Opinion 1: Today's Players Are The Greatest

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Today’s Players Are The Greatest

It’s been a little while, I know.

A few weeks back, I mentioned in this post that we were going to talk about some of the fundamental philosophic questions behind comparing players among different eras.

And, well, I got caught up writing other things. My apologies!

Let’s pick up where we left off. Today I’ll explain the popular argument that today’s players are simply better than players of the past.

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Today’s Players Are More Athletic

This is the argument you’ll see most often when this debate comes up:

It’s a pretty simple argument. Players today are stronger and faster — so much so that the greatest players of all time wouldn’t stand a chance of playing in a modern major league.

Now, Vaux went even further with this line of argumentation, moving things into a pretty ridiculous territory:

Willie Mays being reduced to Juan Encarnacion in terms of offensive productivity strikes me as overstating the point a bit. I can certainly see the argument that Mays would not likely dominate the game athletically the way he did in the 1960s. However, I have a very hard time understanding why Mays would suddenly turn into a middling journeyman power hitter with a huge hole in his swing. But I digress.

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Everybody Moves Up

Back in 1996, Stephen Jay Gould argued that one could see an increase in the average quality of baseball player over time through the way batting averages have been distributed.

Now, I know what you’re thinking — batting averages are an overused and worthless statistic. However, the point here is actually pretty simple. Rather than throwing more text at you, take a look at this illustration:

From Gould, Stephen Jay, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 119

That same page includes this succint summation of his argument:

From Gould, Stephen Jay, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 119

In other words, as the general talent level of baseball increases, we should expect extremely great players to be very few and far between — and we should expect that their performances stand out less from their peers. By this logic, the absence of a .400 hitter (or somebody with a Ruthian .513 career wOBA, or whatever stat you want to use) is evidence of an increase in general baseball talent levels.

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Pitching

Now, it’s kind of hard to make this argument for offensive players. After all, batting science in general hasn’t changed much as the decades have worn on.

However, it does appear that pitching has improved greatly over time.

The easiest statistic for us to trace is velocity. This graph comes from a recent Sports Illustrated article, and seems to speak for itself:

It’s kind of hard to argue with that measurement. 2008 saw less than 500 regular season pitches thrown at 100 miles per hour or more. 2023, in contrast, saw over 3,500 such pitches.

Of course, pitching isn’t all about velocity (though there are some mathematically inclined baseball fans who seem to forget this). Putting the right spin on a baseball matters, too.

It’s surprisingly hard to find simple explanations of this phenomenon. The best I could find was this 4-year-old FiveThirtyEight article, which includes the following two self-explanatory images:

Now, as you can see, the data only goes back to about 2008 or so. This argument includes an implication that the growth we have seen in recent years is a reflection of growth and change that we’ve seen over time.

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Summing Things Up

This is actually a pretty simple argument.

We see world records constantly set in sports in which cross-era comparison is much more natural. Check out these world records for men’s outdoor running from World Athletics:

The oldest standing record on this (admittedly shortened) list is from September 1, 1996. A mere glance at the list will tell you that most records were set after the year 2000, and a considerable number were set after 2020.

It’s hard to look at this and not naturally conclude that humans are faster and more athletic now than they ever were before.

Or, as a Twitter user who shall remain anonymous said in a recent flame war:

That, in a nutshell, is the argument. Cross-era play is pointless. Today’s players are bigger, stronger, and faster than they ever were in the past. Yesterday’s players wouldn’t even be bench warmers. And we can finally move on.

Or can we?