This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

One of the most exciting things in sports.

One of the most exciting things in sports is to see a truly great player shatter all previous

assumptions about what is possible to achieve in the game.

But while fans applaud and announcers lose their minds.

Opposing team scramble to find strategies to stop these grades.

In basketball they tried to stop Shaquille Neal by immediately

fouling him when he got the ball so that he'd have to shoot from the free throw line, which

he wasn't very good at. This strategy became known as the Hakushak.

As we immediately have a Hakushak call, I don't believe it. Five seconds in.

In soccer, opposing teams continuously fouled the great Argentinian player Leo Messy to keep him from dribbling through their defense.

And straight over the top into the knee of Messy.

That is absolutely scandalous.

These tactics to stop the great players can be aggressive and they often stretch the limits of the rulebook.

That's Neil Payne bringing us our story today.

He's from 538, the data journalism site owned by E.S. BN.

But in baseball, they did it differently.

In baseball, the solution to stopping the greatest hitter of all time was to actually redesign the game itself.

It all started in the 1940s with the great Ted Williams.

Famously he would say that when he grew up he wanted to be the greatest hitter who ever lived.

Ben Bradley Jr. wrote the definitive biography of Ted Williams.

Before a game in the clubhouse he would put up a mirror and stripped down to his skivies and swing a bat and say, I'm and

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