Well, January is a slow month for baseball blogging - no pitchers and catchers reporting yet. But watching cricket made me think - what if you had Pedro levels of talent but grew up in a place (like Singapore) where bat-and-ball games just weren’t very popular? Pedro doesn’t necessarily look like the most athletic of guys. For that matter, there’s lots of pitchers on the other side of the bulk scale - we’re looking at you, David Wells. I can see how someone who was a cricket god in Australia might have grown up to be a baseball superstar had he been born Stateside, but absent of bat-and-ball sports it seems honestly like some good, even great, baseball players would not be able to transfer their skills to another sport or another athletic contest.
So what if you had a lot of innate talent in these sports, but just never had the chance to excel in them due to where you grew up? Would that just be a colossal waste of talent? Or is that the wrong way to think about the question of fungibility of athletic ability?
Thanks to USA Today and Universal Hub for their shout-outs, by the way.