by Elton Gahr

Created on: April 06, 2009

The conversation that compares teams now to teams then no matter the sport is one that is endlessly fascinating and baseball is one of the easiest sports to compare because it, more than almost any other sport, is filled with statistics and numbers while having less interaction of strategy. But there are three reasons that the team of today is overall better than the teams of yesterday. Money, sports medicine and pool of players to pick from. None of these are particularly fair, but they exist and to have any discussion comparing the teams we have to acknowledge them.

Money is the most frustrating of the three because many of us wish that money were a smaller part of the sports we love, but the truth is that it has a major effect on the quality of players. In the early years of baseball playing the game meant living on less money than many other people, as well as long bus rides and not seeing your families. There were always men willing to play, but now a young man who wishes to go into baseball as a career, who is truly good, can justify spending hundreds of hours training in a way they couldn't have before.

The second major advantage that modern teams have is one we all appreciate. Sports medicine has allowed players to continue long after they would have retired in the previous generation of baseball players. Pitchers are most effected by this but all players are able to stay in the game longer and experience count in this game. Even those who remained in the game a generation ago often did so at a diminished capacity. Who knows what some of the great pitchers of old could have done if they hadn't been in constant pain while pitching.

The final of my three points is the one that is most important though. Baseball teams today gather the best player from all over the world bringing them to America, while even after the integration of baseball the choices for the teams were much smaller. No one would have thought to bring in a Japanese player fifty years ago. This does not make any one player better than the best players of that time, and I have little doubt that the superstars then would be superstars now, but with ten times as many people to choose from there should be ten times as many great players.

It is impossible to know of course how big of an effect things like love of the game, and teamwork played into the success of these teams and just as now the sum of the parts often became bigger than the individual parts but on a general scale simply looking at the types of teams that exist it seems unlikely that the teams of yesteryear could truly stand up against those who play now.

Learn more about this author, Elton Gahr.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.