Jayson Werth says “there’s nothing harder in the galaxy” than hitting

Jayson Werth is an interesting guy. Not wired quite like most ballplayers. You get the sense that there’s a lot going on above and behind that beard of his. Wheels are always turning. Because sometimes you get quotes from him which don’t come out of the cliche factory.

Take his views on hitting as described in Adam Kilgore’s article in the Washington Post the other day. Werth’s friend Raul Ibanez told him that if you can hit you can do anything. Werth expands:

“Just because you can do something else doesn’t mean you can hit. If you can hit, you can do anything. Because it’s the hardest thing to do. There’s nothing harder. I can bake a cake. I could figure out a way to do algorithms. But a guy that knows how to do algorithms could never hit. It’s literally the hardest thing to do. If you can do the hardest thing, you can do anything else . . . There’s nothing harder in the galaxy,” he said.

Werth is married and has two kids and, based on my own personal experience at least, he had best not say such things around his wife lest he be forced to swallow and then pass a bowling ball as a means of approximating childbirth. Oh, and then take care of the bowling ball by himself for several years as his wife spends six or seven months at a time out on the road trying to hit baseballs. I feel like, eventually, his wife would be able to hit one of those baseballs. I question how well Werth would do with the bowling ball.

But we could say this about any number of things. Maybe the childbirth analogy is a bad one. Pick any other ones. I’m sure you can imagine many. Which isn’t to say that hitting is easy. Far from it. Most of us couldn’t make contact on batting practice pitches if we were given 100 chances. But it is probably the case that anyone who says that a thing they do at a hyper-elite level is the hardest thing to do in the world is worthy of your skepticism.