Quote:
Originally Posted by Rookiemonster
What nobody is saying is this . Is Jackie Robinson was white would he be in the hall of fame ?
I do belive he is a hall of famer but not just because he was a good baseball player and a was a great man , that being said how many great men are not in any type of hall of fame .
He got in for being a pioneer and a good baseball player . Jesse owns was great but his track numbers in today's world are for high school kids . You really can't compare athelites of today to yesterday's .A lot of people on this board have trouble understanding this . with players not really being that good but good for the time they played . Your views are all dangerously flawed if you truly believe that Cobb would be a great player today .
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I think most of us understand that, but being one of the best 5 players during his career (as Cobb certainly was) indicates he'd be doing fine in the majors today if he had been born 100 years later than he was. That is, 2016 Ty Cobb would in fact be better than 1916 Ty Cobb was if you cloned him -- unless you're suggesting that the genes for being a great athlete just mutated into the gene pool in the past few decades. And 1916 Mike Trout would have done just fine in 1916, but he wouldn't necessarily be better than Cobb. You have to take away weightlifting, year-round training in general, access to better healthcare and nutrition, more refined training methods starting even before Little League, etc. and see what's left for a fair comparison. If you put Trout today in a time machine and send him back, he would in all likelihood be even better than Ruth. If, on the other hand, you had put baby Mike Trout in a time machine and sent him back to develop in the early 20th century, he'd still grow up to be a great player, but I'm thinking more like Jimmie Foxx great rather than better than Ruth.
I can't imagine putting, say, Andres Galarraga into the Hall of Fame in place of Roger Connor, but that's what you'd have to do if you wanted a Hall of players who were the best regardless of cohort. I'm sure Galarraga was better at hitting a 95-100 mph fastball, but it's simply not a fair comparison because of the different environments in which they developed, and it makes for a less interesting Hall of Fame anyway.