Perception of pre war baseball players vs other sports

[puckpaul]

Originally Posted by Tabe

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.

I get that but they did use Americans back then in northern states, and it’s a big stretch to say that the US population is the pool today….maybe 3-4 states and a few other pockets. Europe does help a lot today to even it out, especially Russia/Sweden/Finland.

And I made a mistake, only 15 players on a team back in the 20-30’s at most, maybe fewer in the 20’s (don’t have my programs handy). The best players would still be the best players. The depth in the league is a problem today, most teams have little skill on the bottom half/two thirds of the roster even if the guys are in better shape and can skate.