On what evidence do some people base the claim that current pitchers are better than ones from before?

Question

If it's simply an assumption that all athletes are better today, I don't know if there's any point to discussing it.
But I look at the generally much better mechanics and leg kick of earlier pitchers, check the stats, watch documentaries and clips, read extensively on baseball history...and I simply cannot see it.
I don't think that old-time players are automatically better. But I don't think they're automatically worse, either.

So what would lead someone to claim that pitchers today are simply better? Is it evidence or ignorance?

Whoever helps me understand this best will get the points and the thanks of a grateful nation.

T H, I really don't think that pitchers today throw harder. Look at old still photos and see how high the leg kick is; the legs are where the power for fastballs come from (according to Sandy Koufax). You don't see that kind of motion much today; ergo, I don't know that they really throw harder.

Somebody made the flawed analogy to track and field. But in the 1920s, they ran on cinders. Now they run on high-tech tracks; the technology of equipment is the biggest difference there.

And being bigger and stronger doesn't seem to be the issue with most pitchers. Look at Glavine, Maddux, and Pedro for three great but fairly skinny pitchers.

Answer 1

Remember that baseball is a sum-zero competition -- every hit credited to a batter is a hit debited against a pitcher. It very much is a selective process, and an evolutionary one.

The late Steven Jay Gould best described this in his book Full House, in an essay about why the .400 hitter has disappeared. It is not that the best players have diminished; hardly. There is a real upper limit to human performance, and the best players have always been "an inch from the wall", whether it was Cobb in 1912 or Boggs in 1987. What has changed is the aggregate level of competition (despite expansion; the population and potential player pool have also grown). Whereas the least players used to be, oh, 20 feet from the wall, now they are 8 feet away. Cobb got to beat up on pitchers weaker than anyone Boggs ever saw (more than once). The average level of player talent has moved up; the best players have less competitive advantage in today's game than their counterparts did in the olde dayes.

Put another way, Ruth was an orca among minnows, while Bonds has been on orca among groupers. Same orca, but the surroundings change the perception of how amazingly out of proportion it is to the other fish. (Don't belabor this; it is merely a metaphor and not intended for quantitative evaluation.)

So. The best players of today are probably a little better than the olde-tymers -- track and field records indicate that, yes, we're getting a little better all the time, but the increments of improvement are getting smaller and smaller -- but as the entire talent level has moved up, it has become harder to stand out from the crowd. And this is true of hitters and pitchers.

Get a copy of Gould's book, it really is enlightening.

Answer 2

Well, clearly the pitchers are bigger, stronger, and throw harder, etc. The argument also goes for hitters, although one argument is that hitters have it tougher because of all the specialists they only see x times a year. Using that logic, the pitchers of old must have been better because they faced only 7 other teams 7 or 8 times a year, whereas the most a batter will see a pitcher now would be maybe 8-10 at bats in a year. My conclusion is that the pitchers were better pitchers in the old days, but they didn't throw 100+ which makes up for knowing how to pitch in most cases.

Answer 3

Check Cy Young's stats in his career & that's all you need to know on whether the pitchers of today are better or not. I say the ones from before are way better b/c they didn't have the wimpy pitch count crap that they do in Mlb today. Young would pitch a whole game & come back 2 days later to do the same thing. Today's pitchers are wusses compared to the time of yong Christy matthewson & walter johnson.

Answer 4

Pitchers, as a whole, are much better today because people, in general, are much bigger and healthier than in the past. But, as far as the top pitchers of the past, they would compete in today's game just as well as they did in their own time.