Quote:
Originally Posted by uruguru
I realize that this was just a snarky attempt to own someone on the internet, but you are correct that the talent levels that Ruth faced were lower than what Williams and Dimaggio faced in the 40s, and Mantle and Mays faced in the 50s.
But if we are comparing the relative talent levels between MLB and the NNL at any particular year in history, the talent levels in the NNL are clearly going to be a lot lower simply because they are pulling players from a much smaller pool of talent (i.e. 10% of the country vs 90%)
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Sure, we know this is the case to some degree but it's pretty impossible to quantify the actual degree. Once baseball did get fully integrated, until the big influx of Latin American and later Asian players, black ballplayers were overrepresented in MLB (note: not of course because of silliness like "blacks are naturally better at baseball" but because athletics has historically been a way for black people to escape poverty that hasn't quite been the same for white people). To take this to an extreme, would an all-black basketball league with 8ish teams (which is about where the NBA sat at once it stabilized) in the mid-50s really be more "diluted" than the all-white NBA?
We also know that whenever NeL teams and MLB teams played head to head, the NeL was very competitive; IIRC the NeL teams in the 30s in particularl won around 2/3rds of the time. Obviously, we can't begin to say that this is a sign that the NNL or NAL were *superior* in talent to MLB - I'm sure the all-black teams were trying harder - but it sure is a point of evidence for them being *similar*, like, the NFL champions used to play a team made up of the best players in college and, even though the NFL teams classically and kind of famously didn't take those games seriously in the least they still defeated the College All-Stars so often and so badly most of the time than eventually the game was dropped.
I agree that we'll probably never really be able to get at the actual exact different levels between the two leagues. Even when we do have instances of players having played in both leagues, which of course only comes at the very, very end of the existence of the NeL, the sample sizes are miniscule. I think people, frankly, need to leave it at "yeah, we don't know for sure" as opposed to pretending to care about "sanctity of the statistics" (which you haven't done here and I'm not saying you are).