Harry Heilmann

I was just goofing around on baseball-reference and discovered an interesting fact about ATG favorite (I know he's one of mine) Harry Heilmann. He is 19th on the all-time list for sacrifice hits with 277. He was a high average, high OBP slugger! The only other players in the top 50 that I would even remotely classify as sluggers would be Speaker (#10), Cobb (#12), and Sam Crawford (#44). I guess it was indicative of the times Harry played (1914-1932). The only really modern player in the top 75 is Omar Vizquel with 256 at #35 and then all the way down to Bert Campaneris at #83. Anyway it's kind of interesting the way the game has changed over the years. But you know if we were sitting in Yankee Stadium watching the 23 Yankees play the 23 Tigers I think we would also recognize that some things have stayed the same. It's what makes this a great game.

Some things have changed, you don't have to be "white" anymore and the players are much much better than they used to be. Babe Ruth hit homeruns off of guys that would not make the AAA teams of today. Walter Johnson struck out batters that would struggle to make college teams of today. And the game was greatly improved with the DH.

Radagast Brown wrote:

PostSun Feb 07, 2016 3:38 pm
Some things have changed, you don't have to be "white" anymore and the players are much much better than they used to be. Babe Ruth hit homeruns off of guys that would not make the AAA teams of today. Walter Johnson struck out batters that would struggle to make college teams of today. And the game was greatly improved with the DH.

Please stop playing ATG if you have so little respect for old time ball players. Or restrict yourself to only using players from 1998 to the present while the rest of us use the whole player pool. Every thoughtful fan knows that the great players could play well in any era. Babe Ruth and Walter Johnson, just to name a few, were exceptional athletes and could make the necessary adjustments to play today's game. And remember that today they would have the benift of today's better conditioning, nutrition, manicured fields, Huge gloves, pristeen white baseballs (as oposed to dingy brown), air conditioning, scouting reports on opposing players and on and on and on. It's odd that you NEVER state any of the myriad advantages that modern players have over old time players.



BOTTOM LINE: IF YOU DON'T LIKE OLD TIME PLAYERS DON'T PLAY ATG.

NUFF SAID!!

And another thing..... There is a larger question here and it's this attitude that humans living today are superior to all humans that came before them. In many ways modern humans are inferior. Very few people can't, or won't, do anything for themselves. Many people can't find the 7-11 or the Dunkin' Donuts on the corner without GPS. Ancient people were able to figure out the orbits of 6 of the planets and they built pyramids for God's sake. By the same token baseball players from 60, 70,90, or a 100 years ago were not half-erect ape men that couldn't learn how to use tools.
I'm not saying that ancient people or old time ballplayers were better than today, only that they weren't idiots. They just didn't know what they didn't know but they were intelligent and knew quite a lot.

Now in the immortal words of Stan Lee......nuff said!

I do agree, great players of the pre-steroid era would be great players whatever year they played in.
I am not sure that all stars of today could play when baseball was clean.

I find it sad that MR. Brown has such disrespect for the players of the past. One of the beautiful aspects of baseball is its rich and storied past. I would suggest he views Ken Burns Baseball documentary and maybe he would have a better sense of the history of the game and how much these great players of the past became the foundation of our beloved sport. I don't think we argue that the athletes of today are physically superior than those of the past and that is true in all sports. Bobby Jones never drove a golf ball 350 yards but no one ever denies his greatness or importance to golf. The evolution of athletes is a no different than the evolution of man in other fields [science, medicine, technology, ect.......] . As for ATG we have a vehicle that allows us who love this game to play WHAT IF with history . For me, I get to see how my boyhood heroes stack up. Mantle v Mathewson , Koufax v Cobb , all done on a level playing field WHAT IF. Bill

Lanier64 makes an excellent case here to refute the tiresome posts of this gentleman. I would only add that in those early days all of the best athletes played baseball because the other professional leagues were either non-existent or in their low-paying infancy. Additionally, with fewer teams, one saw the best players more often. There were no expansion squads with cast-off pitchers to fatten your BA upon; you saw The Big Train considerably more often than a player from the recent era sees an elite pitcher.

Ultimately the game comes down to pitcher vs. batter.
And you either fire it fast or put a wrinkle in it to get it past the hitter. And I happen to believe that guys like Walter, Feller, and Grove could still pitch today.
And you need to put the bat on the ball and I also think that today's pitchers aren't doing anything different, so guys like Musial, Dimaggio, Ruth would still be able to hit.
And today's players have year round conditioning and an amazing amount of pampering and perks.

There is no doubt the old time Hall of Fame players and great all" white" players could still perform well today, the question is how would the rest of the pre war players do? How many would make MLB teams of today? So I am calling into question Hugh Duffy's .424 batting average and other feats like that.

I find it sad that when the curtain is pulled back on the "white" washing of history some find it "tiresome". Kick rocks.