Baseball, Soccer and Tennis and the Way they have evolved

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Felt a bit inspired and I felt like writing, and I wrote this:

Stephen Jay Gould’s book, Full House: The Spread of Excellene from Plato to Darwin talks about a very intersting patterns that happens in all “stable systems” (stable systems, are a form of organization within a certain cycle). One of the various examples of the interesting finds he makes in this book is related to sports. Gould uses Baseball as the example on this book, but surley tennis can be appled to this example as well (I will also talk about tennis, as soon as I use the Baseball example to illustrate my point.

All stable systems start out a bit chaotically. For example, when Baseball first started, it was quite diffrent that what it is today. The ball was diffrent, the gloves were diffrent, the bats of lesser quality, etc. Of course, this is obvious, technology has improven over the last couple of years, thus all sporting equipment has improved, this is not new information. However, something that some of you may or may not have noticed is the overall improvements of the athletes in this sport.

In Basball, some statistics are quite startling. It has been many years since a person hit a .400 average, wheras even before that almost every player hit .400. How is it possible? If players have improved, how come there overall batting average has decreased? Hmmm, this seems quite a bit paradoxical.

In reality it isn’t. This paradox is explained in quite a simple manner. When baseball started pitchers didnt know the all the types of pitching varities avaiblabe. The pitching mound was somewhat higher than what it is now, and quite simply, batters simply knew how to hit the pitchers better because there was only so-much the pitcher could throw at them.

As baseball history progressed, pitchers and batters improved simultaenously. Pitchers figured out how to throw the ball in diffrent ways (curve ball, knucle ball, etc) and batters learned how to adapt to the pitchers style. The thing is, that pitchers slightly improved over batters as the game evolved. If you were to take the pitchers now, and use them against baseball’s greats, Joe Dimmagio, and Babe Ruth, you can be damn sure there numbers would not be as good.

Another thing to take into accounts when talking about Stable systems is that due to the origin of the sport, it is only natural that some people stand out. If Baseball just started out as a sport, not many people knew about it at first (and quite obviuosly there werent as many people living on the face of the planet back then), and only a few entered and played it. The thing is, the fewer people you have playing a particular sport, the greater the chances of a paricualt athlete stand out, simply because there are less people to compete with him/her. It is a simple rule that can be applied in sports: the more athletes you have playing a particular sport, the greater the chances of tough competition.

Those legendary players from the past serve more as historical figures than as actual super athletes. Based on todays standards, the athlets of the the 60’s and prior where simply inferior than the athletes of today. This is not set on stone though. There is a chance, purley based on probability, that an athlete is born, that will simply be incredible at a particular sport. This is a rare occurance though.

Stable systems can be appled to other sports like tennis and football. In football, for example, the bycicle kick was something that was discovered by a brazilian player out of pure experimentation. Now, all of today’s current football players can do a bycicle kick quite succesfuly. This is an obvious advantage over players that did not know the bycicle kick.

Many people mention Pele and Maradona as the top 2 players ever to have player the game. Pele was an awsome player that Played brazilian soccer in the 50’s. He is the only player ever to have scored over 1000 goals. Surely he must be the best. Well, for one thing, Pele only played in south america, were football leagues were much less competitive than they were in Europe, that and the fact that he played in a lot of friendlies, plus the fact that he had a long carreer obviously helped him reach the 1000 + goal digit. What if Pele had played in Europe or what if Pele were a player now, would he have reached 1000 goals? Probably not.

Maradona is a diffrent issue. He played in the 80’s were football was quite competitve. Sure, it wasnt as competitve as it is now, but it was pretty damn competitve. Maradona is one of thos players that can account for the “probability” of a super athlete being born. Maradona definetly has more odds than Pele in that if he played soccer now (in his prime) he has a good chance of still being recognized as one of the greats.

Tennis is similar to baseball in the stable systems bit. Professional tennis (the open era) started in the 60’s. Tennis is obviously a sport that requires you to have a decent income to be a succeful participant. Tennis, much like baseball, had various changes to its gameplay and equipment. The most notable of these changes would be the change of a wooden raquet, to the modern carbon-fiber version.

The new raquets definetly help players execute more shots, more angles, etc. Players like Rod Laver, even if they player with cotemporary raquets (in there prime as well) would not perform nearly as well as they did in the past. Why? For one thing, the improvment of tennis techniques: better serves, diffrent shots, etc. And another thing that was mentioned in the baseball section: the competitivness of the sport in general.

2

Almost everyone in baseball hit .400? When was this? Maybe you’ve worded something wrong here.

You’ve also overlooked changes in hitting strategy. As I understand it, the idea of regularly swinging for the fences didn’t become popular until after Babe Ruth arrived on the scene. Before that, hitters choked up more often and sought to guide the ball between fielders; that was believed to be the best offensive strategy.

The main idea here isn’t too complicated: the average athlete today is better than ever, so it’s harder for the best athletes to dominate the competition. But it obviously isn’t impossible, since it IS happening in tennis (and golf, too). If Laver was playing today, with modern equipment and training methods, he might be at he might be very successful.

3

In Tennis, thanks to the new rackets we are losing the dedicated serve and volleyers. I’d
say the women are hitting the ball about as hard as the men did in the late 70’s/early 80’s,
when there were quite a few S & Vers. Note however that the most successful male player of
recent times, Pete Sampras, was a S & Ver, which makes it odd that no young gun has come
up emulating his style of play.

4

IMHO George Best was the best football (aka soccer) player I’ve ever seen play.

His balance and skill were without equal

5

Things have changed even since Sampras came up - players were still using metal racquets in the early part of his career. Playing at the baseline is just a lower-risk strategy, although I do think many of the big servers would benefit from coming to net to take advantage of their power.

6

There was never a time when “almost every player hit .400.” If there were, that wouldn’t be all that interesting; the decline in average would be a simple matter of differential improvement among hitters and pitchers.

The paradox, rather, occurs because we no longer see exceptional performances even after correcting for changes in the league average. Rogers Hornsby hit .424 in 1924, at a time when the overall National League average was .283. He hit 1.50 times the league average.

The National League average last year was .262. An equivalent performance to Hornsby’s would see the league batting champion hitting .393. Yet the actual 2005 batting champion, Derrek Lee, hit only .335. Why is this? Why is no player today able to exceed his peers to the extent that Hornsby was?

It isn’t enough to say, “pitchers are better”, or even “pitchers have improved more than hitters”. Pitchers improved enough, relative to hitters, to shave 19 points off the league average. Why did they shave 89 points off the batting champion’s average?

Now, with the question framed properly, we enter the realm of “stable systems” and increased competition to which you allude. The coefficient of variation of today’s players (standard deviation relative to mean) is far smaller than it was in the 1920’s.

Why is this? The system is more sophisticated and more stable–major league baseball teams have farm systems and staffs of scouts, and recruit world-wide and include racial minorities within the United States. Salaries are even higher, in relative terms, than they were in the 1920’s, with more scientific training regimens and coaching from earliest childhood.

It’s impossible for a player today, whether pitching or hitting, to stand out from his peers to the extent that Hornsby did. Too many players have converged on the top level of performance.

7

Is there a reason that might be more true in some team spots than in individual sports? You wouldn’t find a basketball player averaging 50 points per game the way Wilt Chamberlain once did, either.

8

I think so. I don’t follow individual sports closely–are given individuals as dominant today as the best old-timers? It seems like Tiger Woods and Annika Sorenstam dominate golf, but I don’t know how good the oldies were.

I suppose it makes sense to the extent that a smaller coefficient of variation might effect an individual less than a team player. Whether you’re 50% better or 5% better than the next leading tennis player, you’ll still win most of your tournaments. But if you’re 5% “better” than the next leading baseball hitter, you’re probably getting only about 5% more hits, because you’re matching up against a continuum of pitchers with a fair amount of luck thrown in. That would be my theory, anyway.

9

I’m a young guy, too, so I’m not the best to make a comparison. But Tiger Woods seems to be as dominant as anybody has been.

10

Pele isn’t the only person to score 1k goals. Mathias Sindelar scored something like 1300. Pele also only scored something like 600 of his goals in competitive topflight games. Many people think that Ronaldo circa 1996-1997 was the most dominate soccer player of all time.

11

For baseball, you have to factor in the change in population. Back in 1900, the US population was 85 million, and there were 400 major league baseball players (assuming the 25-man roster). Now, the population is around 300 million with 750 mlb players. Population has increased 3.5 times; the number of ballplayers has only increased 1.875 times. In addition, ballplayers nowadays come from all over the world, making the population pool even greater proportionally. Some athletes are siphoned off into other sports, but there were other sports a hundred years ago, and most pros in other sports today probably are unsuited for baseball anyway; a pro offensive lineman probably would have been unable to play baseball at a major league level even if he wanted to.

Thus, in order to play, the skill level has to be higher. Players are also better trained and better fed.

The lowering of statistics seems to be a contradiction, but remember, back a century ago, there were many players in the major leagues who would not have the relative skill level need to play today. So there were some pitchers who would be playing regularly back then who a top batter of the day would tee off on. Similarly, there were batters back then who really couldn’t hit against the level of pitching we see today. So there were bad batters hanging on because they could hit the bad pitchers (and bad pitchers who could have careers because they could get out the bad batters). The top players had weaker opponents, as measured by pure skill, so they could do better.

New pitches are a minor factor. Only the slider is both commonly used and relatively new (I believe it developed in the 60s). The split-fingered fastball is just a variation of the forkball (though it’s thrown harder and used more often), and things like the curve, changeup, and the knuckler have been around for ages (the curve was invented in the 19th century). At the same time, batters a century ago had to deal with the spitball.

What has changed is pitching strategy. A starter was usually expected to pitch the entire game. We know now that starters become less effective as time goes on. So good batters could catch up to a pitcher who tired. It didn’t affect the top pitchers of the time, since they knew how to pace themselves and save their best stuff for tight situations (especially since a home run in 1906 was extremely unlikely). But nowadays, once a pitcher tires a new one comes in, and not only is he fresh, but he pitches differently from the previous pitcher.