Hypothetical Question, could Ruth hit modern pitching

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by rhettyeakley

So young kids that can hit 85-90+ in high school just didn’t exist back then? I went to high school in Maine and we faced Matt Kinney (eventually made the majors with the Twins) and he was routinely hitting 90+ then. Was there some training that a small town kid in Maine had in the 1990’s that was impossible in the 1910-30’s?

Did Something happen at some nebulous point in history that made humans able to throw faster?

I will never understand this logic.

Just because we didn't have radar guns back then doesn't mean we can't make fairly accurate retrodictions about how fast pitchers were throwing during that era. Anecdotally, we know that guys were pitching complete games with regularity, and were even on the mound in back to back games sometimes. Yet they rarely got injured. But it's not because they had magic ligaments, it's because they weren't creating enough torque to damage their arms. We also know that players like Ruth and Hornsby were swinging 50 oz bats! That's truly bonkers. If you tried to swing a bat that heavy against today's pitching, you'd never get a hit. You simply wouldn't have time to get the bat around. We also have video footage of what can only be described now as suboptimal, if not outright silly, pitching forms from numerous players. Guys practically playing catch.

But we don't even need those sorts of observations to know that guys weren't throwing nearly as hard back then. We can look at the peak of human performance in other sports which we do have measurements for like discuss, shot put, and javelin events at the Olympics. We can sit and hypothesize about how and why humans have evolved to become stronger and faster over the last 100 years, but the fact is we have for one reason or another. And that's absolutely irrefutable.