How did baseball players before, say, 1930 compare to players later?

The Game Room
1

How did baseball players before, say, 1930 compare to players later?
Let us say that major league baseball players from before 1930 were no better than today’s Little Leaguers .(I absurdly exaggerate to make the point clear). And let us
say that players after 1930 were as good as they are presently considered to be.
Would there be any way of knowing this ?Ruth would have still hit sixty home runs, Radbourn would still have won sixty games, etc.

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David Gassko tackled this question in 2007 in a three-part series for the Hardball Times which has been preserved on Fangraphs:

Measuring the Change in League Quality, Part One
Part Two
Part Three

There are a pair of key Nate Silver articles alluded to in Part Three where the links to them are broken so here they are: first one and second one.

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Well, let’s talk about the Old Hoss Radbourn thing; even if Radbourn was really a great pitcher by modern standards, of course he wouldn’t win sixty games in a year because no one starts sixty games a year anymore, no matter how good they are. Even if a guy COULD start sixty games in ayear no team would let him. The decline in a pitcher’s upper limit number of wins isn’t because pitchers are worse. It’s because the strategy has changed.

Home runs haven’t changed much though so would Babe Ruth still have been that dominant a hitter?

No way. journeyman has helpfully pointed to a study that shows an apparently gradual rise in league quality over time, one that seems quite commonsense; it dips in World War II and flattens in the 1969 superexpansion.

Baseball today is ludicrously better than it was in 1930. It doesn’t go up that much in any one year, or else no one would have a long career, but over the course of time it has gotten crazily better, for a variety of reasons:

  1. There is a far wider pool of talent now. The population of every baseball-playing nation is larger; black players were not allowed to play until 1947; the drawing of talent from Latin America and Asia is way, way greater.

  2. Sports nutrition and training are vastly more advanced. Players are stronger and faster. Excellent players who get injured are likelier to recover and play at a high level.

  3. The science of coaching is much more advanced. More is now understood about hitting and pitching mechanics. Coaches have access to video and other tools to enable them to assist players in their technique. There is more standardization of technique towards optimum approaches to baseball success.

  4. There is more money at stake, which means talented players are likelier to try harder to be MLB players. Prior to the Second World War, some world class ballplayers simply chose not to pursue the major leagues as a thing. The money involved also means teams are putting vastly more emphasis on domestic and international scouting, talent selection and development, and the like.

  5. Sabermetrics is increasingly the likelihood teams will correctly identify high quality ballplayers and retain them instead of poor ones; this has recently been especially evident in their selection of pitchers.

So how are players today different, aside from the statistical evidence?

  • Players today are much more professional athletes. They are fitter; 99 out of a hundred pro ballplayers show up for Spring Training already in perfect shape, something that did not used to be the case. With the exception of the odd Prince Fielder, they take their training seriously. Almost all lift weights, which just 40 years ago almost no ballplayers did.

  • They are, on average, stronger and faster.

  • Pitchers throw, on average, much harder. The hardest throwing pitchers have always been more or less the same, but more pitchers throw very hard.

  • Hitting technique is more standardized, and very few players have obvious flaws in their swings. There are really only two common schools of hitting now, the rotational technique and the Japanese school. In either case, hitters are vastly more consistent.

  • On average modern players are better fielders than they used to be. The BEST fielders aren’t really any better; Kevin Kiermaier is no better a fielder than Willie Mays was, and he wasn’t any better than Oscar Charleston, who wasn’t any better than Tris Speaker. But the overall quality of center fielders is higher.

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You can look at the progression of athletic records in less complex sports such as running and swimming to get an idea of how athletic ability has increased with time.

In the 100 meter dash, for instance, here are the Olympic winners’ times (men) for some randomly selected years:
1896–12.0 sec
1928–10.8
1968–9.91
2016–9.81

Here are the world record times for swimming 100 meters (again, men, long course):
1908–1:05.6
1924–57.4
1968–52.6
2009–46.91

You can see that the best times today are significantly better than the best times in the 1920s, and *far *better than the years around 1900.

Now, there are confounding variables. Better equipment and better technology can improve times without actually improving athletes (you try swimming a 46.91 hundred in a murky pool without starting blocks before the invention of the flip turn). The Olympics were officially “amateur,” meaning for years that only a particular social class could compete. And there are other demographic/financial reasons why baseball players might not be directly comparable to swimmers or runners. But the clear improvements in sports like these strongly suggest that the earlier posters are right and baseball players are better than they used to be.

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Pre-1930 hitters hit against pre-1930 pitchers, both of whom were using pre-1930 equipment under pre-1930 rules and strategies, so you wouldn’t be able to determine anything absolute from their relative numbers. Too much has changed.

But there’s no question that players are physically much better overall now, with superior medicine and training, and that’s even with PED’s (mostly) gone. Just for example, it was thought almost miraculous when Bob Feller had a fastball measured at over 100 mph in an exhibition, and that was long after 1930. Today, virtually every pitcher in the majors can do it, or at least high 90’s. Pick the rules and equipment and strategies of any era you like, and the game will be dominated by the PED-era players, or maybe the current ones.

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There is no way to know how hard Feller threw because there were no reliable means of measurement back then. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Feller topped out at 95 in an era when most guys were throwing 85 or 90.

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Army ordnance measuring equipment.
Better than a motorcycle.

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Aside: Does anyone know how that Army equipment would have worked? Nowadays, we’d use photocells, but those weren’t invented yet. Audio doppler? Hair-thin broken tripwires? High-speed movie camera?

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Well, the pre-1930’s guys are dead, so I imagine a living team would beat a dead team…I’ll show myself out.

10

The narration in the video said photoelectric cells.

I’ve found a few mentions of a Lumiline chronograph but no description of it’s actual workings.
It looks like a crude version of this. protected by a wood frame.

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Let’s see what Herman Jacobs has to say about this topic: In My Day, Ballplayers Were For Shit

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Same here, but it illustrates the point - few of the best pitchers in the Thirties could even make the majors today. There’s some self-selection involved, sure - short guys who depend on control and changeups couldn’t even get signed. Teams look for big guys who throw hard and can be coached to get control.

Players are bigger now too, and not just because of PED’s. Look at game video even from the Seventies or Eighties, and it’s hard not to think you’re watching high schoolers.

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I think the uniforms of the 70s lend a juvenile, comical appearance to some extent. But they WERE far less muscular.

When Lance Parrish started lifting weights in the early 80s, his manager gave him shit for it. They just didn’t try to be big. Like, who was a really strong player then? I’ll say Jim Rice as an example; he was noted for his strength. Today he’d just look like a normal ballplayer. These days every team has ten guys that big and strong.

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today its more about technique than power … I mean at one time it was throw as hard/fast as you can for as long as you can …aim was second …

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None of that explains why Ruth would be a less dominant player today.

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I think it does. RickJay’s not saying that any of that would have been a detriment to Ruth (and, frankly, had he been able to take advantage of modern training and equipment, he could have been even better). The point is that part of his dominance seems to have been that he played in an era in which success was more about raw talent than the other factors, and that his raw talent was what placed him so far above his peers.

With modern training, nutrition, sabermetrics, etc. available to everyone, I think that it’s very likely that, if he were playing today, Ruth would still be one of the best hitters in the game, but the gap between him and his peers would be considerably less today than it was then.

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Because he would be playing against superior opponents, obviously. Of course he would not be as dominant if opposing pitchers were better and opposing fielders were better. When Ruth faced the mighty Walter Johnson he was seeing the one guy in baseball who could throw 97. Now there’s guys like that on every team. When Ruth was playing, some of the hitters against whom he was compared were probably not among the two thousand best baseball players in America. Today, I assure you, no such player is in the majors.

If we imagine a Babe Ruth with full access to modern coaching, medical services and modern training techniques, I am confident he could still be a Hall of Famer. But no, he would not be as dominant, largely because NO ONE is as dominant. A characteristic of different levels of sports is that the higher you go in talent, the lwer is the standard deviation of talent. Ruth had seven years where he was credited with over 10 offensive wins above a replacement player; the most dominant player of modern times, Barry Bonds, had three.

Ruth is an unusual case in that he also started the home run era of baseball, in part because, as a pitcher, no one bothered to correct his swing to make him stop trying to hit home runs (Ruth’s swing was very unusual for the time, but looks perfectly modern to our eyes today.) for some time he pretty much was THE power hitter in the American League, conferring an enormous advantage on his dominance. But today, of course, hitting home runs is not at all revolutionary.

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Which reminds me of another factor: in Ruth’s era, the MLB player base was “young white men from the U.S.” The inclusion of blacks, and players from other countries, in the modern player pool, undoubtedly also raises the average talent level.

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I might not be adding anything much new here but I refuse to recognize any record accomplished before 1947 because of baseball discrimination. That doesn’t mean there weren’t great players before then but how can you quantify most of them when the players didn’t face black players not only from the United States but also the Carribbean and Im sure other races were barred.

Besides analytics players from that day did not benefit from advanced nutritional, medical and training developments that modern athletes enjoy today. If your were to time travel those back to the 1930s and allowed ANYONE who could fairly try out for baseball the game would have looked a lot different back then believe you me!

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But you still have to show that this “access to modern coaching, medical services and modern training techniques” makes a better baseball player. By your argument, if an average player from today traveled back in time and played in 1930, he would suddenly become elite.

It kind of sounds like the argument some make that NFL quarterbacks today are superior to quarterbacks from the 1980s because of modern training, complexity, better athletes, or some other nonsense argument that overlooks that none of that necessarily means a better quarterback.

Isn’t it possible that Ruth was a once-in-a-generation talent with such natural ability to hit a baseball that he would have dominated any era?