Sociology of Baseball Players
Sociology of Professional Baseball Players There have always been those kids in high school who are really athletic and just particularly amazing at sports. Many of those kids go on and begin a road to attempt to elevate their game to the level of a professional athlete. Of those that attempt to go pro many will try and enter the world of professional baseball. The path of a Major League Baseball player is long, difficult and more often than not a short lived occurrence. Along the way potential players learn the life of being a professional baseball player from small to big time stages of play. That life includes knowing what is expected of a player’s skills, handling the media, baseball values, and learning how to be a member of the baseball community that a player becomes a part of in their professional lives. Professional baseball players are not just people who enjoy baseball and want to give the sport a whirl as a career; they are people who know the physical conditioning and time consumption that it takes to be good at a sport. The people who enter professional baseball are either eighteen year olds fresh out of high school, college athletes who have been drafted by an organization and players from different countries who have already established themselves in a foreign league. Any way these players get noticed they are expected to have two to three already developed skill tools of baseball with the potential to possibly obtain more. The general baseball skill tools looked for in a professional baseball hopeful are running speed (a necessary skill in any sport), Arm strength (which includes how hard a player can throw and how long they can consistently throw), Hitting for Average (the ability to consistently hit the ball in play), Hitting for Power (how deep a player can drive the ball), Fielding (the ability to catch the ball and know where to go with it). Once a player has been recognized as having the basic essential tools or greater they will be