Former MLB Star Rips the Kelce Brothers for Dissing Baseball Players

File this under sports worlds colliding: the Kelce brothers poked the baseball bear, and Jonathan Lucroy swatted back.

On Wednesday, April 1, Travis and Jason Kelce used their New Heights podcast to question whether baseball players really need much cardio. Jason essentially said there is zero cardio required to be good at baseball. Travis brought up doing those high school drills where you run from foul pole to foul pole. That did not sit well with Lucroy, a 39-year-old former MLB catcher who spent 12 seasons in the bigs and made two All-Star teams. He hopped on X the same day and fired back with a pretty simple counter: NFL guys play once a week; baseball players go at it almost every day.

Lucroy's case, in plain English

• Pitchers do run for endurance. Lucroy said running poles (foul pole to foul pole) is a thing specifically to help them handle longer outings. He pointed to Nolan Ryan as an example, saying Ryan ran them daily, played 20 years, and was still touching 95 mph at age 40.
• Position players build conditioning in Spring Training by running bases. Once the season starts, everyday players scale back formal conditioning because the game schedule itself is the conditioning.
• The volume difference matters: MLB plays 162 regular-season games. The NFL schedule is 17. If you reach the World Series, baseball can push past 190 games when you add Spring Training and the postseason.
• The catcher workload is sneaky-brutal. Lucroy said he routinely caught more than 200 pitches a game, which means 200-plus squats before you even count warmups. Catch 120 games and you are looking at roughly 24,000 squats over a regular season, plus all the Spring Training and in-game warmups.
• He gave the NFL its due for being brutally violent, but argued baseball is about endurance and durability over a seven-month grind of daily attrition.

"It is a marathon, not a sprint."

What the Kelces were really saying

Jason's bigger point was that jogging-style, monotonous cardio has little to do with actual baseball performance. In his view, the longest run a position player will ever make is an inside-the-park home run, followed by a long break, so why train past that? Travis backed the vibe by calling baseball mostly a day of standing around, and his memory of all those foul-pole runs in high school only fueled the take.

Lucroy's response is basically: the schedule is the cardio. Pitchers run poles for stamina; position players get theirs through games and base-running work in Spring Training. Whether you buy the Kelces' definition of cardio or Lucroy's definition of conditioning, the math of 162 vs. 17 speaks loudly. And if you are wondering, yes, "running poles" really is just foul pole to foul pole over and over — boring as it sounds, but purpose-built for pitchers who need to survive long nights on the mound.