3dender wrote: ↑24 Jul 2026 09:37 am
A few reasons I can think of:
1) Physical maturity matters as much in baseball as it does in football
2) The difference between college and professional is far wider than it is in any other sport
3) A vastly higher percentage of (the most talented) athletes go straight from HS to minor leagues, depleting the talent level of college
4) College coaches have no incentive to preserve athlete (especially pitcher) health
5) Pitcher velo/spin creates a much tougher matchup for prospect bats than a decade-plus ago.
6) Pitcher velo/spin also creats a much higher chance for catastrophic pitcher injury
few things id like to add.
college is actually played differently than professional. the ball parks have smaller dimensions so on the fielding side, outfielders have less ground to cover. on the hitting side, less distance to hit a homerun.
also on the hitting side, they swing metal bats instead of the widden ones in the pris. quitefrankly, wooden bats as well as longerfields is just a completely different game for hitters
Boiler Bird wrote: ↑24 Jul 2026 16:39 pm
The dropoff in baseball’s quality goes much deeper. For over half a century, the majority of American boys were introduced to “the thinking man’s game” through Little League and the likes, from stickball in the streets to wood bats on dirt, learning rules and nuances as challenging as the game’s widely varied skills. Then came tee-ball and daddy-lob, setting back live hitting and pitching by years. Finally came the national explosion of kiddie soccer – wild coed herds mindlessly kicking the ball and each other -- ultimately producing merely average players at the highest levels of that watch-paint-dry sport but negatively impacting all levels of baseball with dramatically reduced development and talent pools. Try launching that angle. As one who’s seen it all, growing up watching Stan, Yogi, Mickey, Gibby and the real Lou, I just shake my head at what takes the field these days.
The population base which now supplies players to MLB is now roughly 6 times greater than it was in the 1950's and 1960's.
It has not been diluted in any way
Why then are fundamental skills diminished in some ways and yet improved in others?
MLB itself has done so intentionally.
In the last 60 years, while the population grew from 200 to 350 million, the majors grew from 20 to 30 teams. Essentially right in step. Essentially skilled players … not so much. Missing the George Kissells of the world.
The MLB pipeline now comes from a population base of over a billion people.
With more players playing more games than American boys did 60, 70, or 80 years ago.
There has been zero dilution of the talent pool.
Why then are fundamental skills diminished in some ways and yet improved in others?
MLB itself has done so intentionally.
Wow. A billion people to draw from? But 999.9999 million can’t hit their weight?
Fact is, Little League Baseball now has 1.6 to 1.9 million boys enrolled, virtually no more than the 1.6 million boys who played in 1966, showing the dramatic decline in participation percentage from the overall population. Annual enrollment decline in Little League has been between 1.5 to 3 percent each year since the 1990s. Just look at all the vacated diamonds. And now it’s showing in MLB, which in turn aspires to attract fans with the attention spans of gnats while ignoring the values of ten-tool gurus such as George Kissell. Thus, the long-deposed national pastime has fallen even deeper on the charts.
The USA population is 75% larger than it was in the 50's-60's.
And there are far more programs, tools, and coaches available now than then
Additionally, MLB draws from a talent base which includes nearly all of Latin American, and a significant portion of Asia.
The notion that the talent pool, or player opportunities, or coaching has been reduced in any way is completely specious and contradicted by facts.
Bottom line.
MLB is played differently solely because MLB wants it that way.
