Marley, it has been long enough since the 1998 expansion that things should level off again and overall to some degree it has. (Of course, this is mixed up with the increased use of steroids at the same time and then the sharp decrease recently, so it is hard to separate the two.)
The lack of quality starters would appear to have more to do with the new complete adherence to the pitch count rules than the lack of talent. If you develop pitchers to pitch 5-7 innings and 100-110 pitches per game, they are not likely to improve to 7-8 inning pitchers that throw 120-140 pitches per game. Additionally, pitchers are being worn down by the fact that most GMs follow the Yankee example* of getting/developing players that takes a lot of pitches. So pitchers have less endurance and throw more pitches per batter on average. This makes the pitching talent look more depleted than I think it really is.
I remember well that before the strike, pitchers were much more likely to throw 120 pitches and go 7-8 innings consistently. Somewhere in the nineties, prospects started being carefully protected and few minor league pitching coaches and player development personal wanted to chance blowing out a prize prospects arm.
Jim
Billy Beane admits to following what Gene Michaels did for the Yankees.
This stuff about expansion watering down the talent pool is, and has long been, nonsense. Back in the day, for almost 50 years, there were 16 major league teams, drawing their players from the white, American baseball playing population (with a few exceptions). Fast forward to today, and the number of major league teams has not even doubled–but they have opened up the game to players from just about every country in the world. Simply in terms of population to draw from, the talent pool has grown immensely–far more than double the number of potential players back in, say just for instance, 1938. The “dilution” argument is a bunch of humbug that’s used as an excuse for ball clubs and their inability to find and develop the talent. The talent’s out there; plenty of it. But a lot of teams aren’t good at scouting it out or turning those players into major league ballplayers when they do find them. Don’t let them off the hook so easily by accepting those lame, old excuses.
Your argument also has holes in it however. Until WWII, most of the best (white male) athletes would go into Baseball as Football, Basketball & Hockey paid paltry sums. Therefore, the pool was richer than you realize. Additionally, baseball and stickball were a much larger part of the poor urban life than it is now.
Baseball has become a suburban sport in America. This is part of the reason for the huge influx of Caribbean players. They play all the time, like kids in the cities use to play. They play with taped up balls, broom handles and make shift gloves. They play on fields that are terrible and so the good players learn how to play bad hops. All the things I heard from my parent’s generation, or Yogi Berra’s generation.
Development is a problem, I think especially in pitching as I explained above and old school things like bunting and running the bases. Bringing the game back to the inner city is another problem that the MLB is desperate to address. So far, they do not seem to be addressing it well.
I know that early in the last century baseball would get the “pick of the litter” players, with the other sports being relatively less popular and developed as an industry. Still, just thinking about it in population terms (believing that the pool of talent is a relatively stable percentage of overall population): back then, up to and a little past the WWII era, they were drawing from a population that was less than 150 million. But they still found enough players who were good for people to perceive that today there’s been a falloff in the talent. But counting up, as a rough estimate, the populations of the countries that participated in the World Baseball Classic a couple of years ago, you’re talking a population pool (with talent pool as a subset) that has to approach half a billion. There has to be more than double the number of potential baseball players in that much wider pool. They, the baseball clubs, just aren’t finding and developing them.
I will agree with you–and maybe go a little beyond you–with this: early development in this country has fallen off precipitously, because not nearly as many (percentage) kids are playing real baseball these days. (I mean actual hardball, something more than just wiffle ball in the back yard.) And even in suburbia the situation is pretty bad. When I drive past baseball fields and see them being used for soccer games–even in summer–it drives me up the wall. When I was a kid we went to the park to play baseball, maybe football in the fall; I can’t even imagine wanting to play soccer. I know that’s a whole other set of issues. Those kids in the Carribbean and Nicaragua and Venezuela have the right idea; I just wish more kids here had the same idea.
Bottom line: I think the baseball industry here in this country has been lazy about helping to create the environment that develops ball players. They need a more proactive approach. I don’t know exactly what, but something.
In one factor, your assertion about the soccer issue is based upon an error of fact.
Many kids play both soccer AND baseball as youth. Most soccer is played in the fall, usually starting in August. Spring soccer is generally reserved for travelling teams (players dedicated to soccer); in most places the “house” leagues run at best greatly reduced schedules in Spring. This is because Little League/Softball predominate at that time.
All four of my boys played soccer in the fall, baseball in the spring. A couple of them played baseball AND soccer in the spring, easy enough to do.
So soccer doesn’t really drain from baseball significantly. And it does so less as they grow older (soccer drops off precipitously in numbers once the kids hit about 12 years old).
Of course, people have been complaining about a falloff in talent for about a hundred years. That is not an exagerration.
I wonder sometimes if the people who claim that baseball’s talent pool is thinning (I realize YOU are not claiming this) have ever actually watched baseball, and watched it, say, 20 years ago, or 40 years ago. Even watching film of baseball 50, 60 years ago, it’s rather immediately obvious that the players of today are as good or better. I mean, I know old people always complain about the old days, but this stuff is on tape. If Babe Ruth tried to hit modern pitchers with that double-step he took, he’s strike out three hundred times a year. I’m sure the Babe would have adjusted, but it’s notable that he could do that and get away with it against the pitching of the time.
A factor people are ignoring here too is that modern major league baseball is vastly more efficient than it used to be in identifying and promoting legitimate major league ballplayers. In the 1930s, it’s highly questionable whether the 400 ballplayers that made up the major leagues were, in fact, ther 400 best available ballplayers. Even discounting that 20% of the best ballplayers were banned for being black, a lot of ballplayers played most or all of their careers in the PCL, or just never got noticed; only a few teams even had farm systems, there was very limited scouting and information flow, and the understanding of sports medicine and training was in the Dark Ages. There are probably dozens of pitchers pitching effectively today with rebuilt arms (“Tommy John surgery”) who just 40 years ago would simply be out of baseball and replaced with a presumably inferior alternative.
In 1937 you might have been the best 19-year-old ballplayer in your college or semipro league and you just never got noticed, or on the one day a scout saw you you had a bad day, or he didn’t like your face, and that was it. Today, even high school statistics are carefully colelcted and analyzed, and the Internet and modern communications greatly magnifies the likelihood a fine young player will at least get drafted and get a shot at climbing up from Rookie or A ball… which every team has.
During one of the last Mets games this year, they showed a very interesting stat: the number of complete games pitched in 2006 was about half the number pitched in 1996. That in turn was a little less than half as many as the number from 1986. So there’s a long trend at work here.
I admit the talent pool idea looks ridiculous if you compare 2007 to 1907. If you take things in the shorter term (compare a few years before any expansion to a few years after), which is what I had in mind, I’d expect to see dilution. I have the same opinion as What Exit?: the league is drawing from a larger talent pool than ever now and if there’s a way to measure that dilution, I would expect things to have recovered by now. Let the league keep improving and developing talent from Asia and Latin America for a while longer before expanding again.