Making good contact with a round ball and round bat even if you know what’s coming is hard to do. That seems to be the one major thing that all young players have difficulty with. Why? It’s the hardest thing to do in sports. So that’s the reason baseball is a hard game to play.

-Ted Williams

Baseball is a difficult sport to play and to be extremely successful in. By successful, I mean making it to the Major Leagues. I know several guys who have toiled around on farm clubs and around on the independent circuit, but only the truly skilled ball players make it to “the Show.” Even when that happens, only a select few excel at the game at the high level. Breaking it down further, only a few doing extremely well at a specific skill, and that is hitting a baseball.

We as fans like to throw around the words like; “this guy friggin sucks,” because he hasn’t hit a HR in over a month, or in the case of Jason Kendall, a guy who had not hit a HR for an entire season…twice! As we the fans have become more knowledgeable of stats, especially since use of sabermetrics, we have become more critical of baseball players. Even though very few of us can even foul tip a tailing fast 90mph fastball. All the new stats out there have been used to determine a players worth, rather than just the common HR, Runs and RBI stats. These stats are much more useful when trying to build a winning ball club. Kendall at one time could be measured by sabermetrics and would have been deemed one of the more valuable catchers in the game, but it was only for a short time. People almost have forgot about him, as he sits available on most fantasy leagues free agent list. He’s one of those guys that seems to have been around forever now. Does that mean his 2000 hit is not as impressive? Hell no.

Keep in mind how we started this post about hitting a baseball being the hardest thing to do in sports. Jason Kendall now ranks 253rd all-time in hits. But Sparty, 253rd is not something to beat your chest about. Hell yeah it is. Consider that 999 players have at least 1130 hits. I couldn’t find a site that showed me how many players have at least 1000 hits (I’m sure one of you will), but I would be willing to put it somewhere around 1500 ballplayers. Sure, there have been exceptional players that recorded ridiculous hit totals (Pete Rose, Ty Cobb, Stan Musial, Hank Aaron) but those guys are unquestionable Hall of Famers. Oops, sorry Pete. There has also been only 27 ball players that recorded 3000 hits in their career. However, their excellence shouldn’t cause us to scoff at the 2000 hit milestone that Kendall and the other 226 players have reached without getting to 3000 hit plateau. But take into consideration that Johnny Bench is just ahead of Kendall for 7th all-time in hits among catchers.

Jason Kendall and the others have reached base the hardest way possible, and that is making contact with a moving object over 2000 times. Why is it that we only pay homage to those that have 3000 hits or to the ones that that have collected those hits in a more exciting way? Kendall and anyone else that hits their 2000th hit deserves at least 2 minutes of props on SportsCenter for their accomplishment when considering how few will ever reach that level, or at least a couple blog entries.

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