Strat-O-Matic Baseball 365

In the 1870s there were maybe a couple of thousand kids in the world who grew up playing baseball. Now 20 million kids around the world play baseball. Furthermore, in the 1800s you had to be "white" to play. What would that look like today? It would mean guys in single A ball could make the MLB because all the Hispanic players, all the black players, all the Asian and foreign players would be gone. .

This is not even up for debate, it is a numbers game. Baseballs' player pool this century is at least 20 million kids growing up playing the game. The player pool in 1899 was maybe a few thousand. If you can't understand these facts, you are mathematically and logically challenged.

Mike Trout has faced more pitchers in the last two seasons (18-19) than Lou Gherig faced in his whole career.
Guys like Ross Barnes, Bill Dahlen, and Hugh Duffy would have trouble batting .440 against today's best high school pitchers.

Even Babe Ruth faced mostly pitchers who would not be able to sign a minor league contract today.

Radagast Brown wrote: This is not even up for debate, it is a numbers game. Baseballs' player pool this century is at least 20 million kids growing up playing the game. The player pool in 1899 was maybe a few thousand. If you can't understand these facts, you are mathematically and logically challenged.

You heard it folks, No debate. Let's move on to the next thread worthy of consideration.

This is a fundamentally flawed proposition and here's why.

Advancements in nutrition, health care, sanitation / plumbing, physical fitness, advanced training techniques, agriculture, refrigeration, antibiotics, materials management / engineering, etc have had dramatic impact on things like life expectancy, infant mortality, average height and weight, education, and all manner of human performance and outcomes. Yet, we are genetically, culturally, and socially descended from these same people who didn't have access to modern day advancements just four or five generations ago. Not nearly enough time for true mechanical evolution to have introduced any meaningful differences / improvements.

Many scientific studies back up these generalizations. Some of them are vilified for being eugenic / racist. People twist it both ways. Modern day people couldn't have survived the past environment without their creature comforts hence the gene pool is being diluted. Past people couldn't have survived in modern times because they were inferior and couldn't compete, etc (which is another way to attack third world and disadvantaged peoples).

The environment component is the framework or foundation upon which people achieve (or fail to achieve) their potentials. That modern day people would have trouble if transplanted back to the past or past people would have trouble if transplanted to the present goes without saying. But, had these people been born and lived in other times, they would have fared probabilistically (it is a real word) just like everyone else. Very little about their environments and life experiences would have been the same comparing current times to past times. How Ruth or Duffy or Jim Thorpe or Jesse Owens or Teddy Roosevelt or anyone else from back then would have fared today OR how anyone from the current times would have fared back then is impossible to precisely know. Odds are that past exceptional people would have had better chances than the average person in modern times just like current day exceptional people would have had better chances than the average person were they born in the past. But, nothing is assured. If Bill Gates had been born 100 years earlier, he might have caught small pox as an infant and died before the age of 5. Had Bill Gates survived and been afforded comparable opportunities, he might have been another Rockefeller. There's no way to know.

An interesting real world microcosm of how environmental variation affects humans and human outcomes is taking place on the Korean peninsula. Koreans as recently as 100 years ago were a relatively isolated and uniform Asian sub-group because of their geographic isolation on their peninsula and their cultural / social inclusiveness. After the communist revolution and dramatic separation of populations between North and South (especially in the last 40 years with the development of the South), we've seen a huge divergence between this once uniform population of people along the lines of my first paragraph, above. Genetically, they are still the same people. Environmentally, they are not.

Radagast, before you attack me, what's the practical point to this? You've made these kinds of statements before. You start this post, today.... What's the point?