Great read and interesting premise Paul. IMO keeping the game going during wartime despite the lower level of play, was a good enough reason to count those seasons as any other.
Your argument isn’t supported by *all* of the data, you merely cherry picked certain players to buttress your argument. I can do the same thing to argue the other way, that certain great players played about the same during and after the war, which demonstrates the quality hadn’t slipped that much: Hal Newhouser had 20.5 bWAR from 1943-45 and 22.0 bWAR from 1946-48. Stan Musial was still playing in 1943-1944 but his three best years in bWAR were post WWII. Vern Stephens’s production from 1943-45 was on par with his post WWII production from 1946-49.
You may have a point about MLB quality of play during 1943-45, but you’re going to have to do much more comprehensive data analysis to make a compelling argument that MLB should throw out those years.
I think they are fair points about the quality but I think you could make a similar argument about much of the deadball era as well. The stats from these seasons should count because these were the best teams and players available, of course not including the negro league players of same time that were still excluded
Great read and interesting premise Paul. IMO keeping the game going during wartime despite the lower level of play, was a good enough reason to count those seasons as any other.
Your argument isn’t supported by *all* of the data, you merely cherry picked certain players to buttress your argument. I can do the same thing to argue the other way, that certain great players played about the same during and after the war, which demonstrates the quality hadn’t slipped that much: Hal Newhouser had 20.5 bWAR from 1943-45 and 22.0 bWAR from 1946-48. Stan Musial was still playing in 1943-1944 but his three best years in bWAR were post WWII. Vern Stephens’s production from 1943-45 was on par with his post WWII production from 1946-49.
You may have a point about MLB quality of play during 1943-45, but you’re going to have to do much more comprehensive data analysis to make a compelling argument that MLB should throw out those years.
I think they are fair points about the quality but I think you could make a similar argument about much of the deadball era as well. The stats from these seasons should count because these were the best teams and players available, of course not including the negro league players of same time that were still excluded
I'm not following the comparison to the dead ball era. Other than not allowing non-White players, what was the major talent drain then?
Just that they were not playing the same game and so the stats are not that comparable.