As a failed baseball player… there’s absolutely no way to barrel a swing so accurately you could hit another ball out of the air without an impressive amount of skill and incredible luck.
If the barrel is off by a millimeter, the ball will have a vastly different trajectory going in a completely different direction once it gets half way to the pitching mound.
And the harder you swing (which he was swinging a decent single) the less and less your accuracy goes. We worship guys like Ichiro and Edgar Martinez because they had godlike abilities in terms of accurately hitting a ball in a gap that’s pretty damn wide going from center field to left or right field. Why? Because being able to aim your shots like that even in that big of a target (waaaaaay bigger than another ball) is impressively difficult.
While what you are saying is true, you are removing the fact that hitting a pitch has a lot more variables introduced and less control than hitting a tee ball.
That’s my point. This is almost as impressive as hitting Rivera’s extremely unpredictable cutter with such accuracy you can put it in a gap. I say almost cause you don’t know what pitch is coming, where it’s landing and coming at you much faster. But the target here is so much smaller even on a lobbed pitch right down the middle that’s still nuts. Now if you told me they’ve been recording this video and trying multiple times for days trying to get this shot I’m less impressed. But it seemed like it didn’t take that many tries.
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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.