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Originally Posted by tcblcommish
I will agree that our athletes of today are better than they were in the 20's. I think even Mal would agree to that but there are also 30 teams now compared to the 16 that there were back in the 20s. If you look at the product as a whole, the talent pool really isn't that much different than it was back then becuase even though there is a lot more top quality players and pitchers, there is a lot of below average major leaguers that wouldn't even get a sniff of major league time if there were 16 teams.
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That's true. It's also true that the population from which talent is being drawn has increased much more than the number of available teams has.
Edit: Just some relevant stats:
1920: 40.7 million white men
2000: 138.4 million men plus millions of Japanese, Cuban, Dominican, Venezuelan, etc men.
In 1920 there were about 2.5 million available players per team. In 2000 there were between 15 and 20 million available players per team.