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Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig BP

mbtex

By mbtex
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Post Oak

Post Oak 20349

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Posted

I thought about starting a thread like this.  I'm rewatching Ken Burns Baseball on Prime.

This era is so interesting to me.

 

One thing that I found really interesting that I missed on previous viewings was Ty Cobb, Christy Matthewson and Branch Rickey all served in the same unit in WWI

ty_cobb.jpg

Mathewson and Cobb

http://www.baseballinwartime.com/chemical_warfare.htm

 

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TwiceHorn

TwiceHorn 31699

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22 minutes ago, formermav43 said:

Imagine them with modern nutrition, strength and conditioning, and bats that weren’t 3 feet long and 40+ ounces.

The interesting thing would be whether it made any difference at all.  Baseball hitting is odd.  Little guys and fat fucks can outhit (for distance and average) swole, yoked bros.

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Onboard 2.0

Onboard 2.0 9083

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1 hour ago, TwiceHorn said:

The interesting thing would be whether it made any difference at all.  Baseball hitting is odd.  Little guys and fat fucks can outhit (for distance and average) swole, yoked bros.

The word is bat speed IMO, that's always the most important batting metric. Bat speed is what creates that sound other hitters say they hear when great hitters make contact, josh Gibson, Babe, Puljoles.  

I associate it with the same phenomenon as Tannerite being set off by a high powered rifle.  You need a certain kinetic enegery/speed to ignite it. Course I'm, a simpleton idiot when it comes to physics, and other things.

Edited by Onboard 2.0
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TwiceHorn

TwiceHorn 31699

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6 minutes ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

The word is bat speed IMO, that's always the most important batting metric. Bat speed is what creates that sound other hitters say they hear when great hitters make contact, josh Gibson, Babe, Puljoles.  

I associate it with the same phenomenon as Tannerite being set off by a high powered rifle.  You need a certain kinetic enegery/speed to ignite it. Course I'm, a simpleton idiot when it comes to physics, and other things.

And the hand-eye coordination to get the bat on the ball at the right spots..  I guess the counter-argument would be Sosa, pre- and post-PED.

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Onboard 2.0

Onboard 2.0 9083

Posted
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12 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

And the hand-eye coordination to get the bat on the ball at the right spots..  I guess the counter-argument would be Sosa, pre- and post-PED.

Yeah eye hand is huge,  you don't get to the show without it, but what separates the great hitters from the good hitters is bat speed IMO.

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MirrOlure

MirrOlure 14959

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On 1/22/2019 at 1:29 PM, dcar00 said:

Very cool video.  that dude throwing batting practice sucks.  it is funny how they don't really get good wood on most of those pitches.

so much wrist on both but when you are swinging a tree trunk your velo doesn't have to be as high.

Hah....I was about to reply with the same comment

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Fozzz

Fozzz 152

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Posted
On 1/19/2019 at 8:00 PM, Nope said:

Lol imagine these guys trying to hit Aroldis Chapman 

I liked Ottavino's comment on Ruth:

Quote

“I had an argument with a coach in Triple-A about Babe Ruth’s effectiveness in today’s game,” Ottavino said, via MLB’s Statcast Podcast. “Babe Ruth, with that swing, swinging that bat, I got him hitting .140 with eight homers.”

 

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Fozzz

Fozzz 152

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4 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

That’s like saying aj Foyt couldn’t compete in open wheel racing now, using his car from 1974. No shit. 

He wouldn’t be using that bat, and if that swing wasn’t working he’d change it until it did, with the aid of his hitting coaches. 

I think if you had a time machine and had 1927 Ruth face off against MLB pitching he would get his ass beat, even with a modern bat.  They likely didn't throw nearly as hard back then and they certainly didn't have the breaking stuff hitters have to deal with today.  Maybe if you transported Babe Ruth as a kid and had him develop as any other baseball player today develops, then who knows.  

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Escapedgoat

Escapedgoat 90

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This is awesome stuff. I love old footage like this. I second the poster that is watching Ken Burns' Baseball as I am doing the same thing now. I wish there would be footage of Joe Jackson and Ty Cobb. I'd also love to see stuff on the 1919 World Series, which for some reason I've been really reading more about lately.  This is great stuff. 

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PittsburghTiger

PittsburghTiger 6245

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On 1/20/2019 at 9:18 AM, formermav43 said:

Imagine them with modern nutrition, strength and conditioning, and bats that weren’t 3 feet long and 40+ ounces.

That's how I have always looked at things. It's like that in every sport. Imagine tennis players from the 1970s using rackets from today. Or Jim Brown with health and training like today. Or Ali with physical and nutritional changes, etc. Yeah, athletes from back then, stuck back then, could not compete today, but with up to date training I think a lot could, especially the great ones.

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BurntOrange&White

BurntOrange&White 40484

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That's how I have always looked at things. It's like that in every sport. Imagine tennis players from the 1970s using rackets from today. Or Jim Brown with health and training like today. Or Ali with physical and nutritional changes, etc. Yeah, athletes from back then, stuck back then, could not compete today, but with up to date training I think a lot could, especially the great ones.

The cream of the crop will always rise to the top.
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Pato del Muerto

Pato del Muerto 52902

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3 minutes ago, Bevo VIII said:


Weren’t ball parks much much larger back then too?

Many parks had very unusual dimensions long and short.  Fenway being a good example, but I believe there were even shorter dimensions in some parks and much deeper in others. But is that an argument in favor of or against older players?

did more short fly balls drop in because outfielders played 20 feet deeper due to the 440 and 450 foot walls?  Like coors field now, larger outfields mean more area for 3 guys to cover. 

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Fozzz

Fozzz 152

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5 minutes ago, Huckleberry said:
2 hours ago, Fozzz said:
Non sequitur.

You're really good at pointing out intentional non sequiturs. Or do you not know what that actually means?

You're still statistically illiterate if you are identifying a skill based off of a sample size of one.

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Bull Horn

Bull Horn 118

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Only way to measure historical greats in sports is how they fared vs. the peers in their era.

Babe Ruth hit more home runs in 1920 than any other team in the American League.

Any. Other. Team.

No one today is even sniffing the farts of that kind of dominance.

Put that stat in your pipe and smoke it, whippersnappers.

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UcancallmeSurly

UcancallmeSurly 451

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On 1/20/2019 at 9:45 AM, Onboard 2.0 said:

The word is bat speed IMO, that's always the most important batting metric. Bat speed is what creates that sound other hitters say they hear when great hitters make contact, josh Gibson, Babe, Puljoles.  

I associate it with the same phenomenon as Tannerite being set off by a high powered rifle.  You need a certain kinetic enegery/speed to ignite it. Course I'm, a simpleton idiot when it comes to physics, and other things.

yep.  Bat speed can be calculated I'm sure from 60fps..  be interesting to see what it is.

Shit mechanics compared to today, but you can only compare athletes to peers in their era IMO.

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Beau Vine

Beau Vine 54942

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Posted (edited)
10 hours ago, Escapedgoat said:

This is awesome stuff. I love old footage like this. I second the poster that is watching Ken Burns' Baseball as I am doing the same thing now. I wish there would be footage of Joe Jackson and Ty Cobb. I'd also love to see stuff on the 1919 World Series, which for some reason I've been really reading more about lately.  This is great stuff. 

Get yourself this on DVD if you don't have it already:

518SRXW45PL._AC_UL320_SR242,320_.jpg

I still watch this every year before the season starts.  First time I watched it with my dad is still one of the coolest things I've ever done with him.  

Edited by Beau Vine
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UcancallmeSurly

UcancallmeSurly 451

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9 hours ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Many parks had very unusual dimensions long and short.  Fenway being a good example, but I believe there were even shorter dimensions in some parks and much deeper in others. But is that an argument in favor of or against older players?

did more short fly balls drop in because outfielders played 20 feet deeper due to the 440 and 450 foot walls?  Like coors field now, larger outfields mean more area for 3 guys to cover. 

Weird dimensions were usually a byproduct of fitting them into existing downtown street grids.

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Seasick Sailor

Seasick Sailor 3747

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We're Actually Watching the Best Baseball Players Ever

By Ben Lindbergh

We’re Actually Watching the Best Baseball Players Ever

Let’s put away the sepia-toned glasses and admit what the advanced stats tell us: The level of MLB play is better than ever, and many of yesterday’s greats probably wouldn’t stand a chance in today’s game

By Ben Lindbergh  Mar 29, 2019, 8:05am EDT
 

WatchingGreatestPlayers_Getty_Ringer.0.jGetty Images/Ringer illustration

In December, then-free-agent reliever Adam Ottavino made an off-the-cuff comment that has stuck to him since. Appearing on MLB.com’s Statcast Podcast, Ottavino opined that Babe Ruth would bat .140 with eight homers if transported to today’s game. “I would strike out Babe Ruth every time,” the right-hander continued, adding, “I’m not trying to disrespect him, you know, rest in peace, you know, shout-out to Babe Ruth. But it was a different game.”

In January, Ottavino signed with the Yankees. Naturally, his Ruth comments came up on his first post-signing conference call. Having recently accepted 27 million Steinbrenner Bucks, Ottavino struck a predictably penitent tone, confessing that he would “probably not” strike out Ruth every time after all. “I probably used a bad example of the point I was trying to make about the evolution of pitching over baseball history,” he said. “Babe Ruth is probably a name I shouldn’t have used in this example, but I caught a lot of flak for it.” Ottavino assured the fans of his new franchise that he “meant no disrespect.”

In the days leading up to spring training, the Yankees approached the pitcher with an idea for a video in which a sepia-toned Ottavino would appear to pitch to Ruth. In the finished product, which was released last week, Ottavino voices his inner monologue as he stands on the mound and stares down the slugger. “Did I really say I could strike Babe Ruth out every time?” the setup man says. “He’s so much bigger in person.” Ottavino delivers, and Ruth repeatedly takes him deep. At the end, Ottavino wakes up, panting; Ruth has been haunting his dreams.

 
Embedded video
 

That #FridayFeeling when the 1st Yankees commercial drops...

Adam Ottavino's got some pretty scary nightmares.

 
 
 
 

The video was clearly light-hearted and self-deprecating, an attempt to capitalize on the controversy to generate retweets. But it also seemed like the logical last step in Ottavino’s contrition tour—one final gesture of deference to tradition and obeisance to the Babe. In January, Ottavino said he was surprised that his comment had gone viral, but as Roger Maris and Hank Aaron could have told him, many baseball fans don’t take kindly to players who challenge legends of yesteryear (in Aaron’s case, partly for racist reasons). The Ottavino backlash is the latest reminder that baseball fans are reluctant to era-adjust at the expense of past players.

A long and rich history is one of baseball’s best assets, and one can compliment current players without blasting the Babe. (As of several years ago, the long-dead Ruth remained both better known than any living athlete and much better liked than the typical living major leaguer, according to Q score.) But the flip side of fetishizing players of the past is overlooking the excellence of players of the present. So as another season begins, it bears repeating: Baseball players today are better than they’ve ever been before. Like, a lot better. And while we can’t prove it via time travel, we can demonstrate their superiority in other ways.

We could watch them, for one. The pitchers Ruth faced probably didn’t throw sliders. They definitely didn’t throw sliders like this.

We don’t know how hard the hurlers of Ruth’s era threw, but some evidencesuggests that the fastest of them, Walter Johnson, may have maxed out in the low 90s. Ottavino sometimes throws sliders close to that speed, and his fastest heaters have rounded up to triple digits.

 
Embedded video
 

Adam Ottavino, 93mph Fastball and Slider, Overlay/Slow.

 
 
 
 

Still, that’s inconclusive. And because baseball players’ performance is always relative to their contemporary opponents, it’s difficult for fans to pick up on improvements across eras by glancing at stats. Baseball lacks track’s trail of broken record times. Only a small sliver of baseball history has been tracked in great detail; we know that pitchers throw harder than they did a decade ago, and newly available evidence strongly suggests that they threw harder then than they had a decade before that. Beyond that, we can’t say with certainty. As Ottavino acknowledged when he walked back his claim, “It’s not something that can be proven anyway.”

Well, we can try, beginning with a study performed for my upcoming book by sabermetrician Mitchel Lichtman, a former consultant to teams and coauthor of The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball. Borrowing a research method from a 2007 series by Hardball Times author David Gassko, Lichtman looked at all AL and NL nonpitcher hitters ages 26 to 29 in each season since the NL’s founding in 1876 and compared their performance (in wOBA) in season x to their performance in season x+1, regressing each season toward the mean of that year’s league-average wOBA. Hitters in that cohort should be largely resistant to age-related decline, so a change in their collective performance from one year to the next should reflect a change in the rest of the league’s talent. If the 26-29-year-olds from 2017 hit worse in 2018, for instance, it should be because everyone outside of that age group got better.

 
Embedded video
 

Adam Ottavino, 95mph Two Seamer and 84mph Slider, Overlay. 😳

 
 
 
 

The graph below shows that compared to MLB’s 2018 talent level, which is pegged to 1.00, the players of previous eras were significantly worse, confirming that the quality of the league has ascended over time.

 

image1__19_.png

Lichtman also showed that the spread in talent—as represented by the standard deviation in wOBA, or how closely players’ performance is clustered around the average—has decreased over time, which is consistent with an increasing overall talent level. Although the spread spiked during the so-called steroid era of the 1990s and early 2000s, it’s been slight since then, as competition has filtered out the players who clearly don’t belong and made it more difficult for stars to separate themselves from the pack.

 

image2__11_.png

Judging leaguewide talent over time by comparing performance from one year to the next may underestimate the gulf between past and present players were they to face each other in a Field of Dreams–style scenario (or a real-life version of Ottavino’s onscreen nightmare). Any collective advance over a single season is subtle, but over several decades, those improvements could compound in ways that would overpower players of the past. Maybe the Babe could hold his own today given modern nutrition, training methods, and tracking technology (hard as it is to imagine the Babe living clean or studying spin rates). Nonetheless, those changes (and many others) have helped produce a group of current players that’s superior to past classes.

A long list of factors can affect MLB’s quality of competition, including the size of the pool of potential players (which has expanded through the breaking of the color line, the growth of the domestic population, and the internationalization of the sport); competition from rival baseball leagues, other sports, and nonathletic forms of entertainment; skyrocketing salaries and stronger incentives to pursue playing baseball; expansion in the number of teams (which has stayed static for two decades); improvements in player evaluation; and increasingly, improvements in player development. For our purposes, though, it doesn’t matter so much why contemporary players are better; whether it’s mostly talent or mostly nutrition or training, the result is the same. And Lichtman’s data suggests that even 150 years into the existence of professional baseball, the sport’s quality of competition is not only continuing to climb, but is rising at one of the most rapid rates in history.

 

image3__4_.png

There’s one more way we can confirm that players keep improving. Major League Baseball conveniently comes with a built-in control group: pitchers who have to hit. Because pitchers’ jobs don’t depend on their offensive ability, their hitting skills have stagnated relative to “real” hitters; to paraphrase Wooderson from Dazed and Confused, other hitters keep getting better, but pitcher hitters stay the same. The graph below shows the annual offensive performance of National League players whose primary position was pitcher. Early on, NL pitchers were close to league-average hitters, but today they’re almost automatic outs.

 

image6__1_.png

Not by coincidence, the heightened competition of the current era has overlapped with a historically significant youth movement. As a then-32-year-old Adam Jones—a below-average player in 2018, only four years removed from earning MVP votes—toldESPN’s Sam Miller, “The game’s gotten harder … the next generation’s here, and they’re really good.” Jones, who had a hard time finding work this past winter, was right: Weighted by WAR, the average hitter age in 2018 was the league’s lowest dating back to the designated hitter’s debut in 1973, and every team had an average hitter age below 30 for the first time in more than 40 years.
 

unnamed__13_.png

In 2018, hitters 25 or younger accounted for their highest share of MLB plate appearances since 1978, when free agency was still in its early days. Compared to the MLB baseline, they collectively recorded their highest walk rate and second-highest isolated power ever. If we group together all players 25 or younger and 35 or older, we find that in contrast to the old-player peaks of World War II and the steroid era, young players are dwarfing old players in their share of the league’s overall production. In 2017, the older group accounted for its lowest percentage of leaguewide WAR since the 19th century. It barely rebounded in 2018, when the younger group’s share came close to a 35-year high.

 

image4__3_.png

It made perfect sense, then, that MLB’s popular playoff promo last year featured the tagline “Let the kids play.” Buoyed by the reception, the league produced a sequel this spring. Both spots send the message that baseball needn’t be a self-effacing sport; emotion is encouraged. Maybe this endorsement of demonstrative celebration is resonating right now because there’s so much to celebrate. As MLB turns the page on the 20th century, the kids are coming to play, with Fernando Tatis Jr., Pete Alonso, and Eloy Jiménez among the most recent arrivals. It’s fine for them to brag a bit if they can back it up.

Ever since the first professional ballplayers grew old enough to start sentences with “Back in my day,” many retired players have persisted in saying that the latest crop of players can’t compare to them and their aging peers. Not all of them, though: Plenty of ex-players are clear-eyed enough to know that baseball is becoming more competitive, not less. Even some of the highest-performing players of previous generations can see they’ve been surpassed—including the hitter who broke Ruth’s career record. The stats support the Hammer.

If Ottavino did face Ruth for real, then, the matchup might look more like this than the Yankees’ version.

 

Adam Ottavino, 82mph Slider and 95mph Two Seam Fastball (home plate view). 😂😳

 
 
 
 

No, there’s no way to know whether Ottavino, who struck out three of the four batters he faced on Opening Day, would whiff Ruth every time; although the Babe might not look athletic to 2019 eyes, he employed pretty modern mechanics, and compared to his contemporaries—the white ones, at least—he was the best hitter in history. But the basic sentiment is rock-solid. We can argue about whether baseball is better; in some ways, the league’s unprecedented talent level may beleading to a less spectator-friendly game. But whether baseball players are better—and by a lot—shouldn’t be up for debate.

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