re: Which is harder to do.....

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You could be the best baseball player of all time if you hit 4 out of 10 pitches.

If you are a pro tennis player and hit 4 out of 10 serves then you won't be a pro tennis player for long.

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i agree with that. but the question is posed to us everymen. i stand by the sentiment that if the average male went up and tried to hit or return serve (field of play for both respectively) we'd have more baseball "hits" than tennis "returns"

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i agree with that. but the question is posed to us everymen. i stand by the sentiment that if the average male went up and tried to hit or return serve (field of play for both respectively) we'd have more baseball "hits" than tennis "returns"

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I disagree unless bunting is an option. Smaller bat, balls are about the same size, the difference between 100 and 140 are negligible to the average person most likely because they'll be trained to do neither.

Is bunting allowed?

Definitely hit a baseball. If a professional tennis player missed a serve 7/10 times then they'd starve.

This is an interesting question.

Couple of things you would need to distinguish. Are we talking about top five tennis players / servers ever and top five pitchers ever. The Everyman will never get a hit / return off of these athletes in a reasonable amount of time. The amateur athlete in the respective sports would be a more interesting factor IMO.

So I am not an expert on tennis, but it seems a general hit would depend more on the defense / pitch type, etc. so I am going to assume we are debating a home run off a world class pitcher throwing a fastball in the zone, and a perfect return / (whatever the term would be if the server was not able to hit the return) against a world class tennis player. And in this scenario the baseball edges it for me because to the small area you have to catch contact in to get a great ht.

Would be interested to see area of raquet over possible area of service vs sweet spot contact area on bat vs strike zome type estimate. And put the reaction time number over the values just calculated.

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CheeseburgerEddie

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A few more things to consider.

A strike zone operates on a two-dimensional plane, whereas a served tennis ball only has to hit a two-dimensional plane before having an having an infinite area (theoretically) where the ball can be

You would have to make some assumptions, I would assume that tennis player would move in a straight line to any single place the ball could be hit and effictively create a 2D plane for the purpose of this but yes that and many other problems trying to quantify this type of scenario.

Another thing to note about tennis: it is 78 feet from line to line but a receiver can stand much further back from the line. Granted, this opens up the server to be able to use a lot more angled shots, but the tradeoff is that a server swinging as hard as he can (to hit the 140 MPH serve) does not typically have as much control on shot placement.

I know, I was trying to simplify the problem by saying fastball vs straight hard serve.

It would be more difficult to return a serve "in play" than hit a baseball "in play". ( assuming hard serve and hard fastball ).

However. A tennis serve returned "in play" is considered a successful return while puttin the fastball "in play" is not a guaranteed success. Pro ball players put the ball "in play" 8 or 9 times out of 10. The best ball players will avg 3 out of 10 success rate( base hit )

So for this reason it would be more difficult for the avg joe to have a successful at bat than a successful return IMO