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Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
Baseball is drowning in stats, but they do facilitate discussions of comparing players across different eras, which people always love. I think it's relatively harder to do that in a sport far less given to stats, and it could be (just theorizing) that the lack of stats is one reason casual fans may be less interested in greats of the distant past?
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I love stats...but it’s hard to capture much beyond goals and assists in soccer and even then numbers are not always meaningful or comparable.
Hockey has goal and assist numbers Pre-War (though assists were given out much less frequently) but Pre-War players are still dramatically underrated. A typical baseball top ten will be filled at least half with Pre-War players while a typical hockey one will not have any. I think baseball overrates Pre-War players since they played pre-integration (meaning that the “replacement level player” was much worse than today) but that hockey and perhaps soccer underrate them.