Quote:
Originally Posted by packs
I don't really agree with that perspective. A player like Alejandro Oms played in multiple professional leagues and against competition faced nowhere else. If you were in MLB at the same time, you played only white American players.
I don't think there is a way to quantify a percentage of quality players from either MLB or the Negro Leagues in terms of a superstar for every X player, so I don't think there's any reason to make assumptions about the more elite talent either.
Players from Latin America are among the best in the game and have been for quite some time. Many of them come from very little, both in an economic sense and an organized competitive sense, and are elite anyway. Is there anything to suggest the same hasn't always been true?
|
Players from Latin America now get with trainers at an extremely early age and they are playing an extreme amount of baseball against the best players. That happens at an early age because they can sign at 16 years old and agree to deals as young as 14 years old. Those trainers take 30-40% of their bonuses, so they put money into those kids to help them get better. There's nothing like that happening in the U.S.
I think what you're seeing now in the Dominican actually helps prove my point. They play a lot against the best players and everyone plays baseball there. In the U.S., a recent nationwide poll said that just 9% of the 18&under crowd considered baseball to be their favorite sport, which is a continuation of the decline of the sport. Fewer kids are also playing baseball, despite the population of the country on the rise. That means it is harder for kids to get games going and the best players are spread thinner, so they are playing against mediocre talent coming up, except for the few baseball hotbeds still around.
There is a clear decline in the quality of play in the majors and minors because of that, but there are also more young international players coming up that are top talent, which helps make up for the decline. If MLB right now was just American-born players, the level of play would be even worse than it is now.
I'd also point out that MLB was not all white Americans at any point in its history. That's the same thing people who use the segregation crutch say about Ruth, but minimal research disproves.