We’re Actually Watching the Best Baseball Players Ever

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.

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.

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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 evidence suggests 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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—told ESPN’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.

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.

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.

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 be leading to a less spectator-friendly game. But whether baseball players are better—and by a lot—shouldn’t be up for debate.