Many writers roll these conventional explanations into one large ball, and then pitch the whole kaboodle all at once. Dallas Adams, writing in the Baseball Research Journal for 1981 on "The Probability of the League Leader Batting .400," states:
The commonly held view nowadays is that night ball, transcontinental travel fatigue, the widespread use of top quality relief pitchers, big ballparks, large size fielders’ gloves and other factors all act to a hitter’s detriment and make a .400 average a near impossibility.
Even though exhaustive repetition has enshrined these explanations as true, I believe we can conclusively debunk both versions (tougher conditions and tougher competition) of the claim that 0.400 hitting died because changes in play have made batting more difficult. The theory of tougher conditions makes no sense to me. Is transcontinental flying more tiring than those endless train trips from the East Coast to Chicago or St. Louis? Are single, air-conditioned rooms in fine hotels more conducive to exhaustion than two in a room during an August heat wave in St. Louis? Why do people continually claim that schedules are now more grueling? Modern teams play 162 games and almost no doubleheaders; during most of the century, teams played 154 games in a shorter season filled with twin bills. So who worked harder?
William Curran (1990, pages 17—18) underscores this point in writing about the conditions that a Wade Boggs (our most recent serious contender for 0.400) would have faced in the 1920s:
First let’s deprive Boggs of the services of Ted Williams as a special batting coach. Rookies of the 1920s rarely received individual instruction at any stage of their careers, and, in fact, had to fight for a chance to get into the batting cage to take a few practice swings at the ball. Next we’ll take away Wade’s batting helmet and batting gloves.... And while we’re at it, we’ll have Boggs play three to five consecutive doubleheaders in the afternoon heat of September. After the games let him try to get a night’s rest in St. Louis or Washington at a hotel equipped with a small room fan, if any fan at all. You get the drift.
The testimony of many players affirms the unreality of "tougher conditions" as an explanation. For example, Rod Carew, the best 0.400 prospect since Williams (and a near achiever at 0.388 in 1977), listed the litany of usual explanations and then demurred (Carew, 1979, pages 209-10):
I don’t buy much of that. I imagine that train travel was as rough as jet travel ... and I prefer hitting at night.... During the day you squint a lot, and then there’s a lot of stuff in the air—especially in California—and it burns your eyes. There’s the glare of the sun. And in some places the artificial turf smokes up and your legs are burning. Then the perspiration during the day is running down your face. I like nighttime. You’re cooler and more relaxed.
Tougher competition seems more promising because the basic facts are undoubtedly true: pitching, fielding, and managing have improved. So why shouldn’t the extinction of 0.400 hitting record the relative decline of hitting as these other skills augment? All the other arguments can be refuted by the weight of their own illogic, but "tougher competition" must be tested empirically. We need to know if improvement in hitting has kept pace with opposing forces of pitching, fielding, and managing. If these three adversaries have undergone more improvement than hitting (or, even worse for batters, if hitting has stayed constant or declined as the other three factors ameliorated), then the extinction of 0.400 hitting will be well explained by "tougher competition."
But the mere fact of better pitching, fielding, and managing doesn’t prove the "tougher competition" theory by Itself—and for an obvious reason: hitting might have improved just as much, if not more. Why should hitting be uniquely exempt from a general betterment in all other aspects of play? Isn’t it more reasonable to assume that batting has improved in concert with other factors of baseball? I shall show that general improvement in hitting has not only kept pace with betterment in other aspects of play, but that baseball has constantly fiddled with its rules to assure that major factors remain in balance. The extinction of 0.400 hitting must therefore arise from other causes.
8
A Plausibility Argument for General Improvement
However tempted we may be to indulge in fanciful reveries about dedication during "the good old days," the accepted notion that decline in batting skills caused the extinction of 0.400 hitting just doesn’t make sense when we consider general patterns of social and sports history during the twentieth century. This context, on the contrary, almost guarantees that hitting has improved along with almost anything else we can measure at the apogee of human achievement. Consider just three of many arguments that virtually cement the case, even before we examine a single baseball statistic.
1. LARGER POOLS AND BETTER TRAINING. In 1900,76 million people inhabited the United States, and only white men could play major league baseball. Our population has since ballooned to 249 million people (1990 census), and men of all colors and nations are welcome. Training and coaching were absent to slapdash in the past, but represent a massive industry today. Players follow rigorous and carefully calculated programs for working out (even, if not especially, during the off season, when their predecessors mostly drank beer and gained weight); they no longer risk careers and records by playing hurt. (Joe DiMaggio once told me that he was batting 0.413 with two weeks to go in the 1939 season. He caught a serious cold, which clouded his left [leading] eye, and he could not adequately see incoming pitches. The Yanks had already clinched the pennant. Any modern counterpart would sit on the bench and preserve his record; DiMaggio played to the last game and fell to 0.381, his highest seasonal average, but below the grand plateau.) No one—neither the players nor the owners—can afford to take risks and fool around today, not with star salaries in the multiple millions for careers that last but a few years at peak value. What possible argument could convince us that a smaller and more restricted pool of indifferently trained men might supply better hitters than our modern massive industry with its maximal monetary rewards ? I’ll bet on the larger pool, recruitment of men of all races, and better, more careful training any day.
2. SIZE. I don’t want to fall into the silly mythology of "bigger is better" (okay for a few things, like brains in the evolution of most mammalian lineages, but irrelevant for many items, like penises and automobiles). Still, ceteris paribus as the Romans said (all other things being equal), larger people tend to be stronger (and I say this as a short man who loved to watch Phil Rizzuto and Fred Patek). If height and weight of ballplayers have augmented through time, then (however roughly) bodily prowess should be increasing.
Pete Palmer, sabermetrician extraordinaire and editor, along with John Thorn, of Total Baseball, the best (and fattest) general reference book of baseball stats, sent me his chart (reproduced here as Table 1) of mean heights and weights for pitchers and batters averaged by decades. Note the remarkably steady increase through time. I cannot believe that the larger players of today are worse than their smaller counterparts of decades past.
3. RECORDS IN OTHER SPORTS. All major baseball records are relative— that is, they assess performance against other players in an adversarial role—not absolute as measured by personal achievement, and counted, weighed, or timed by a stopwatch. A 0.400 batting average records degree of relative success against pitchers, whereas a four-minute mile, a nineteen-foot pole vault, or a 250-pound lift is unvarnished you against an unchanging outer world.
Improvements in relative records are ambiguous in permitting several possible (and some diametrically opposed) interpretations: rising batting averages might mean that hitting has improved, but the same increase might also signify that batting has gotten worse while pitching has deteriorated even more sharply (leading to relative advantages for hitters as their absolute skills eroded).
Absolute records, however, have clearer meaning. If leading sprinters are running quicker and vaulters jumping higher ... well, then they are performing their art better. What else can we say? The breaking of records doesn’t tell us why mode
rn athletes are doing better—and a range of diverse reasons might be cited, from better training, better understanding of human physiology, new techniques (the Fosbury flop), to new equipment (fiberglass poles and the immediate, dramatic rise in record heights for pole vaulting)—but I don’t think that we can deny the fact of improvement.
Therefore, since the relative records of baseball must be ambiguous in their causes, we should study the absolute records of related sports. If most absolute records have been improving, then shouldn’t we assume that athletic prowess has risen in baseball as well? Wouldn’t we be denying a general pattern and creating an implausible, ad hoc theory if we attributed the extinction of 0.400 hitting to a decline in batting skills? Shouldn’t we be searching for a theory that can interpret the death of 0.400 hitting as a consequence of generally superior athleticism—thus making this most interesting and widely discussed trend in the history of baseball statistics consistent with the pattern and history of almost every other sport?
I don’t want to worry a well-understood subject to death, and I don’t want to bore you with endless documentation of well-known phenomena. Surely all sports fans recognize the pervasive pattern of improvement in absolute records through time. The first modern Olympic marathon champ, Spiridon Loues, took almost three hours in 1896; more recent winners are nearly down to two. The allure of the four-minute mile challenged runners for decades, while Paavo Nurmi’s enticing 4.01 held from 1941 until Roger Bannister’s great moment on May 6, 1954. Now, most of the best runners routinely break four minutes nearly every time. By 1972, for the 100-meter freestyle, and by 1964 for the 400 meters, the best women swimmers eclipsed the Olympic records of the 1920s and 1930s, set by the two great Tarzans (both played the role in movies) Buster Crabbe and Johnny Weismuller. I will let one chart stand for the generality, based on data closest to hand for the most famous of local races at my workplace— the Boston Marathon (see Figure 12). The general pattern is clear, and the few anomalies record changes in distance (the "standard" 26 miles 385 yards has prevailed in most years, but early winners, from 1897 to 1923, ran only 24 miles 1,232 yards for their longer times; with a rise to 26 miles 209 yards from 1924 to 1926; the standard distance from 1927 to 1952; and a shortened 25 miles 958 yards from 1953 to 1956, until reestablishment of the standard distance in 1957).
FIGURE 12 The steadily decreasing record time for men in the Boston Marathon. Dots are five-year averages (my calculation).
For almost every sport, the improvement in absolute records follows a definite pattern with presumed causes central to my developing argument about 0.400 hitting. Improvement does not follow a linear path of constant rate. Rather, times and records fall more rapidly early in the sequence and then slow markedly, sometimes reaching a plateau of no further advance (or of minutest measurable increments from old records). In other words, athletes eventually encounter some kind of barrier to future progress, and records stabilize (or at least slow markedly in their frequency and amount of improvement). Statisticians call such a barrier an asymptote; vernacular language might speak of a limit. In the terminology of this book, athletes reach a "right wall" that stymies future im- provement.
Since we are considering the world’s best performers in these calculations, the probable reasons for such limits or walls should be readily apparent. After all, bodies are physical devices, subject to constraints upon performance set by size, physiology, and the mechanics of muscles and joints. No one will argue that curves of improvement can be extrapolated forever—or else runners would eventually complete the mile in nothing flat (and, finally, in negative time), and pole vaulters would truly match a gentleman of legend and leap tall buildings in a single bound.
We can best test the proposition that physical limits (or right walls) cause the slowing and plateauing of improvements by comparing curves for athletes operating near the extremes in human capacity with performers who probably retain much room for further advance. What conditions might place people far from the right wall, and therefore endow them with great scope for improvement? Consider some potential examples: new sports where athletes have not yet figured out optimal procedures; new categories of people recently admitted to old sports; records for amateur play. As an example, the Boston Marathon was opened to women only in 1972. Note how much more rapidly women have improved than men from their beginning to the present (Figure 13).
We may generalize this principle by setting up a hierarchy of decreasing improvement (also a ranking of increasing worth in the value systems of some rather old-fashioned and well-heeled folks): women, men, and horses. Winning times for major horse races have improved, but ever so slightly over long intervals. For example, between 1840 and 1980, thoroughbred horses in the three great English races of St. Leger, Oaks, and the Derby have shaved twelve, twenty, and eighteen seconds off record times, for a minuscule gain of 0.4 to 0.8 percent per generation (Eckhardt et al., 1988). These gains are tiny even when compared with the other great arena of breeding in domesticated animals: improvement of livestock, where gains of 1 to 3 percent per year are often achieved for features of economic importance.
This limited improvement makes perfect and predictable sense. Thoroughbreds have been rigorously raised from a limited stock for more than two hundred years. Stakes could not be higher, as the slightest improvement may be worth millions. More effort has gone into betterment of this breed than into almost any other biological endeavor of economic importance to humans. We might therefore suppose that the best thoroughbreds have long resided at the genetic right wall for the breed, and that future improvements will be negligible to slow. But since (thank God) we have not yet reached brave new world, we do not breed humans for optimized physical performance, and records for people should therefore show more flexibility—for we have no purposeful purebreds at our right walls.
FIGURE 13 Women’s records decline precipitously while men’s records remain relatively stable between 1970 and 1980 in the Boston Marathon. Since 1980 both records have changed little. Dots are actual winning times for each year.
In most popular and established men’s events, we note the pattern of rapid initial improvement followed by flattening of the curve.4 Exceptions may be found in such events as the marathon, where length and complexity provide great "play" for experimenting with new strategies, and where recent surges in popularity have brought large increases in prestige and participation. (Note that the curve of improvement for the Boston Marathon has remained virtually linear for men, and did not slow before 1990— though the pattern may now be shifting into the usual mode as the world’s best runners now compete and improvements begin to abate.)
Many commentators have noted that most women’s records are both falling faster than men’s for the same event, and are not yet flattening, but maintaining a linear pace of improvement. Interestingly (see Whipp and Ward, 1992), most men’s running events (200 to 10,000 meters) have improved in the same range of rates regardless of the event’s total distance— 5.69 to 7.57 meters per minute improvement per decade. (Improvement in the marathon has been greater, at 9.18 meters per minute per decade, thus supporting my claim that this event remains "immature" and still in the category of potentially linear improvement—that is, not near the right wall.) But for women in the same events, rates of improvement run from 14.04 to 17.86 minutes per meter per decade (with a whopping 37.75 meters for the marathon).
These findings have led to all manner of speculation, some rather silly. For example, Whipp and Ward (1992) just extrapolate their curves and then defend the conclusion that women will eventually outrun men in most events, and rather soon for some. (The extrapolated curves for the marathon, for example, cross in 1998 when women should beat men by this argument.)
But extrapolation is a dangerous, generally invalid, and often foolish game. After all, as I said before, extrapolate the linear curve far enough and all distances will be run in zero and then in negative time. (False extrapolation also produces the irresponsible figures often cite
d for growth of human populations—in a few centuries, for example, humans will form a solid mass equal to the volume of the earth and no escape into outer space will be possible because the rate of increase will cause the diameter of this human sphere to grow at greater than the speed of light, which, as Einstein taught us, sets an upper bound upon rapidity of motion.) Clearly we will never run in negative time, nor will our sphere of solid humanity expand at light speed. Limits or right walls will be reached, and rates of increase will first slow and eventually stop.
Women may outclass men in certain events like ultra-long-distance swimming, where buoyancy and fat distribution favor women’s physiques and endurances over men’s (women already hold the absolute record for the English Channel and Catalina Island swims). The marathon may also be a possibility. But I doubt that women will ever capture either the 100-meter dash or the heavyweight lifting records. (Many women will always beat most men in any particular event—most women can beat me in virtually anything physical. But remember that we are talking of world records among the very best performers—and here the biomechanics of different construction will play determining role.)
The basic reason for more rapid gains (and less curve flattening) in women’s events seems clear. Sexism is the culprit, and happy reversals of these older injustices the reward. Most of these events have been opened to women only recently. Women have been brought into the world of professionalism, intense training, and stiff competition only in the last few years. Women, not so long ago (and still now for so many), were socialized to regard athletic performance as debarred to their gender—and many of the great women performers of the past, Babe Didrikson in particular, suffered the onus of wide dismissal as overly masculine. In other words, most women’s curves are now near the beginning of the sequence— in the early stages of rapid and linear improvement. These curves will flatten as women reach their own right walls—and only then will we know true equality of opportunity. Until then, the steep and linear improvement curves of women’s sports stand as a testimony to our past and present inequities.
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