re: Mickey Mantle hit a ball 565 feet

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ThePTExperience1969

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I think he's agreeing with you.

If I read him correctly, he's saying it was much easier for an individual a long time ago to be head and shoulders above the others because the talent pool was much more shallow. "Big fish in a small pond", essentially.

Now, with so much money in the sport and so many people chasing the dream of playing in the Majors, it's exponentially more difficult to dominate the sport today. So if a player is head and shoulders above everyone else in today's game, it's because that guy is UNBELIEVABLY good.

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Is it? Kids back then played baseball like Latin American kids play soccer. If you were a major league level athlete, I doubt you got overlooked as often as I believe y'all are implying. Certainly we have an international talent pool, but that doesn't mean that pitchers when the league was 16 teams weren't any good.

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Baseball was thought back then as more of a game than a real career. There wasn't the money in it that there is today.

A lot of people who played baseball as kids and could have been a great player quit playing and worked in a factory or something when they were teenagers and never tried to make a career out of baseball.

It was much different than today.

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Frank Thomas never juiced and hit multiple 500 foot home runs why can't other non juicers?

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lol look at the difference between mantle and Thomas.

That's a pretty good point. You have plenty of women out there hitting 300+ yard drives. I doubt there's many women out there that you could give a wooden baseball bat and they could hit a 400+ foot home run.

Here is a number from the old days that's totally objective. Babe Ruth swung a 46 ounce bat. He experimented with bats over 50 ounces. He was a strong guy in any era.

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I just looked up longest home run ever hit and it said 575 by Babe Ruth. I am quite skeptical.

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That is the major league record, someone in the minor leagues hit one over 600 feet.

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Is it? Kids back then played baseball like Latin American kids play soccer.

If you were a major league level athlete, I doubt you got overlooked as often as I believe y'all are implying.


Certainly we have an international talent pool, but that doesn't mean that pitchers when the league was 16 teams weren't any good.

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back then, first off, blacks couldn't play in the majors. Additionally, you didn't have international players playing. The worldwide population in 1940 was ~2.3 billion. The United States white population in 1940 was ~118 million.

Compare that to today. The wordlwide population is currently around 7 billion people, more than 3 times the population of 1940. Even if you limited the pool to the United States, the United States population has nearly tripled since 1940 with it being about 322 million currently.

Even with the advent of other sports and baseball's decreasing popularity in this country, the talent pool is exponentially larger now than it was in 1940. That more than makes up for the fact there were fewer teams in the 1940s compared to today.

Add to that the advances in nutrition, training regimen, year long baseball, and technique, it shouldn't even be a conversation that the athletes of today are bigger, stronger, faster, and more skilled than athletes of 75 years ago

Now, there is an agrument to be made that if you were to take an elite athlete from the 40s and raise him today with all the advantages of today's athletes that they would be competitive, but to say that you could just put Mantle in a time machine and transport him to the game today that he'd be just as dominant is just ignorant.

Yeah a real tape-measure job eh? The mick.