Opinion 2: Yesterday's Players Were The Greatest
Get off my lawn.
Yesterday’s Players Were The Greatest
Somebody mentioned in the comment section in the last post that he can see where this is going.
I’ll admit that there’s not much mystery to how I’m trying to present this debate. I honestly think there are good points on both sides of the issue, and remain unpersuaded by those who claim that there is some scientific way to prove that today’s players are better than all players who came before.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Today’s Players Have It Easy
If we accept the validity of the argument that today’s players are more athletic, we’ve at least got to recognize that today’s players are coddled in comparison.
This shouldn’t be too hard to understand, right? Players in the olden days couldn’t fly in chartered jets to go from game to game. They had to deal with bumpy train rides and less than ideal hotels when playing on the road.
I’m not convinced that the average American’s nutrition is any better now than it was before — but it’s pretty obvious that the availability of food in our day is a vast improvement over what things were like 130 years ago.
My article about Harry Pattee a few months back mentioned all the smoke and ash he had to deal with while playing in Brooklyn in 1908. If we’re going to give modern players credit for having huge bodies due in large part to favorable modern nutrition and conditioning methods, should we not also give players of the past credit for playing as well as they did in circumstances that were frequently awful?
Or, as an old Baseball Think Factory poster put it:
Having to deal with those tiny hotel rooms, the lack of hot water, poor food, rickety train rides, and all of that must mean that the older players were tougher, right?
The Equipment
Have you ever considered that the changes in baseball history might have more to do with equipment than some kind of human evolution?
We know that this is true, by the way. In fact, it’s obvious when you consider the development of fielder’s gloves over the years.
We don’t even need to graph this point out. Look at the major league errors per game ratings from 1871 through 1915:
As fielding gloves developed, errors per game went down dramatically. Fielding percentages went up, wild pitches decreased, and the caught stealing rate increased.
This isn’t my argument, by the way. It comes from The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, in his section on the game in the 1970s:
Now, I don’t agree that baseball was dominated by “men who wanted to freeze” in that era, as James says. There’s a better argument to be made that a political stalemate among the owners prevented baseball from changing the way it probably should have. But that’s an argument for another day.
As much as we praise modern athletes for their strength and agility, I don’t think they would do well with the equipment of the past — the larger, heavier bats, the finger mitts, the beaten up and bruised baseballs, or even the gigantic stadiums.
There’s something to be said for the men who had to deal with all those disadvantages — and yet still managed to put up records that took decades to break.
The Product
Baseball was simply better back in those days, too.
This is where the real chaos starts. That’s a really subjective statement, the sort of thing you can’t really measure.
I remember reading and thinking a lot about baseball television ratings back when I was in high school. I always wondered what things were like in the late 1970s, back when people actually watched games and would talk about them. I was probably the only kid in my entire high school who was watching baseball games religiously.
Part of the shift away from baseball in the popular eye is due to expanded media choices, of course. But part might be due to a general lack of quality in the sport.
Leonard Koppett described this eloquently in The New Thinking Fan’s Guide to Baseball:
Have you ever read articles from a few decades ago about how today’s players just don’t talk about the game anymore? This is the problem that Koppett is describing. You can’t eat, sleep, and breathe baseball the way you once did — not if you’re a player, anyway. You’ve got to be PR conscious, and you’ve got to be a celebrity.
In other words, the old time players actually felt the game. It was more than just a job to them.
Anyway, that’s how the argument goes. Is it convincing? We’ll find out next time.