1924 World Series footage
 

Amazing footage of the 1924 WS. Seems very well filmed for the era.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUX9QZo_jX8

Cool video!

WaJo is at 1:39 by the way. Same video with commentary:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hxXWykxGRs

I very well could be wrong, but whenever I see footage of pitchers pitching in games way back when, Its no wonder some hitters could hit the .400 mark for a season (along with the gloves the fielders used and field conditions) and its very evident why that will never happen again. The pitchers LOOK like they are hitting about 85mph at best. Its almost just all arm without the full body torque and legs like it is with modern day pitchers. Think of Nolan Ryan, Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens and the list goes on.
Imagine Mike Trout hitting against any of the top pitchers back then. He would probably hit .500 with 80 HR in a season. Just food for thought.

-1

Well thought out and insightful.

It’s Walter Johnson for crying out loud.

3 out of 5 scenes showing pitchers pitching were not WJ. Even still and blasphemous as it may be, even watching WJ pitch, you can see its all arm.
I cant recall where i watched it, but I recently saw a video demonstrating how they calculated his pitch speed and showed that it was 83mph.

As Hank Thomas points out in his biography of Walter Johnson, the apparatus Johnson had to throw through at the Remington Arm's bullet-testing range in Connecticut was at "shoulder height to measure bullets fired from a standing position and Johnson couldn't get his sidearm throws to go straight through the plate. "At length, however" it was reported, "after some effort and with a consequent loss in speed in an attempt to place the ball accurately, "the sphere was successfully hurled in the proper direction, broke one of the fine wires in transit and collided with a heavy thud against the steel plate." Johnson's best throw clocked at 122 feet per second (82 m.p.h), Rucker's at 113, both on their third and last tries. Despite the flawed procedure, it does allow for some comparison. In June 1933, Van Lingle Mungo of the Dodgers and Lefty Gomez of the Yankees, two of the fastest pitchers of their era, were tested at West Point's department of ballistics and mathematics, presumably with more sophisticated equipment. Mungo registered 113 feet per second and Gomez 111 on their best throws."

Given that Walter Johnson was unable to use his natural motion during the speed test in Bridgeport, Connecticut, I don't think it is a reliable gauge of the Big Train's actual speed.

Torque This
 

Here we go again! 85 MPH? Where'd you pull that out of? Cobb said the ball "hissed" as it went by, Crawford described it as a "swoosh." Sisler said in 1916 if Walter had been willing to put the first couple pitches under the batter's chin, nobody ever would have gotten close enough to the plate to get a hit off him. But gosh, imagine if today's pitching coaches had only been around to correct the flaws in his delivery, what an eight years he might have had before the TJ surgery failed and he was done! Go look at Johnson's stats and think that these were mostly put up in the small ball era, when giving up even one run might mean the ballgame, and that he never really had an outpitch. Fastballs, just fastballs, one after the other, see if you can hit it. Walter said that early on, a lot of people tried to get him to change his unique motion to a more conventional one, but he was striking out everyone in sight, so why should he?
Here's some torque for you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aN0viXDAiU

+1

Has someone made sure Val has seen this footage?

If you watch the video it’s obvious they could run a lot faster back then

+1 total nonsense. I'm sick and tired of this. Keep on convincing yourselves they were throwing soft pitch watermelons. That these morons today are so much bigger and better and they all throw 110 mph. That they don't totally break down at the drop of a hangnail. Total BS by armchair people who obviously never played baseball and don't have a clue.

I knew the immediate responses to my post were going to rile people up.

I'm somewhere in the middle on this. I don't care about Ty Cobb's report of hearing a ball hiss. Sure, Johnson threw very hard for the era. I'm sure in 1920 people were also saying "my god. . . the automated horseless carriage just flew buy me at lightening speed. . . ." Everything is relative.

Having said that, some of these guy were throwing plenty hard. Not they weren't over 100, but they threw damm hard.

And comparing people from different eras with all the variables at play is just silly.

Yes, but I do think that pitcher effectiveness, including the fastball, might just be the closest you can get in all of sports. And in my research, I did pay a lot of attention to the opinions of people who experienced the game close at hand in the "Golden Era" and were still doing that several generations later, into the 1980s, in fact. While certainly not dispositive, and allowing for some generational bias, you have to listen to them. And I don't think I ever came across any of the old timers who claimed that Nolan Ryan was faster than Johnson, not one; or Ryne Duren; or Sandy Koufax; or Herb Score; or Bob Feller (who was always the first to say he thought that Johnson was the greatest pitcher ever and also the fastest); or Lefty Grove; or Dazzy Vance. Who knows what they would have to say about Clemons, or Pedro, or Randy Johnson, or Chapman, etc.? The string runs out when all the old guys are dead. One thing we know for sure is that one of these days, if not already, someone will come along who throws harder than Johnson did. That's guaranteed. Records are made to be broken, as the saying goes, and Walter has lost a lot of them over the years. I can hear him now, saying, "Well, that's just fine," in his Kansas twang. But Larry Ritter didn't name his book "The Glory of All Times" for a reason. To be "The Glory of Their Times" is all any of us could ask for, and those guys knew they were the luckiest sons of bitches ever born, to be where they were doing what they did. That will always have to be enough for them--and for us.

Not challenging your research, but I'm not impressed by generational bias. I talk to seniors all the time . . . everything was great in the 40s and 50s. . . no one had any issues . . . . everyone was unfailingly polite . . . my god all the singers were so much more talented than people today. . . . my god the movies were all so much better..... I'm sure you get the idea. I think we all sugar coat the good old days as we get older to more or less degrees. And I think its particularly pronounced in sports.

Ha

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One thing for sure is they had better baseball cards back then.
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Till they put one in his ear since no helmets or body armor back then or a new ball every pitch.

You pull Walter Johnson out of a time machine and put him on a mound he wouldn't be one of the best 100 pitchers in MLB. Just like you take the best Football or Basketball player from 75 years ago and dropped them in todays game it would be a massacre. Its not knocking the old players its just simply evolution.

I guess the ancient Egyptian pyramid builders wouldn't be able to construct a single-bedroom bungalow nowadays, because they wouldn't know the first thing about computerized AutoCAD programs. Sure, makes sense.

Can we just stop going down this same rabbit hole time after time after time, and just enjoy the video for what it is??? I'm beggin' ya!!!

Fair enough. I'm convinced that in my time of the 60s-80s, the music was better, the movies were better, the books were better, TV was better, the food was...no, actually, the food is much better now. I see what you mean.

Jim, I really enjoyed watching this footage, especially seeing WaJo pitching!

There is nothing to be said, other than to express one's own biases.

Mike... that is that Trout guy's name. I've not seen him play. I've watched a few innings of games in which he played with whatever the MLB subscription I have is (which is crap because for various reasons they black out 30+ games a season when I wanna watch the Cardinals). Trout doesn't seem to me to be all that other people see. I don't think he is a lock for the HOF. I'd not be upset if he didn't get in. I recall hearing a Dad tell his young son how great a player some Strasburg guy was, he was an unbeatable pitcher who would certainly be in the Hall. It was a "lock," I heard, whatever that was. I think he is no longer in the majors. I don't think he'll make the Hall, I don't think he ever won 20 games in the Majors. I felt that when that Dad was talking back then, I think that now about Trout stuff.

I don't think pitcher bore down throwing quality pitches on every pitch. I don't think Johnson threw competitive fastballs that were going 83 miles an hour. Golly, as a kid (20-25 years of age) I think I could throw in the high 70s and occasionally in the very low 80s. Walter Johnson could vastly surpass that. I stood in on guys throwing in the low 90s. I can't imagine that Walter was throwing that slow. (Should that have been slowly? Stood in equates to I was in the batter's box and lacked the ability to take a timely swing at a ball moving in the low 90s, nor the high 80s, nor the mid 80s)

Of course I didn't see Walter pitch. But I can't imagine that if he pitched now he'd be mediocre.

The runners in the video aren't running faster, the video of the film is from a film that's running faster.

NEGATIVE 1. I applaud that up there, and agree with it.

I saw a game in St. Louis in the old ball park, sat in the right field pavilion with the screen in front of it. Starters were Gibson and Koufax. I can still hear the pop of the catchers' mitts as they caught those two, that was about 60 years ago. Gibson and Koufax must to have been topping out at 85 mph at least.


Ok, fans of Trout and Strasburg... vote out of the Hall Cobb, Wagner, Cy Young, Walter, Christy, Alexander, and the like.... and then fill the damn hall up with mediocre modern ballplayers like Trout, Puckett, and Baines and the like... those would be players who'd struggle to hit Walter Johnson's 83 mph fastball.

Beautiful rant Frank and 100% agree, just an FYI, if you set up a VPN that works with MLB.com you can watch all those blacked out games. Just google "how to get blacked out baseball games". Go Giants!

In the current strikeout era there seems to be an epidemic of injuries requiring Tommy John operations. Could this be related to the proliferation of 100 mph fastballs currently? Any old timer with such an injury wouldn’t be throwing as fast or would have an abbreviated career. I’m of the opinion that the current era of “heat” is related to the increased incidence of elbow injuries.

As much as I like Ohtani, with two TJs under his belt, I think his future as a pitcher with the Dodgers may be wishful thinking.

A few comments:

The footage is fantastic. I'm not even sure the people in 1924 would be able to comprehend that our national pastime is still being played 100 years later!

Secondly, to the debate that is had constantly: we can only judge these men by how good they were to their peers. We cannot hop in a time machine and take Walter Johnson, Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, from their time and plop them into today's game. They were the cream of the crop when they played, no questions asked.

In 1924, modern weight training didn't exist, players traveled on sleeper cars and most if not all held jobs in the offseason. Most players played every game of the season, and pitchers almost always went a full 9 innings. I'd like to see any player today accomplish what they do now, under those circumstances!

My point being, we can argue this until we're blue in the face. We're not gonna get anywhere. Just enjoy looking at where we were, and where we are now.

People always say the music from the 50s and 60s was so great. It wasn’t. There was a ton of garbage music. But that goes away into obscurity and what it played on classic rock stations today is the 1% of hit songs. You hear the one hit wonder …. Not the six terrible albums the same band recorded. Same with movies. The great movies from the 70s are a staple of television. No one plays the bad movies. Television from the 70s and 80s is not 1/1 millionth as good as the production value and quality of what is available to stream today.

I couldn't disagree more. Of course, anything in the realm of art is always a matter of taste. You like today's music? Fine, you listen to it to your heart's delight. I have my Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin, Who, Airplane, Dylan, etc., etc., etc., compilations that never get old for me. You like today's TV, with its frenetic editing and ridiculous story lines? Give me my Twilight Zone, Star Triek, Gunsmoke, old movies from the 30s and 40s, etc., reruns any day over that crap, but you binge on today's overproduced vapidity all you want. I can't remember the last time I didn't come out of a movie thinking it was too long, too loud, too jacked up for limited attention spans, but you go see "Barbie" as many times as you like. The movies of my youth were about real people, the real world, things that mattered, which is what art should illuminate, IMO, not just blow away your eyeballs and ears for enough time to get them away from a tiny screen for a nanosecond. And yes, there has always been a lot of junk catering to the masses produced to cash in, but I do think the 60s and 70s actually had more of the cream rising to the top in terms of that, too. "I'm talkin' 'bout my g-g-generation!" and damn proud of it.

+1

I agree completely. This reminds me very much of a guy who is seemingly forgotten, but whose work I believe deserves further study: Mike Marshall. A somewhat short, fattish guy who pitched incessantly and featured a screwball (now no doubt called four or five other things by the creative geniuses who feel the need to rename things every few years to help justify their jobs). For a guy who threw ALL THE TIME and did so at a high level, I believe he was/is ignored because he rubbed the establishment the wrong way. But when you have Tommy John himself extolling Marshall's theories of pitching and kinesiology, you should sit up and pay attention. SABR gives us a great recap of Mike and his careers. https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/mike-marshall/

BTW_ cool video-- thanks for the link.

Of course Barbie is a great example of fluff.

But it wasn’t nominated for a single academy award.

Try comparing the artistic achievement of Oppenheimer to moves of the 70s.

Totally agree with every word.

As I said, if you think all they were throwing is 85 mph at the major league level in the 1920s, you're dumber than a box of rocks. Ask Ray Chapman about that 85 mph ball that effing killed him. How did you ever successfully make it in life? Certainly not by playing or understanding the game of baseball. My God, I'm 66 years old and I can hit 85 mph, as proven by batting cages a couple of weeks ago. If all they were throwing was 85 mph, and I could time travel, you would be collecting my cards!

Of course, there are examples of great movies (and music, and TV, and books, etc.) and lousy ones in every era. "Oppenheimer" would have fit right in the 1970s, that's why it shocked people that it did so well. From Patton, Godfathers I and II, French Connection, Clockwork Orange, through Chinatown, The Conversation, Jaws, Taxi Driver, Animal House, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Star Wars, Blazing Saddles, Network, to Halloween, Apocalypse Now (the original, not the crappy "director's cut,") Alien, etc., the 1970s is regarded as the last golden age of Hollywood. Any comparison you try to make between that decade of movies and more recent ones is going to lose hands down, I believe. But we digress.