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Posted By: jay behrens

Julie, you are correct, a great player would be a great player not matter what era he played in. I forget wher eI first read this, but to best explain this is to think of all the players in the game as being represented by a bell curve on a graph. All of the great players are on the outlier part of the right side of the curve.

In the 19th century, the curve would not be very high. As the game developed and players got better, both phyically and in the play of the game, the right outlier remains in the same place, but the median (middle of the curve) is continuously moving to the right and the curve gets higher and higher. This also means that difference between a great player today is less noticible than it was in the 19th century. It also means that a player that was around middle of the curve in the 19th century would have little or no chance of making a major league team today, but that the great players such as Ewing, Anson, etc would still be great today.



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