Quote:
Originally Posted by Seven
"The Players of today are so much better than the players of 20, 30, 40, etc years ago."
I feel like it's a statement born of pure stupidity. Frankly I think the entire concept is ridiculous. Yes if we magically got a a time machine, grabbed Babe Ruth from 1927 and plopped him into baseball today, he would not do as well. But a Babe Ruth with access to modern health care, training and all the things players have today would still be a massive force in the game today.
I wish people instead of debating just appreciate what these players did, within the context of their times. Yes it's fun to play the "What if?" Game, but the "X player is better than Y player, because Player X is from 2023," is nonsense, in my opinion. The sport has changed so much, you can't properly make this argument.
We can compare era adjusted, park adjusted stats, that's as probably as close as we're going to get. Just enjoy the history of the game, and take pride in the fact that the sport you follow has a long and storied past.
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I understand what you're saying and agree to a certain point.
On the flipside, it's just as annoying when certain fans declare the old-timers were so much better then the athletes today...because they weren't spoiled or soft, only played for the love of the game, ate rocks for breakfast, and smoked 3 packs of Camels a day.
I'm a boxing specialist and one of my pet peeves is fantasy fights between guys from different era's (Can John L. Sullivan beat Jack Johnson beat Jack Dempsey beat Joe Louis beat Muhammad Ali beat Mike Tyson, etc, etc.), and how into it some boxing fans and historians are. They will argue outcomes over the course of days. Write thesis's, articles, and books about it. They are mostly irrelevant arguments to me, unless you are comparing contemporaries to contemporaries.