Still nothing

The players said no to federal moderation because they felt the owners actually hadn't done much negotiating. That's probably true.  The owners are meeting over the next couple of days and the CBA will be discussed a lot but any formal offer is not expected. Gotta say this is killing my blog, dropping my ad revenue an undefined percentage from $0 to $0.  And don't even talk about my non-existent subscriber substack. Brutal. 

So what to talk about?  How about lists?  ESPN put out their list of the Top 100 players and of course people took the bait.  We can't help it.  We like arguing.  It's fun.  

Of course lists like this are stupid, and in baseball more so.  The game has been fundamentally around in the same way for 120 years. So much has changed in that time.  In 1900, which is when we usually put the starting point because the American and National Leagues formalized, there weren't computers... or television... or radio... or automobiles or motion pictures really. There weren't anti-biotics and they JUST figured out germs caused diseases instead of like "bad air".  The US had 45 states. Why are we trying to compare someone from then to now? 

People know this intrinsically so they do try to dismiss a chunk of time from analysis. Most often it's saying "I'm not considering anyone before integration. That's like 20% of the population who weren't allowed to play" But if it's just a population thing (instead of like a punishment) then we can't ignore the explosion of players from Latin American countries in the 80s or the introduction of players from Asian countries in the last 20 years when pointing out population differences. There's also considering the percentage of population who WANTED to play the sport. In the 20s what could you do instead? Box? Everyone who wanted to be an athelete pretty much wanted to be a baseball player.  Now? Football is dominant in the culture. Basketball can be played anywhere. You aren't getting the same level of interest. But does that really even matter considering baseball growth hasn't matched population growth? We're more than 4 times bigger but don't even have twice as many teams.  And that's not considering all those other countries we talked about. So are there more young men who could and want to play now or less?

It's impossible and that's just wrangling the "population involved" question.  Former players didn't have to travel across time zones... but also traveled the same amount of time by train in some comfort but nothing like players have today.  Players today have modern medicine and training methods. Players in the old days played in a era where the system didn't quite optimize the best players and had wider variety between the best and the worst*.  But then again players in the old days had to hit against balls that could be mushed up, spit on, and gunked up but then again again it was on worse maintained fields and guys with gloves the size of big hands. Impossible. 

I'm not saying don't rank players. Do! It's fun. I just say if you are going to do it cross-era you need to admit it is an exercise in opinion. There is no fact here. Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Barry Bonds.  Who's better? Whoever you want to be. 

If you want to take it more seriously then you are going to have to split up eras in some way.  Even that is fraught. When to make the cut and who falls into where is hard.  Dead ball to live ball makes sense.  Pre 69 expanision and field changes and after makes sense. But players' careers don't always fall neatly into one or the other. Failing doing like 5-10 rankings of different eras I prefer the "does anyone alive really remember this time" breaking point. Basically we are coming into that split being around WWII right now.  Players before that are numbers on a page, and a bit on film if we are lucky.  They are legend and stories. That can't possibly be ranked in the same way as people you actually saw play.

*this is part of the theory why we don't have .400 hitters anymore. But of course it was part of the theory on why we didn't have 60+ homer hitters anymore and we saw that can change. You can always tweak the game.