On the Evolution of Baseball

Can teams from the past be compared with teams from the present?

On the Evolution of Baseball

This is probably the most precarious subject I’ve ever written about, and is sure to make my ramblings on WAR look like a walk in the park.

However, we can’t really move forward with our discussion on great teams of the past without addressing this issue.

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The Problem

Remember that old Baseball Think Factory post I was rambling about a few weeks ago?

Yeah, we’re going back to that one.

The problem that we’re running into is described in numerous posts in that old collection of threads and posts. If you mosey on over to this partially archive thread, you’ll see a lot of what I’m talking about.

We’ll start off with this post by “Vaux, A.B.D.” in post 317 of the 1200 or so that originally comprised that monstrous thread:

This is a pretty clear and fair summation of an argument that I see all the time on Facebook, Twitter, and other places where baseball fans gather.

This argument is that no fair comparison between the past and present is possible due to issues like these:

• Sports science has improved by leaps and bounds, allowing players to recover from injury faster than before.

• The average human diet is far better than it once was, allowing players to enter baseball stronger, taller, faster, and more capable than ever before.

• New records have been set in the so-called “Olympic sports,” showing beyond a doubt that humans are faster, stronger, and more capable today than ever before.

And so on. We’ll go through a number of these arguments as we move along.

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It Can’t Be Ignored

Now, the easy thing to do is to simply ignore this argument.

In fact, if you look at Baseball Reference’s normalization explanation, that’s precisely what they do:

But you can’t just do that.

I mean, you can sidestep the issue and pretend that it doesn’t exist, sure. You can go through life pretending that the game has simply never changed, that raw statistics are easily comparable without dressing them up slightly, that the sabermetricans don’t know what they’re talking about, and so on.

Seriously, though, where’s the fun in that? And what do you do when you’re faced with evidence that runs contrary to your conclusions?

Nobody wants to talk about this stuff, largely because the conversation tends to go around in circles. In fact, that’s exactly what happened on that Baseball Think Factory thread I quoted above. The discussion went away from talk on the merits and demerits of various teams, veered into this subject matter, and then took a strange detour into the concept of “luck” and whether games like Strat-O-Matic can teach us anything about how baseball works.

We’re not going to go that far. But we are going to spend some time talking about the impact of fitness and nutrition on how we measure players across era.

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The Plan

Here’s the plan:

1. My next “Dynasties” post will be an attempt to make the case that the players of yesterday simply cannot compete with today’s athletes.

2. The “Dynasties” post that follows that one will be an attempt to refute those arguments, making the case that the players of the past were far more versitile and capable than today’s players.

3. My third post will make the argument that baseball is actually quite comparable across eras, despite our best attempts to overcomplicate the issue.

4. I’ll then come up with a fourth post about what I see as the best way to move forward.

Now, I know I’m not going to convince any of you. This is one of those topics that people get real fired up about, as if it were the religious side of baseball fandom. And that’s perfectly okay.

I’ll do my best to make an argument for each side of the debate. You might disagree, which is fine. In fact, if you are willing to contribute to support the blog and don’t mind a public discussion, I’d encourage you to leave a comment telling others how you feel.

The point here is not to have the final say in the debate. Rather, the idea is to have a place for this debate to actually take place.

I’m excited about eventually talking about normalized statistics, cross-era play, and how one could theoretically set up a league of the greatest teams of all time. We’ll get there. But we need to get this part out of the way first. It would be a disservice to everybody to simply dismiss this discussion as unimportant or irrelevant.