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Henry, that's a much more convincing argument than "I saw both and I know what I saw." There are a lot of problems, not the least of which are:
a. We (all of us, not just you, not just MD, all of us) tend to remember things that happened when we were younger as being more grandiose and washed away of exceptions than things that just happened a couple years ago. You know as well as I that the "player X from a prior generation was better than anything you kids have ever seen" is not a new argument; it's been used pretty much since baseball was old enough to have a history. That's not because the players were actually better; it's because of that phenomenon.
b. Given that this is the case, many of us prefer performance analysis to straight human perception. Saying that Koufax had more endurance than Pedro and as such didn't leave it to the bullpen to finish what he started is something that can be quantified by the data. I still think you need to adjust for what the league as a whole was doing in order to properly make those comparisons (it's entirely possible that Pedro's 33 CGs were more valuable to the teams he played for than Koufax's 100 because holding a team to 2 runs over 9 innings was far more valuable in Fenway in 1998 than in Dodger Stadium in 1963). Still, it's a better start.
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