re: Best Era in Baseball History (defined by quality of players)

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Music in the 60's and 70's is much better than it is today and that's a fact. As for the other topics, that's up for discussion

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It really wasn't. I think you can always make a case that now is always the best time (because you have access to the present and all of the past). If you think modern baseball stinks, you can find an archival copy of the 1954 season, if you would like.

I'd hate to have to listen to only the music before the punk revolution and the proliferation of independent labels. I like that anyone can make a record now and distribute it worldwide. Just like I like that any person in the world can play in the Majors without restriction, save talent.

I agree with the 1960s and early 1970s. Very impressive list of players, and as someone already pointed out, it was the sweet spot for the player pool. We were already starting to bring in the talent from Latin America and baseball wasn't losing homegrown athletes to football and basketball.

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orrect. Because kids today still listen to it.

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and there are 50 year olds who listen to Bruno Mars and Maroon 5

I feel like I can read this thread and find out how old everyone is who posts on it
That being said I would say more current is always better in sports bc of advancement in training, diet, equipment ect...
So I would say sometime in the last 10-20 years was the best, generally true in all sports

Not really sure how...

I agree with him that the strongest era in baseball history is the mid to late '50s in National League without a shadow of a doubt. It was after integration and before expansion. Baseball was also the most popular sport in America at that time. The American League wasn't fully integrated during that time so their league was weaker. I'll just give you one year to demonstrate the strength of the National League at that time. The year is 1956. Here are all the great players in the National League that were active during that time.

Willie Mays
Hank Aaron
Stan Musial
Duke Snider
Roy Campanella
Jackie Robinson
Frank Robinson
Roberto Clemente
Stan Musial
Eddie Mathews
Ernie Banks
Pee Wee Reese
Sandy Koufax
Warren Spahn
Robin Roberts
Don Drysdale
Richie Ashburn
Monte Irvin


And all of that talent was divided within an eight team league. That's the strongest era ever for me.

Yet the Yankees were dominating the AL with an all-white team. And then usually winning the World Series. I do think the 50s were a great era, but it was also pretty top heavy -- the mark of a bad league in any sport is the ability of one team to dominate. When quality is high, it is harder to dominate. Parity is ually, not always, a sign of quality (you won't see a Cleveland Spiders level bad team ever again).

That said, to stretch the music analogy to the breaking point, the 80s are the best era because you could succeed in so many ways (as I listed above). Same with music. You had massive bubblegum pop stars (Madonna, Michael Jackson), college rock proto-alternative origins (REM), punk (Minor Threat, Black Flag), hip hop (Run DMC, NWA), or even last gasps of 70s dinosaur acts (Queen, Rolling Stones), straight ahead rock n roll (Van Halen, Guns n Roses), or European art rock for sensitive theater majors (the Smiths, the Cure). It was a remarkably varied decade. Same with the baseball.

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Yet the Yankees were dominating the AL with an all-white team. And then usually winning the World Series.

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I said in my original post that the AL wasn't very strong because the league wasn't fully integrated yet. Teams like the Red Sox didn't have their first black player until the late '50s. The AL was actually vastly inferior to the NL until the 1970s when the great black players of the NL started getting old and the AL finally caught up with the times. Also from 1954-1959, the Yankees were 2-2 against the National League in World Series during those six years. That's hardly a dominant run. Also the best team doesn't always win in a seven game series. We've seen plenty of superior teams have a bad week and get upset in the playoffs. It doesn't really measure superiority one way or the other. As for the '80s, it was absolutely a down era for baseball. By the '80s, all of the great Black American athletes were playing football and basketball. Football passed baseball as America's favorite sport sometime in the late '60s, early '70s so the best athletes weren't turning to baseball anymore. So the talent pool was a lot shallower during that time and it didn't get replenished until the international talent pool in Latin America and Asia exploded in the early '90s.

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Football passed baseball as America's favorite sport sometime in the late '60s, early '70s

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Sorry but this is a fail. That happened when they went on strike and ruined the 1994 season. THAT is when football took over.