Perception of pre war baseball players vs other sports

[Tabe]

Originally Posted by puckpaul

In hockey, there were only 6 teams and maybe 20 spots, so you are talking about competing against the 120 best players vs today the top 700 players. Yes, more diverse pool, but the best of these guys were great athletes.

120 guys drawn almost exclusively from Canada, a country whose population was 18 million people in 1960.

Now there's 700, yeah, but drawn from a pool of 375 million in North America alone. So a league that's 5.83x as large but drawing from a pool roughly 21x as large. And that's completely ignoring Europe where a huge percentage of the best players in the world are born.

The very best NHL players of that era were really, really good. But, overall, there's absolutely no comparison to today's players.