Argumentative Essay: Baseball For Life

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Hear the crack of the bat as the 96 mph ball makes contact with the stick of wood, the game known as America’s pastime.The stands fill with people of all ages and genders, to watch and snack on ballpark food and experience the love for the game. Baseball, a game of 4 bases, 3 outs, 2 teams, and one successor - but the outcomes are unlimited. A sport either loved to be played or loved to watch, but for many it’s a game with which one grew up with and a strong love was formed. However, there’s always a limit, an extent to how much love and passion one has for the game - how hard you work to play the game for as long as you can, in hopes you make it to the pro league. Many think that the hard work, the dedication, and the talent of a player is …show more content…
It can be argued that one must possess the skills of strength and speed to compete against the highest level of competition and play in the pro leagues. Considering this, children as young as twelve years old devote their lives to playing baseball in hopes that they can play for as long as possible, the ultimate goal is playing in the pro leagues. Sara Corbett explains the lives of these extraordinary little leaguers in her article “Baseball for Life” as she write, “Yet he suggests that it's simply a traditional model of athletic development — in which promising kids are basically isolated from "normal" childhood in order to refine their physical gifts — applied to a new game.” Corbett is trying to portray that these children spend countless hours and make sacrifices for their love of the game and hope to get scouted into higher ranked teams. More importantly, to attract the attention of big name teams and coaches, the player must be able to produce the high quality statistics. Primarily, strength, speed, height are often the first things to be noticed by scouts and attract attention - giving the player a greater chance to continue on in their baseball career. Michael Lewis, author of “The No-Stats All Star” claims, “The virus that infected professional baseball in the 1990s, the use of statistics to find new and better ways to value players” That is, the more talented a player is in the game along the lines of fielding, hitting and baserunning, the more valuable they are to the team’s success. The physical game is more important because it is very rare that low statistics win games, talent is needed to play because without high statistics, a player is less likely to

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