"Whites" Only Please.

My head is not exploding but you left out so much relevant info. How come no mention if you would let Ruth and others juice just like the stars of today...and yes including David Ortiz. What about the unbelievable low bar for todays players. I mean you can hit 30 hrs and strike out 200 times and you are a star. That is a horrible stat in any era. Gee I wonder how many hrs Joe D would have it if Yankee stadium was not 4 miles in dead center and 3.5 miles in power alley left field. Many more banjo parks today. Gosh today a guy hits a 450 foot hr and he is god. That would not be making it in Mantle's top 25. I am still waiting to see a complete player like Willie Mays...gee he has not showed up yet. I feel the pre 1940 guys are just as potent...just did not see them personally. It is impossible to compare eras. What about the advanced medical arena which repairs and returns players to peek performance quickly..when in the past players just played hurt. Oh yeah thats another thing most players don't do today. As far as pitchers go yesterdays elite I am sure are with todays elite. I once saw a science show and they compared speeds of pitches today to the past. They actually had some rudimentary measures back in the good old days and they examined that and adjusted for accuracy. Well the top 3 pitchers speed wise...only one was post 1970...Nolan Ryan...with speed gun comparisons done he was number one at consistently over 100.8 miles per hour topping out at 107.6. The other two were Walter Johnson and I cant for the life of me remember the third one. Big difference...old days no relievers..starters stayed in...advantage hitter. Todays relievers...top percentage...excellent..advantage pitcher...however I would estimate at least 20% just plain suck and should not even be in majors....advantage hitter.

Hard to know how players of the past would do today. The leagues may not have been integrated pre-1947 but those players back then were the best of the best. Only 16 teams, talent was not watered down, baseball was king of professional sports, and these guys were not only playing to win World Series bonus money (which many times was as much as their season's salary) but were playing to avoid a life of working in a coal mine or as a laborer - they played hardball and they meant it. Many of the parks were huge, no cheap HR's, pitchers routinely headhunted, they traveled by trains, played several doubleheaders a year and then when the season was over, they would barnstorm, play winter ball...they may not have been as physically talented or have today's training methods but these guys knew how to play the game. Its been well documented that players such as Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston would have been all-stars in MLB had they been given a chance. Having said that, this whole race thing in this country getting pretty boring and becoming increasingly counter-productive to the greater good - the past is the just that, the past. If I want to read race baiting articles I can check out CNN. Sports and sites like this are supposed to be a diversion from that. Play ball!

Well said, Mr. Blazers!

I will second that. All Blazer's points are dead on accurate in my not so humble opinion.

Compare eras? Heck, it is difficult to compare players playing right now. Who is clean and who is not? Troy Glaus once pointed out it was tough to get noticed hitting 25 clean HRs because of the roided guys hitting 60. But then while most of us agree the juicers numbers should be discounted none of us can agree how much. And for that matter I cannot even agree with myself from one day to the next on that as I struggle to wrap my head around the fact those hitting performances were accomplished against juicing pitchers.

It's easy to forget the flip side of the pre-war era. Hitters didn't have to face guys throwing sliders, or flame throwers out of the pen, or fielders with gloves the size of small countries. Bill Mazeroski played with a glove that, if you gave it to any 6 year old today, they'd throw it away, and he played in the 50's and 60's.

Honestly, I've seen multiple videos of Ruth's swing, and I truly believe that if he played today he'd be one of those guys hitting .230-30-95 with 200 K's. I just don't see how he'd get wood on a good slider, not to mention a splitter. But I don't know that much about it, and in any case with modern training and coaching he wouldn't have that body or swing.

I saw a great quote from Noodles Hahn some time ago, and he was bemoaning the fact that all the pitchers knew that the 350 inning workloads and 170 pitch CG's were killing their arms, but they didn't want to go back to the corn fields or the mines or the factories so they just did it.

Life was damned hard 100 years ago, few of us could handle it.

Two cents

I think we can assume that the best black and white players of the modern era are about the same ability and we can assume the same for the black and white players of the 50's and 60's. I don't think there is an argument there. Willie Mays/Mickey Mantle, etc.

Then, by logic we must assume the best black and white players of the 20's, 30's and 40's were of equal ability. Josh Gibson/
Babe Ruth, etc.

So, if it is true that Babe Ruth would be an average player today, then so would every other superstar of the 20's and 30's no matter what their color (Rooskie's point).

If Ruth, Gibson, Johnson and a few others could play at all in the majors today is a testament to their greatness.

There are so many great points made in this thread, but I think when you throw everything in (relief, sliders, player pool, trains, trainers, steroids, modern training, equipment, etc.), the truth is you can only compare players within an era (how wide that window is I don't know) because they all competed in the same environment. Just because Ruth only faced white pitchers, so what; Gibson batted against a far more limited pool of pitchers. Truth is- logic would say that the best black players would equal to the best white players and neither comparable to the modern era.


Just to make the point again. Jesse Owens was a superstar jumper and sprinter, but he couldn't make the US relay team today, but just like the point Johnny Blazers and others have made- look at differences in eras. Owens wore heavier shoes, ran on cinder tracks, etc; he was great because he was excellent in his era.

And Babe Ruth was a giant of a player, just like Mays was and Trout is, etc. They all dominate within their era.

The player pool now a days comes from literally billions of people. In Babe Ruth and worse yet Hugh Duffy's day, the player pool was maybe a couple hundred thousand people.

The great and good players today are way better than in the 1800s-1940s and much better than the players of the 1950s and 1960s.

Mike Napoli and guys like that would blast 1927 pitching to the tune of at least 60 homeruns.

The majority of pre WW2 MLB pitchers would not be MLB pitchers today. There were no Hispanic players, no Asian players, many fewer American players. The vast majority of pre WW2 pitching would be of minor league quality at best today.

Mike Napoli and guys like that would blast 1927 pitching to the tune of at least 60 homeruns.

You're probably right. And if you gave Babe Ruth access to the proper diet, training regimen, technology and advances in medicine that modern ballplayers enjoy, he might hit a thousand home runs.

Conversely Radagast's argument would be that an average pitcher today, like Edwin Jackson for instance, would dominate 20's & 30's hitters like Lou Gehrig, Rogers Hornsby, Babe Ruth, etc. He would be better than the likes of Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, et al since they would be no better than minor league pitchers today.

I don't buy it.

However, who really cares if average players today would dominate great players from the past or if the best players from the past would even make it to the majors today. Is baseball not enjoyable today because we are thinking how much better the players will be 100 years from now? Going with Brown's argument again, the player pool would be so much greater then that Mike Trout & Clayton Kershaw wouldn't even make it to AAA if they played 100 years from now. Even if true does that diminish the enjoyment we get out of the game today or make us think that today's superstars shouldn't be considered among the greatest of all time? I think not.