OK, now that I’ve introduced the concept of two small improvements (in grounds-keeping and in scouting) silently and invisibly making the game of baseball more competitive every single season, if only slightly, I want to suggest a few other ways the game is constantly improving. Then I want to suggest what the totality of all these small improvements might mean.

FrankD in the "Comments" section of "A Couple of Small Things" anticipated one of my examples: Tommy John surgery.  The TJ procedure, need I point out, is only one of hundreds of medical developments over the past century that has changed how baseball deals with players’ injuries, so it’s going to stand in for all of them because it’s so prominent in our minds. (And I’m distinguishing here "medical" procedures from "training" procedures, which also number in the hundreds—things like pitchers icing their arms after games instead of super-heating them. Just think of "Rub a little dirt in it" being the early 20^th century standard treatment for a bruise or open cut.) Tommy John, and his hundreds of beneficiaries, played MLB after his surgery and, for over a decade, deprived some less-skilled pitcher of a big-league career. Having Tommy John around, and not having this less-skilled guy around, raised the level of play in MLB generally. It didn’t benefit him alone, or even benefit alone the pitchers who also had the surgery. Having TJ around for an extra decade (as opposed to the 11^th or 12^th best pitcher on his staff) also helped weed out weaker batters a little sooner than they would have against weaker pitching, as it increased the number of healthy pitchers competing for MLB jobs.

Our tendency is to regard things like Tommy John surgery on the individual or team level: "Hey, isn’t it great for Tommy John that he gets to pitch again after blowing out his arm?" or "Hey, the Dodgers are really going to benefit this year if Tommy John is back" but we tend to overlook what TJ procedures have done to benefit baseball itself, to raise the level of competitiveness. We must have seen a couple of hundred quality seasons, tens of thousands of innings, from pitchers since that first surgery who replaced inferior pitchers who got sent back to the minors, some never to play in MLB at all.

The grossest example of the phenomenon I’m trying to describe is the breaking of the color barrier, which everyone agrees massively introduced many better players into MLB in a short period of time, players whose presence is visible and self-evident. Even the most unenlightened observer had to admit, "Hey, that Willie Mays guy on the Giants, you know the one whose skin is much darker than most of his teammates’, he looks like he can play!"

One thing the anti-integrationists got exactly right was their objection that Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby were taking jobs away from white boys. Starting in 1947 there were white boys who otherwise would have had major league careers except they got cut from rosters, so a black guy, and a much better ballplayer, could have a major league career. This is so obvious I feel stupid even making this point. Willie Mays didn’t take Bobby Thomson’s job away from him, he took the job of some replacement-level zhlub you never heard of who got sent down to the minors and never got to play major league baseball.

OK, now, what about all the differences that are much less dramatic than the difference between dark brown skin and pink freckled skin? The signing of international players, which has multiplied many times since World War II, for example, or the just the U.S. population size more than quadrupling since the 1900 census while the number of MLB teams have increased in 2017 by less than double.

Finally (for now—I can’t be making points this obvious all day long), another unrelated, massive improvement that Bill is too modest to take credit for would be "sabermetrics," which has improved the game in more ways than even we on BJOL can conceive of.  Bill alone has made hundreds of practical suggestions over the years about improving the game—let’s take just one of them. Remember Bill’s correlation of wins with strikeouts? It was pretty mindblowing stuff, entirely contrary to how most of us (and most GMs) thought about W/K ratios, that it was a very accurate predictor of genuine ability to pitch in MLB— it was obvious which pitchers (most of them) were getting credit for wins that were in line with their actual abilities, and which ones (a few) were lucky stiffs, overdue for a reversion to the norm, and which ones (another few)  appeared to be struggling but actually had displayed far more ability than their W-L record showed.

Don’t you think in the years following Bill’s observation (but before it became generally accepted) that some teams made out like bandits, exploiting this revolutionary way to assess their pitching staffs and the staffs of other big league teams? Even if only one hardluck pitcher had his career saved (and another corresponding lucky stiff had his cut short) that’s one hell of an improvement in the quality of big-league play. And I think there was probably far more than one pitcher’s career being affected positively.

And I know that Bill has had many, many insights far more useful than this one. And I know that Bill is only one of many, many sabermetricians who’s come up with a useful idea or two.

I came up with a testable theory a few years ago, in fact, that will give you another example of sabermetric knowledge, which I’ll repeat only because I am among the least brilliant of sabermetric thinkers, and I won’t be insulting any of my peers in assessing their work as less than blindingly brilliant. (This five-part series ran at the end of 2016, under the general title "Young Pitchers Will Break Your Heart.) https://www.billjamesonline.com/young_pitchersll_break_your_heart_part_five/?AuthorId=23&pg=3

Despite my lack of brilliance, this idea is potentially a useful tool for GMs making roster decisions, and may for all I know actually be a long-practiced consideration in GMs’ decision-making. (In which case, I neither get nor deserve credit for coming up with it, just for describing here it on BJOL—I’ve never read of anyone else describing this phenomenon before, but that may just be a lapse in my reading.) It was the one about young hitters being about 50% more valuable over the course of their careers than young pitchers are, meaning that in trading pitchers for hitters, or just in acquiring one or dealing off the other, or in signing and letting free agents go, their generic value should be understood. Personally, I’ve never heard anyone in MLB expressing, as an axiom, the notion that a given young hitter has 50% less value than a comparable young pitcher. This notion, seems to me, should be extremely valuable to a ballteam looking to build its roster: trade your young pitching stars far more readily than your young hitters, acquire another team’s young hitters at a higher price than its young pitchers, etc. Unless you’re pretty sure you’re routinely 50% more brilliant than your trading partners, you should consider trading a potential major-league hitter for his pitching counterpart very skeptically, and vice versa.

Now, this theory may be totally wrong, or it may already have been long since adopted as an axiomatic truth by all GMs—like I say, if it is already axiomatic, I never heard anyone expressing the axiom in quite those terms.  But my main point here is that someone, maybe me, maybe someone else fifty or eighty years ago, came up with this non-intuitive idea. At some early point, pitching prospects and batting prospects were regarded as equally valuable, and for all I know, at some point maybe they were—at some point, for all I know, pitchers were even more valuable prospects than hitters. But my little study showed that hitters, since at least 1970, are about 50% more likely to have substantial careers than pitchers, and if it checks out in practice, then that’s a huge advantage for the first GM who practices it, until every GM assumes the axiom to be true and valuable, at which point it ceases to have a competitive advantage over other teams. But at that point, ALL teams will be making smarter choices, and the game itself will be vastly improved over the earlier point where teams were evaluating young pitchers and young hitters as about equally valuable.

My larger point in belaboring this example (of an idea I’d almost forgotten about) is that these ideas are plentiful as raindrops, and smart teams can consider them, test them, adopt them if they seem to check out, and improve their clubs. (If this one turns out to be a dud, what have they wasted? A few days of consideration? There’s almost no downside to considering it, and considerable upside.) There are hundreds of sharper sabermetricians than I am, all with more ideas in a week than I’ll come up with in three lifetimes—collectively, they must be generating a few very helpful ideas every year, at a dead minimum.

These five improvements—the sweeping of pebbles, professional scouting staffs, the breaking of the color line, Tommy John surgery, and Bill’s discovery of the Wins/K ratio—were just the first five examples I thought of, of what I mean by "improvements," but there have been many other changes in the game, far more than one per season, that each by itself allows superior players to land MLB jobs over their inferior counterparts, while still retaining all the benefits of past seasons’ advancements as well. There are improvements in in-game strategy, improvements in roster proportions, improvements in economics, improvements in equipment design, improvements in virtually dozens of areas of MLB that I haven’t even proposed here or even imagined.

Most of these improvements have nothing to connect them causally to each other.

Each of them is happening more or less constantly, each of them is happening more or less simultaneously, and the cumulative effect of all of them is happening more or less invisibly and silently. What might that cumulative effect be?

I’d like to propose a radical concept, a what-if that I don’t expect you to take seriously right this second, and that might strike you as absurd even after long and thoughtful consideration:  what if that cumulative effect is far greater than anyone has speculated?

What if the order of improvement is NOT "Players in 2018 are a little bit better, generally speaking, than players were in 1918" but instead "Players in 2018 are a little bit better than players were in 2017" or even "Players in 2018 are measurably better than players were in 2017"?

And now that I’ve offended every traditionalist with that bit of arrant nonsense, please allow me to share my reasoning, using as my example the clear, and obviously large, improvement that breaking the color line represents. If there are 750 men on MLB rosters today, there must be at least 125 of them who would be ineligible to play under pre-1947 standards. I don’t know if that 17% actually represents a 17% improvement in the game of baseball (or how any 17% improvement could be quantified precisely), but it is by any measure a tangible step up in the quality of the game’s competitiveness. There is some very real number that can be attached to it. Other far less significant numbers than that one also measure tangible signs of improvement, and that there are certainly dozens of these smaller numbers, perhaps hundreds of them, that must be added to find the total effect. How we quantify these figures, how we combine them, is speculative, and mostly beyond the scope of my argument. I’m just trying to articulate for now how much we take for granted this level of improvement, how unconscious we remain of the pace of improvement because of how small each one of them is.

Now, I need briefly to give the contrary argument its due, the one old-timers love to invoke: baseball has in some ways gotten less competitive as time has gone on. Old school guys like to argue that equipment improvements, like more flexible and capacious gloves, have made fielding easier, not harder, that it took real skill to catch baseballs with tiny gloves or with no gloves at all. I would argue otherwise: better equipment allows for actual skills to comprise the difference between a good fielder and a poor one, as opposed to luck or other randomizing effects.

But even conceding some validity to such arguments (which I don’t) doesn’t invalidate my overall argument. Even if the old-timers are right about some things, I think it’s still unarguable that there have been many more improvements in competitive levels than there have been degradations in quality. But let me show why this one doesn’t even work:

A fielder without a glove, standing 100 feet away, is rarely going to handle cleanly a hard-hit line drive, no matter how skillful he is, right? So no matter who’s fielding without a glove, or with a crummy webless glove, that line drive is going to be a hit, either by bouncing off a gutsy fielder’s hand or just by skipping into the outfield unimpeded. Even Ozzie Smith, without a glove, just isn’t going to catch certain line drives, and if he tries, he’s going to break metacarpals like you break bubblewrap. But with a well-padded glove with a strong webbing and enormous flexibility, any major-leaguer will catch it cleanly almost every time, while an unskilled fielder is still almost never going to have the reflexes or the guts needed to catch it. You could put the best glove ever made on me, and it wouldn’t help me catch a major league line drive from 100 feet away any more than it would help me deflect a bullet from that distance. If I get very, very lucky, sure—but otherwise I need a suit of armor more than I need a mitt. Improvements in equipment make for finer distinctions between skill levels, not for grosser distinctions.

This is entirely separate from the argument about guts, or toughness. Old-timers liked to say that batting helmets are unmanly, that playing without a helmet takes guts, which I’ll readily concede. But we’re not discussing the bravery it takes to play baseball with inadequate equipment. It’s been almost sixty years since batting helmets were made mandatory, I think, and numerous players have been hit square on the noggin. None have died, and most have gone on to play MLB for many years afterwards. It’s more than probable that one of them, or several, would have suffered Ray Chapman’s fate (or best-case scenario, Mickey Cochrane’s) if not for the batting helmet. Tommie Agee (beaned by Bob Gibson in 1968), Kirby Puckett (by Dennis Martinez in 1995), Mike Piazza (by Julian Taveraz in 2005), David Wright (by Matt Cain in 2009), Mike Stanton (by Mike Fiers in 2014), and many others all have had their careers and quite possibly their lives saved by the batting helmet:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oomcPAIDp50 illustrates a few fastball-to-helmet shots, of which we can only speculate how many would have been fatal or career-ending if they’d been fastball-to-skull. Having such stars play for years after being beaned represents a tremendous improvement in the quality of major league competition.

Going on the assumption that major-league players are the 750 best on the planet (an exaggeration but only a slight one), if you subtract the ones who wouldn’t have played MLB at all in years past (too dark-skinned, furriner who wouldn’t have been scouted, ‘Murican who wouldn’t have been signed because of pebbles, kilt in the batters box, etc.) that still leaves us with way less than 50% of the major leaguers on current rosters, and then you start on strategies that we’ve come up with that past generations found useful but that we now reject universally today (leadoff batters who can’t get on base, pitchers struggling beyond their 200^th pitch of the day, intentional walks handed out like Skittles, etc.)—well, I’ve got to say that it doesn’t seem crazy at all to suggest that most of the current players would be out of the game, and the game itself would be grossly inferior to the one we will be privileged to watch in a couple more weeks.

Some of these changes in baseball that I’m labelling "improvements" have, I suppose, made baseball less competitive rather than more. For example, take players’ salaries. My assumption is that paying players a decent living wage kept good players in the game, and that paying them astronomical wages incentivized good players to stay in the game longer, to keep themselves in better shape over extended careers, and never to walk away voluntarily from another season’s salary, which occurred occasionally in the decades players were badly underpaid. But of course astronomical salaries do sometimes have the contrary effect: players do sometimes still leave money on the table and walk away from the game when they’re still capable of playing at a high level, precisely because they’ve earned more money than they, or their grandchildren, will ever be able to spend. Overall, however, I think it’s plenty clear that fabulous wealth has acted far more as an incentive than it has acted as a disincentive. Most of the changes I’ve identified so far act in this way, not 100% clearly in the direction of improvement in the quality of competition, but enough in that direction to be labelled clearly as an overall improvement.

I’m going to list a dozen separate areas in which baseball has become more competitive, more demanding of a heightened level of play, less subject to randomizing factors. These areas have very little overlap—and since one has almost nothing to do with another, there will be cumulative progress even if one or two slow down or even reverse course for a season or two. Think of the progress as akin to the Dow Jones index over the course of the past hundred years, some years up, some years way down, but overall dramatically and overwhelming up, up, up:

Economic improvements: Not just salaries alone, but guaranteed contracts and other provisions of the standard contract, including comfortable accommodations on the road, first-class plane travel. When I hear old-timers commenting on the good old days when players could travel on comfortable trains, it’s enough to tear your hair out. Did you ever try to sleep on a moving train? As compared to a first-class hotel room? Give me a break. Just protection from needing to work the often physically demanding, sometimes dangerous off-season jobs, is a big advance. (Leaving to the next category all the safe, supervised training and conditioning that players have been able to afford instead for the past few decades).

Training improvements: Let’s include physical differences. Citing the average height and weight of today’s players compared to 50 or 100 or 150 years ago is not a pound-for-pound, inch-for-inch measure of improvement, but it’s gotta be worth something that everyone is taller, better fed, with routine access to complete gyms at home, on the road, at the stadium, etc. Within our lifetimes, weight training used to be disparaged, mocked, and severely discouraged reminds us of how much progress has been made in this area, leaving aside all of the specific advancements in types and techniques of strength and flexibility training.

Medical improvements: Not just baseball-specific improvements, like the TJ surgery, rotator cuff, ACL treatments, but all the advancements in medical knowledge generally affecting players’ lives before they turn pro: how many 20-year-olds are now eligible to sign contracts because they all been vaccinated against polio, which must have claimed the lives of several potential major leaguers before Dr. Salk?   Not sure if things like "players smoking cigarettes," which must be down at least 75% over my lifetime, belongs under "Medical" as much as "Social," but there’s a sizable cohort of active players who would have had serious health issues if smoking, chawing, dipping snuff, etc. were still a part of players’ lifestyles, not to mention stuff like seatbelts in cars  preserving more than a few players’ lives in their childhoods and teens. Just having a team physician, as opposed to one overweight masseur nicknamed "Doc," is critical progress.

Social improvements: Changes in society have extended and improved players’ lives: I’m thinking here primarily of military service, which from 1942-1971 or so routinely cost players whole seasons, and wiped out some players’ entire careers, but I’m sure you can think of other social changes besides the elimination of military service and racial discrimination that have added considerably to the pool of active major leaguers in 2018.

Player Development improvements: The nurturing and skills-training that takes place in the minor leagues (to say nothing of college ball and high school ball) is ridiculously more professional (and less idiosyncratic) than it was in the past. Bill wrote about a high school training program (for football) he endured in the early 1960s that would probably get the coach 3-to-5 years on child-abuse felony charges today: depriving kids of water, overworking them physically for the sake of teaching "discipline"-- such stories used to be universal, now not so much. Aside from saving a few lives in extreme cases, eliminating such needless macho crap prevents more than a few career-ending injuries as well. At the major league level, injuries that might have ended careers if left untreated (i.e., "healing by itself") are now carefully monitored, and re-hab duty is now a typical stage of recovery from almost any serious injury, freeing players from the need to go "all out" as they resume competition.

Self-assessment improvements: this one may have some overlaps with "personnel" or "training" improvements, or even "social" improvements, but have you ever realized what an advantage it is for players to be able to study film of their opponents, or themselves, any time they choose? We’re all surrounded by our laptops, and search engines, and streaming video so much that maybe we don’t realize what a boon it is to have dedicated video available 24/7. A pitcher with a "tell" in his delivery won’t last a week with opponents watching his motion over and over and over again, looking for weaknesses. Players can watch their own swings, side-by-side with their swing from last week or last year, with coaches sitting by their sides, pointing out the smallest change or quirk or wasted motion.

Support personnel improvements: Apart from scouting, whose staffs have grown from a couple of ex-ballplayers wearing out their cars’ tires to massive bureaucracies criss-crossing the country by plane, I’ll also include such innovations as the sheer number of coaches, which is probably double, maybe triple, what I remember from the 1960s, which is easily double, probably triple, the first coaching staffs (mainly one old ex-drinking buddy of the manager’s).  https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/List_of_current_Major_League_Baseball_coaching_staffs  For that matter, even the idea of the manager being a separate job was introduced slowly: for years, it was assumed that the manager could swing a bat or toss a couple of innings every now and then. Ya think maybe reducing the manager’s responsibilities by eliminating half of his job while giving him a half-dozen assistants to help him do the other half makes for better managing?  I’m no fan of gigantic bureaucracies being key to efficiency (in academe, we tend to appoint a new associate dean every time a window needs opening, with no actual results being demonstrated or even required) but you do tend to have fewer tasks that are no one’s responsibility, and which therefore get completely neglected.  Such jobs as Spanish-speaking coaches and translators, or other languages if needed, are routinely assigned, putting a premium on victories ("Will this help us win even one game over a season? If yes, do it") rather than on dollars and cents. Skinflint GMs of my youth must be spinning in their graves like Mixmaster blades.

Rules improvements: The reduction of hard-contact plays (home-plate collisions, takeout slides at second base, beanball wars) has probably kept a few players in the game whose careers would have otherwise been truncated. Player safety has been at least partly behind most changes in the rules, as seen in such things as fresh, clean, white baseballs in play 100% of the time, as opposed to maybe 10%. Or maybe that’s an "Equipment improvement"?

Equipment improvements: I made a big deal in my previous column out of the improved dragging of the infield dirt, but that was only a minor example of the advances that have been made in grounds-keeping equipment and practices, which is only one type of equipment. When was the infield tarp introduced, for example? When was the first outfield wall padded? Did the Yankees (and other teams) eliminate the exposed drainpipes that ruined Mickey Mantle’s leg immediately after the 1951 Series, or was it more gradual than that? How slowly did teams install backgrounds behind the pitchers to make pitches more visible to batters? I suspect that one reason players used to leave their gloves on the field between innings is that the gloves didn’t represent significant enough impediments beyond what the field itself presented.  As unlikely as it was that a shortstop would trip over his counterpart’s glove, it was no more likely that he would trip over some lumpy piece of sod, some rock, some clod of clay.  (Good name for a 1940s player, btw: Claude O’Clay). I don’t know exactly when players started wearing sunglasses, but I wrote in my Halberstam critique last year about the difficulty (Halberstam claimed) the 1961 Cubs had in instructing Lou Brock in the use of this newfangled technology.

Tactical improvements:  We could measure the difference (relative to league runs) between runs scored in innings 7-9 in 2017 and in 1917. I assume there’s a significant payoff in having several fresh arms from both sides over having one tired arm from one side of the plate pitching the final three innings. Much as we complain about the overuse of relief pitchers (I devote at least two hours per week to bitching about it, myself), there’s no denying that it is clearly a more effective tactic to get a fresh arm out there than it is to wait until your starter has given up multiple runs in a late inning before finally taking him out, disgusted that you can’t rely on him for nine good innings. (Whether it’s more watchable, as Marc Schneider observed in the last "Comments’ section, is highly doubtful.) It may be that not every new tactic represents a clear advance, but there sure have been a lot of tactical changes and most of them must work out, because otherwise smart guys would gain advantages by reverting to old tactics, which you very rarely see.

Strategic improvements: Let’s lump "sabermetrics" into this one, evaluating players rationally, by careful study instead of relying on General Managers’ ideas of a ballplayer’s "good face," but also such non-sabermetric changes like teams generally signing more starting pitchers on the roster than they’ll actually use at any one time, knowing that some starting pitcher, probably several, will get injured at some point. A contender will in effect stockpile starting pitchers, cautiously keeping one starter on the DL routinely while his minor injury heals rather than having him "pitch through it."  Teams react much more pro-actively to pitchers’ complaints of aches and pains, encouraging them to voice even minor issues, instead of the former policy of "Of course your arm hurts, wussy man. Tough it out."  Teams have figured out that they can squeeze extra pitchers onto the MLB roster by keeping their third catcher on their AAA roster, taking advantage of the miracle of modern plane travel. As inefficient as it was to keep a third catcher around who would bat less than 100 times per season, that used to be the standard practice. Long-range planning has dominated discussions, and the advocates for "tomorrow’s game" win fewer arguments these days with the advocates for "the season" or "the player’s career."

Improvements in techniques: Sticking to just pitching here, pitchers experiment with new pitches, new grips, new deliveries constantly, and the result is that the ones that work catch on, while the ones that don’t, or the ones that cause injury, drop out of play. I’m thinking of the screwball in particular but also about the practice Bill described the other day of prewar pitchers being told to pick a fastball (two-seamer or four-seamer) and stick with that, up until someone said "No" and was successful throwing both, opening the door to everyone throwing both fastballs. This sort of thing can be superstitious, or based on an idea that applies to some but not to all, like "Don’t be a one-handed hero" in catching fly-balls that applies to few outfielders outside of Pete Gray but was axiomatic until some outfielders got themselves into better position to throw by using only their glove hand.

Each of these dozen large categories of improvements (which could easily be expanded) contains many particular examples of ways the game of baseball gets progressively more competitive every season. I’ve been stalling off hitting "submit" on this article because I kept thinking of different categories, and different examples within each categories. I have no idea how to devise a comprehensive list of categories or examples—I’ll just go with "more than I can think of."

So how do we discuss this stuff in a quantitative way? I’ve been tossing around numbers freely here, such and such a percentage of improvement for this little thing or that, so let’s look at the few numbers we can approximate pretty closely: there were about 400 roster spots in 1901 (384 men batted in MLB, but we’ll go with 400 for the moment.) With twice the number of American boys to be scouted (remember, the population has more than quadrupled, while the number of MLB teams hasn’t quite doubled), you figure that brings the number down to fewer than 200 right off, of players in 1901 who would make a roster in 2018. Now bring in the number of foreign players being scouted actively, and the number of dark-skinned players (some overlap there, which is why I’m combining these two areas) --figure conservatively that’s at least 25% of MLB today, so we’re down to 140 players from 1901 making a current roster.

Those are the areas that are easiest to pin an approximate value to, but of course we’ve only scratched the surface of all the areas of improvement I’ve listed above. I have no idea how to quantify the other areas of improvement, but I have to believe that cumulatively, no matter how we do it, it has got to add up to a considerable positive integer. All the injuries prevented, all the careers extended, all the players added to major league rosters in place of these 140 players from 1901….

If we assume that half the remaining players from 1901 would make a MLB roster in 2018, which is perfectly arbitrary yet perfectly reasonable assumption, that gives us a little over two 1901 players on each 2018 roster, and that seems about right to me. Some of those players, such as Nap Lajoie, Jimmy Collins, Christy Mathewson, Vic Willis, Honus Wagner, Cy Young, would still be starters (though perhaps not as league-dominating alongside the vastly better competition they’d be facing and playing with) while others, such as Rube Waddell or Doc White (the 18^th and 19^th best pitchers in the NL in 1901, as WAR has it) might be struggling to make the final cut on some contemporary roster.

It also seems right, using 2.5 players per 2018 roster, to then assume that baseball has improved about tenfold since 1901, almost 10% per decade, between .5% and 1% per season, a figure low enough to be imperceptible to the human eye or ear but high enough to make for the sort of annual progress I’m trying to describe.

That figure, which is not much more than a numerical approximation of a feeling, an attempt to quantify a vague sense of baseball history, seems at least close to correct.  If it were much lower than 0.5% percent, it wouldn’t account for the improvements that we all acknowledge have been made, and if it were much higher than 1%, it would begin to show up before our eyes.

I was a little surprised, and a lot pleased, to find that several of you anticipated and affirmed the direction my last article was heading, but I suppose BJOL is where I’m going to find readers who don’t find a severe assessment of early baseball to be heretical. I’d like to explore, in my next piece, a little further back into an even more severe assessment of baseball before 1901, and more significantly a critical assessment of the way we read history in general, not just baseball history, as we look deeper and deeper into the past.