks for the thoughts on this silly topic. Good old reddit. I can be mostly sarcastic about a light hearted post and people get riled up. And on the other end I can say super serious shit in another sub and people laugh.
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u/Repulsive-Block9938 17h ago
Even the misses are impressive to have that control of direction