The reason why I could have played so much better 50 years ago is that I was only 20 then.lol

I'm a former drums/keybaord player.

I only quit due to mangled hands/fingers.

Artists such as Oscar Peterson, Stanley T, Buddy Rich, Diz, etc will ALWAYS be at the very top of the talent pool as, true artistry will always shine through.

"This wasn't just a major league problem. I played Little League baseball from 1971 to 1975 and I swung a 27-ounce bat at the age of 7, probably about a 29-ouncer when I was 11."

And you know what? It wasn't just the bats...the gloves were too small, the cleats too clunky, the pants too baggy. And it wasn't just major league baseball either. The tennis rackets, the surfboards, the skis--even the race cars--all needed far more attention from the physics teachers than they were getting. All that fly me to the moon and Dr. Strangelove stuff sucking all the energy out of the lab I guess.

This made me chuckle:

"The dominant teams in the 1970s were, believe it or not, the Reds, the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Baltimore Orioles, the Oakland A's, and the Los Angeles Dodgers, all, with the exception of the Dodgers, small-market teams, then and now. Where are they today?"

The Oakland A's are perennial contenders, despite their small-market status. They've had two off years, but from 1999-2006 they won 87, 91, 102, 103, 96, 91, 88 and 93 games, and made five trips to the playoffs. The Pittsburgh Pirates, Cincinnati Reds and Baltimore Orioles stink because they are run by a bunch of morons.

The American League champion last year was the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. The Minnesota Twins are another franchise that is constantly competitive despite being a small market club that plays in a craptastic stadium. Both mega-market, high-payroll NYC teams missed the playoffs last year. Baseball has more competitive balance now than it ever did. Fourteen different franchises have made it to the World Series this decade and we've only played nine seasons, so eighteen is the highest possible total.

This is an oft-told tale, but it's worth repeating....

Up until free agency, major league players often ended their careers with a couple years in the minors. The pay cut from the majors wasn't so great back then, and farm teams were willing to keep some "name" guys on their squad to bring in fans.

The upside was that young minor leaguers had the counsel of old big leaugers, and they picked up a lot of details that a coaching staff wasn't able to convey. The result was more mature players coming up. Were they as good as the athletes today? Not by a mile. But they were a lot smarter about the game and how they could contribute to every inning of every game.

This is also one of the reasons why younger Latin players who come into US baseball have more knowledge than their American counterparts. They've played more innings of baseball in an atmosphere that allowed older players to convey what they knew...outside of the kind of formal coaching structure that dominates American amateur baseball.

I'm a white American, and was fortunate enough to play baseball in an informal Latin league back in the 90's. There were players from 15 to 60 on every team. The kind of informal teaching that went on was a wonder to behold. No ego or age barriers, just a passion for the game and a belief that everybody should come away from every game a better ball player. I'd never seen anything like this in mainstream American baseball. Not even close.

It's also worth taking a moment to consider how the population of pro baseball players may have changed over the years and how that might effect things as well...

Overall the US population is now much larger, and there are also substantial numbers of top notch players coming from other countries--Ichiro for example-- and of course you now have lots of excellent minority athletes who were previously excluded from competition. Of course there are now more teams than there were in 1956 and baseball has increasingly had to compete with football and basketball for top notch athletic talent, but overall, I'd say that MLB can probably recruit from a larger pool of talent now than was possible in 1956, and this likely allows baseball to be more selective-- a player who had just enough stuff to make it into the majors in 1956 might languish in AAA now, while your superstars of 1956 might be a step closer to run of the mill. (In keeping with the 'where are the .400 hitters' theory...)

It's also worth considering that free agency has allowed player's salaries to balloon, and the top players make a lot more money now than their predecessors did--apparently in 1929 Babe Ruth made only about $80k, which is still less than a million dollars adjusted for inflation. The prospect of higher payouts might convince more people to take a roll of the dice on a baseball career now than in times past, further increasing the potential pool of talent and allowing teams to be even more selective.

This, coupled with better conditioning, training--and steroids--is likely to make the average current player better than the average player fifty years ago.

I read somewhere -- it might have been in "The Glory Of Their Times" -- that Satchel Page rarely struck anyone out on three pitches. If he had them 0-2, the next pitch was very high and very inside. Then the 4th pitch was down and away...an easy called strike three.

Bob Gibson was also said to have never given up 4 hits to the same batter in one game. The first pitch of the fourth at-bat (after three hits) was in the middle of the back.

I'm not glorfying any of this. Just pointing out that pitchers "back then" weren't the soft tossing wimps they'e being made out to be...and hitting off them carried more than a little risk.

And, with every game now broadcast on TV -- many of them in hi def -- scuffing or loading up balls on the mound is an almost lost "art." Back then, it was the wild west.

Whan I was a kid, there was a husband and wife who owned a sports lettering shop down the road. The guy had been one of the bench warmers on the Gas House Gang, with the Dean brothers, etc. We would go in there after school and hear one horror story after another about what went on back in the day.

This old guy also had a corked bat from that era, cut in half length wise and put on display. So maybe those huge chunks of lumber weren't as heavy as hitters claimed they were!

Also, in Ted Williams' hitting book, he talked about using bats in the low 20 ounce range, and storing them in hermetically sealed cases so they wouldn't pick up any unwanted moisture in humid cities. True, Williams was WAY ahead of his time, but weight was a consideration in the 40's and 50's...at least to some guys.

All that said, this is a great piece of sports writing by King, if for no other reason than it's bringing out the best in the readers.