ZOMG, she was NOT a nice person. Calling her a megalomaniac would be a vast understatement.
I can’t get the proper link to post, but just go to Amazon.com and look up her recent biography, “Wonder Girl” by Don Van Natta.
As for being tabloid fodder, Bill Tilden was gay, but that was apparently quite well known even then, and nowadays people probably wouldn’t bat an eye. It’s believed that Babe was too, or at least bisexual, and that George Zaharias was her beard.
Okay, thinking about it a bit more, and I am just not imagining Mikan being anything more than a journeyman power forward. He wasn’t freakishly athletic - he was just bigger than everyone else. And him putting on weight - sure, let’s say he puts on 30 pounds, maybe 40; now he only weighs 70 pounds less than Shaq. Also it’d be an unknown wether or not his body, his joints and bones, would be optimal with the extra mass. I think that the earliest old time hoops player that would be able to play, and at a high level today, would probably be Elgin Baylor, and for big men it would be Wilt.
Stan Musial, Warren Spahn and Ted Williams from baseball were dominant before 1955 and for some time after it, so I’d wager they’d acquit themselves well in the modern era.
Otto Graham was an excellent QB from 1946-1955, and I think he’d do well too. He had the same skills as Joe Montana, IMHO.
George Mikan, on the other hand, couldn’t make the NBA today, not even on the worst team.
I don’t know about that. I believe what got Tilden into trouble was the fact he had a preference for underage boys. Even now, that would be a killer.
Actually, contrary to popular belief, for the most part Ruth was not “lazy and gluttonous”. He actually hired his own personal trainers(or whatever term was used in the 20s) and was actually forced to stop jogging during spring training and the off-season by the Yankees because they insisted he “save his legs”.* Yes, there were times when he did overeat, but a lot of that was a well-crafted image(such as the “bellyache heard round the world” which was almost certainly a venereal disease).
He, like Roger Clemens, and others always had a fat face, but he did keep his overeating under control.
There’s a reason he hit over 40 home runs when he was 36 at a time when others hung up their spikes at 30.
Oh God, you’re right, all of them would be fantastic and bonus points for mentioning Charleston, who never got to play in the majors for reasons we both no why. Wagner actually lifted weights and had he access to modern weight rooms, trainers and nutritionists, people would be saying “Cal who”?
Actually, he faced quite a few when barnstorming and by all accounts, including those of the African-American players in question he did extremely well.
Keep in mind he played at a time when nearly a third of all games people played were barnstorming.
I can tell you’re a fan so I’m going to recommend a book that I think you’ll like.
http://www.amazon.com/Year-Babe-Ruth-Home-Runs/dp/B0017U1IV2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373862642&sr=8-1&keywords=the+year+babe+ruth+hit+104+home+runs
Some top sports colleges will only put up with that sort of thing for decades.
Now that baseball is integrated, I’d love to see how some of the Negro League players would do; i.e., Rube Foster
On one hand, it’s obvious that offensive and defensive linemen is today’s NFL are WAAAAY bigger than the guys I saw as a teenager in the Seventies, let alone in Sammy Baugh’s day. So, it’s tempting to think that, say, Alan Page and Bob Lilly could never have gotten past the 350 pound blockers of today.
But look at former star offensive linemen like Mark Schlereth or Nate Newton today. When they were active offensive linemen, they were over 300 pounds. But today, they’re actually svelte! They both weigh about 225 pounds now.
What that shows is, modern NFL players aren’t naturally, genetically bigger and more musicular than their predecessors. Many MADE themselves huge by eating and working out a LOT more than they really wanted to. Once they retired and went back to just eating when they were hungry, they shed a lot of weight quickly.
So, it’s very likely that Mike Webster, John Hannah, Bob Kuechenberg and Ron Yary COULD have gotten a lot bigger and a lot stronger in a hurry, if they’d had the time, money, facilities and motivation to do so.
I’ve heard several commentators speculate that Babe Ruth was successful BECAUSE he was a pitcher.
What they meant was that, as you say, Babe Ruth’s swing was completely unorthodox for his day. Everyone who watched him at bat thought, “He’s doing it all wrong.” If he’d played any position BESIDES pitcher, some coach or manager would have forced him to stop swinging that way, and hit the way everybody else did.
But since Ruth was a pitcher, and pitchers weren’t expected to hit worth a damn anyway, nobody ever bothered to “correct” the Babe’s swing.
They guy was both great and innovative, just as gold medal high jumper Dick Fosbury was. But it was inevitable that, once all the other jumpers started doing things Fosbury’s way, many of them would match or eclipse his records.
Once the shot clock was introduced, Mikan was toast. He was big, but he also was slow and couldn’t keep up with the modern NBA.
Mikan’s presence was a factor in rule changes that neutralized him, but he knew he couldn’t keep up.
Some possibilities who might do fine include Satchel Paige, Lefty Grove, Jimmy Foxx, and Lou Gehrig
I’m hard pressed to think of a lot of things Ty Cobb did that wouldn’t fly in baseball today, apart from behavior like going into the stands to beat up an abusive fan and attacking a black groundskeeper who tried to shake his hand. Being a great singles and doubles hitter with modest home run power (with a live ball, anyway), possessing excellent bunting ability and great speed would still make him a highly valuable major league player today (think an early 20th century version of Ichiro Suzuki, a comparison that probably would not have pleased Cobb).
There are pitchers who in their prime, with modern notions about training and innings restriction, would in my opinion have still been dominant today (for example Bob Feller and Walter Johnson).
Gordie Howe would still be an all star in today’s NHL.
And anyone who sez otherwise gets a stick in the face!
Man O’ War could still tear up the track.
I was thinking of the sharpened cleats on his shoes, and general intimidation tactics against other players. An attitude like his could cut a career pretty short now. But he wasn’t stupid, he could have stayed within the acceptable lines in modern baseball. I’ve no doubt he’d be a great player today, but what I wonder is if he would be any better today due to modern training.
Are you factoring in his being cloned and brought up in modern sports training? That’s the interesting part about all of this, not how they would play if transported through time, but if they had developed as modern athletes do.
Your basic speed is inherent. You will get a small improvement from modern training but if you’re slow, you remain slow.
There’s a difference between a slow style of play, and being inherently slow. Is there some way to determine that Mikan was inherently slow?
But you still have to measure their athleticism and dexterity as a starting point, and Mikan did not possess them way that Wilt, Baylor, Robertson did within a decade. At best, he might be a Kevin Love type of skill level, imho.
I’ve no doubt Ruth did fine playing against black pitchers, but it’s inescapably true that had the major leagues been integrated, it would have slightly worsened his statistics; there’s no other logical conclusion. Each black pitcher that entered the majors would have displaced a white pitcher, and in all likelihood, MLB being an imperfect but reasonably efficient meritocracy, they would have displaced inferior ballplayers. It’s not an accident that when MLB DID start adding black ballplayers in a gradual process, they were disproportionately excellent; they are naturally the first ones you’ll hire. Jackie Robinson was a better player than Dustin Pedroia; how happy would his opponents be if Dustin Pedroia had never played baseball?
I’m not saying it would have collapsed Ruth’s numbers; he’d still have been the best hitter in baseball. But instead of being a career .344 hitter with 714 homers, in a fully integrated league we’d be looking at something like .339 with 689 homers - a slight adjustment, but one all the same.
Only because there was no way AL pitchers would let a Jew even tie Ruth in '38.