Heresy! Players Today Better than Oldtimers

Comparisons between oldtime baseball players and modern performers are inevitable: Ty Cobb vs. Pete Rose . . . Babe Ruth vs. Hank Aaron … Walter Johnson vs. Nolan Ryan. And, in most cases, the supporters of the oldtimers have the edge when it comes to raw statistics: Nobody in our lifetime will ever bat .367 lifetime, as did Cobb, or win 511 games, as did Cy Young.

There is no question that, overall, modern athletes are superior to their predecessors. Athletes today are bigger, stronger and faster. If Johnny Weismuller, on his finest day in the 100-meter freestyle race, had swum through a timewarp into the 1972 Olympics, he would have found himself eight seconds behind Mark Spitz. Jesse Owens would not come within two feet of the longest jump by modern star Carl Lewis. Glenn Cunningham would finish a couple of hundred yards behind Sebastian Coe in the mile run. In this century, most record times and distances have been improved by 15 to 25 percent, and several by much more.

Why, then, is baseball the one major sport in which measurable numerical records have endured for many decades? This, I hope to prove, is not because today’s players are inferior; it is because the game is so different and the level of competition today is so much higher.

Advocates of the modern player list a number of factors that have made the game more difficult, particularly for hitters: Night baseball, relief specialists, the slider, bigger gloves, increased media pressure, cross-country travel and jet lag.

Supporters of the oldtimer often cite expansion as a reason for the watering down of talent in the big leagues. “By sheer numbers,” wrote. one, “one-third of today’s (players) wouldn’t be in the major leagues if it weren’t for expansion …”

And that’s where we have them. A statement like that fails to consider the impact of the United States population – which has tripled in this century – on baseball’s level of competition.

The accompanying graph introduces the “Level of Competition Index ” (LCI), which indicates the relative degree of difficulty of a man making it to the major leagues at a given time and, simultaneously, reflects the depth of talent in the majors.

LCI is arrived at by dividing the number of major league baseball players at a given time by the number of pro baseball candidates (in millions) at the same time. The number of players is defined as the number of major­-league-level teams in existence (according to The Baseball Encyclopedia, Macmillan) times 25, the current standard. roster size. (Yes, rosters were smaller in the 1800s and early 1900s.) Pro baseball candidates, for the purpose of this computation, are defined as “United States males aged 20-39 years,” for which the data have been supplied by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. Since the census is taken only every ten years, population estimates for the intervening years had to be made based on each particular decade’s rate of growth.

Therefore, an LCI of 25.0 means that there were 15 major league players per one million “candidates.” The lower the LCI, the higher the level of talent.

 

Table 1: United States Males, Aged 20-39 Years, 1870-1980

Year	Total
1870	5,804,616
1880	7,935,892
1890	10,279,912
1900	12,466,309
1910	15,927,583
1920	17,333,099
1930	19,535,426
1940	21,071,933
1950	22,855,322
1960	22,531,151
1970	25,547,049
1980	35,906,643

Source: US Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census

 

Since 1876, the advent of what is usually recognized as major league baseball, the highest LCI ever recorded occurred a century ago. The addition of four teams to the existing American Association in 1884, plus the single­-year existence of the eight-team Union Association, gave the big leagues 28 teams and brought the LCI to a whopping 78.9. The lowest LCI ever was the 16.0 mark of 1900, one year before the American League claimed major league status.

With the inception of the current two-league format in 1901 – the beginning of the “modern era” – the LCI stood at 31.2. That number shrunk slowly but steadily for half a century, dropping to 25.1 in 1910, 23.1 in 1920, 20.5 in 1930, 19.0 in 1940 and 17.5 in 1950, before levelling off to 17.8 in 1960. (While overall population had grown 18.5 percent in the 1950s, the 20-39 age group actually decreased in number due to the low birthrate of the Depression years.)

The 1960s saw the formation of eight new teams – the Los Angeles Angels and the new Washington Senators in 1961 (the old Senators had moved to Minnesota and become the Twins); the Houston Colt .45s and New York Mets in 1962, and the Kansas City Royals, Seattle Pilots, Montreal Expos and San Diego Padres in 1969. (The Colt .45s became the Astros in 1965, the Pilots became the Milwaukee Brewers in 1970, and the Senators became the Texas Rangers in 1972.) With this 50 percent expansion of the big leagues, while the talent pool increased by only 13.4 percent during the decade, the LCI jumped to 23.8, the highest since World War I.

The maturing of the “baby boom” generation, however, swiftly reversed that effect over the next decade. The male 20-39 age group grew by an astonishing 40.6 percent during the 1970s, while the number of major leaguers – with the addition of the Seattle Mariners and Toronto Blue Jays in 1977 – increased only 8.3 percent. This set of circumstances brought the LCI back down to 18.1 by 1980, or about the same as the immediate pre-­expansion levels. And with the continuing population growth since the last census, it is altogether probable that the LCI is right now at the lowest point since 1900 – which means that the level of talent in the big leagues today is the highest of this century.

 

Table 2: Number of Major League Baseball Teams, 1876-1984

Year	Teams
1876	8
1877-78	6
1879-81	8
1882	14
1883	16
1884	28
1885-89	16
1890	24
1891	16
1892-99	12
1900	8
1901-13	16
1914-15	24
1916-60	16
1962	18
1962-68	20
1969-72	24
1977-85	26

 

This, of course, takes into account only factors of population and expansion. There are other bases to touch.

As many people have pointed out, baseball was, for many years, virtually the only sport in which a talented athlete could hope to perform for financial gain. There are at least two counters to that contention.

First, only a select few players really made a decent living playing ball in those days; there were no dreams of multi-million contracts. For example, a star sandlot player of the 1930s (my father) told me he had to refuse a minor league contract offer because he could not live on $20 a month. The point is, many good athletes couldn’t afford to consider a pro sports career, baseball or otherwise.

Second, probably most of the potential baseball players who have opted for other pro sports are either basketball players or skill position football players – and the vast majority of those athletes would not have been allowed to play baseball between 1887 and 1947 because they are black. This leads us to the integration factor.

We have already established that, based on population data alone (“sheer numbers”), the number of major leaguers per million candidates has dropped from 31 in 1901 to 18 in 1980. But were those 31 of ’01 the best baseball players in existence? No, they were the best white players. Meanwhile, of the 18 in 1980, perhaps 12 are white.

So, considering the integration factor on top of the population factor, we can say that only about two-fifths of the 1901 players would be good enough to make it to the big leagues today. (And with the much-improved overall caliber of the modern athlete, that fraction would be much smaller.) In a normal distribution (bell) curve of baseball ability, the line separating non-players and minor leaguers from major leaguers is moving farther and farther to the right.

What this tells us is that, by today’s standards, Cy Young, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, et al, were hurling against lineups of mostly minor-league-level hiters and Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Rogers Hornsby and company were batting against mostly minor-league-level pitchers. These Hall of Famers would have excelled in any era, but their individual statistics were embellished by the low levels of talent of the rank and file players of their times.

This leaves us only to speculate: What kind of numbers could have been put on the board by the likes of Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Rod Carew, Pete Rose, Steve Carton and Tom Seaver had they played under similar conditions as these oldtime heroes?