Linden: Racism, the original performance enhancer in baseball
From Jason Linden at The Hardball Times on October 25, 2019:
One thing that continues to bother me about the historic analysis of baseball is the extent to which we take pre-integration numbers as gospel while throwing into question numbers from various other eras. One look at historic leaderboards should be enough to tell you pre-integration players are substantially over-represented at the top, given the number of players in the major leagues at the time and the fact that pre-integration baseball now accounts for slightly less than 40% of the modern era.
And yet, as I looked, it seemed like no one had addressed this. And that meant it was time for me, the lowly member of the baseball writing humanities wing, to dust off my spreadsheet knowledge and do some calculating.
Read the full article here: https://tht.fangraphs.com/racism-the-original-performance-enhancer/
Originally published: October 25, 2019. Last Updated: October 25, 2019.