Deadball Player Skill???

[steve B]

Originally Posted by prewarsports

I would argue that Baseball was a MORE skilled game in the deadball era whereas this argument obviously can not be made for any other sport. Here are my reasonings:

1. Throwing a baseball fast is a god-given talent and not a skill that can be learned or enhanced by wiehgts. If 5' 9" Billy Wagner can throw 100 mph now, what is there to really think that pitchers like Walter Johnson could not do it 100 years ago. Factor in the spitball and other deadball tricks, I think it was harder to hit a ball 100 years ago than today.

2. 100 years ago there was no TV, IPODS, Basketball, hockey, Pop Waner Football, Video Games etc to compete for kids free time attention, kids played Baseball all day everyday. Today even skilled ballplayers would have a fraction of the time that kids did 100 years ago under their belt. They knew the game better.

3. There was only a fraction of the teams 100 years ago as compared to today so the talent pool was not spread nearly as thin, and this does not even include the exluded players because of their race.

These are just my thoughts but I think a stronger case can be made for their being BETTER Baseball skill 100 years ago than today. The game is different, but not that much. Players today would have a harder time hitting 1910 pitching than 1910 hitters would have hitting todays pitchers!

Rhys

Actually point 3 isn't quite right. The club I'm in had Lenny Merullo speak a few years ago. One thing he brought up was the overall numbers of people involved in organised baseball. It was more in the context of whether certain problem players would have been kept in the big leagues when he played.
The numbers he had were - About 17,500 players now in all levels of pro ball. And about 175,000 when he played. His numbers may be a bit skewed, because he counted a only "professional" baseball, meaning college was out, but industrial leagues were in. I think it still shows a very deep pool of natural talent. As he put it , if you weren't a Williams or DiMaggio you'd better be likeable and not a nuisance come contract time, because they could replace an average player very easily. he played in the 30's -40's but I can't imagine that aspect of the game being that much different from the deadball era.

Steve

[rhettyeakley]

Steve, you are actually making his point for him. When Rhys said there were only a fraction of the teams then he was speaking ONLY of the Major Leagues, as the Minor League system during that time period was everywhere, any city with a decent population had a minor league ballclub. In that time period there were only 16 teams in the "majors". The rosters of those 16 teams were also not as large as they are today.

Thus, there were perhaps 10X the number of organized players competing during that time period for only half the number of teams with smaller rosters. I think this is what Rhys was getting at w/ #3. Even taking into consideration the "excluded" players from the Negro Leagues there were more people trying to get to the majors then.

-Rhett