Introduction

The backbone of sports fandom is debate. Whether you’re a professional talking head on ESPN or sitting at the lunch table with your friends, if you’re an avid sports fan, you’ve almost definitely had some screaming matches over hypothetical arguments regarding your favorite sport. One of the most classic arguments is about how different players would fare in different eras of their sport. Whether it’s your 90-year-old grandpa preaching to you about how Wilt Chamberlain would dominate the centers of today, or your 12-year cousin saying that Babe Ruth played against plumbers, it’s inescapable for sport’s fans to avoid these types of arguments. I’m here to tell you that, somehow, both your grandpa and cousin are correct. Crazy right? As someone fully immersed in the world of sports debate, it seems impossible that both sides of the most popular debate topic can be right. What I am arguing is that yes, the average athlete of today is leagues better than the average athletes of yesterday, however the best of the best in every sport would be able to compete in any time. Athletes from the 1980s like Barry Sanders, Charles Barkley, and Mike Schmidt are just as good as their 2020s equivalents of Saquon Barkley, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Aaron Judge, everybody else has just gotten better.

The Average Athlete Over Time

It can be hard to tell whether players get better or worse in the major US sports just by looking at their stats. This is because all of these sports are not solely based on individual achievement. Success in sports is a microchasm of interactions against another individual, who is in theory, getting better at the same rate. For example, batting average in the MLB has not improved drastically over time. This does not mean that the average MLB hitter has not improved, it just means that pitchers have improved at the same rate. So we must be careful when we select the statistics that we use that are the most individual possible in each sport.

The Average NBA Player

This graph showcases the average NBA true shooting percentage and turnovers per game across time. True shooting percentage is a more advanced version of field goal percentage (the percentage of shots you make). This statistic properly weights the different point values of a free throw, two-point field goal, and three-point field goal. True shooting percentage can be throught of as a one-size-fits-all statistic to sum up offensive effeciency. A turnover in the NBA happens when a player makes a mistake that results in the other team getting the ball, such as making a bad pass, stepping out of bounds, or committing an offensive foul. These can be a result of great defensive plays, but often they are individual mistakes a player with the ball makes. In this visualization, you can see that true shooting percentage consistently goes up over time, while turnovers per game consistently goes down. This points towards the average NBA player now is both more effecient and makes less mistakes on the court than they did in the past.

The Average NFL player

The NFL draft combine is a place where prospective NFL players get to show off their speed, agility, and skill in front of NFL scouts before they are drafted to their NFL teams. One of the most important events at the combine is the 40 yard dash. Speed is so important in the NFL for every single position, as being a little bit faster will help you in all facets of the game, whether you’re an offensive lineman trying to block for a running back, or a running back trying to outrun a line backer. It may appear subtle, but the average NFL player is getting much faster over time, especially offensive linemen, tight ends, and quarterbacks. In a sport where a tenth of a second can be the difference between a touchdown or a loss of yards, every bit of speed matters.

MLB Pitchers and Hitters

Best of the Best

Comparing NBA MVPs

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This graph shows two very important comparisons. The first is that it compares how NBA MVP seasons stack up and compare against each other. The important thing to see is that there is seemingly no drop-off the later and later you go in time. Explore the data and see if you can find a stretch of time that had objectively worse MVPs than other years. MVP back in the day might have had lower 3-point efficiency but the monster rebound and block numbers from the 70s and early 80s are hard to compare. When you explore the data, a good way to compare is by looking at win-shares. Win shares is a computed statistic that attempts to quantify the individual impact a player had on their teams wins. While an imperfect statistic, win-shares is a great way to compare how all of an individual player’s statistics contributed to their team’s success. The second comparison this graph has is the dotted red line that goes across the graph. This line shows the average statistics for some of the best players in the NBA in 2023. This line is computed based on the average stats for players who just missed an All-NBA team in 2023. For those unfamiliar, at the end of the year, the NBA has players, coaches, and the media vote on who the best players were that season. The 15 players with the most votes make the All-NBA team, one of the most prestigious honors a player can make. This red line takes the average of the 10 players with the most votes who did not make the team. To be clear, these players are still the best of the best in the NBA. These players are all-stars and former MVPs having some of the best seasons of their career. When exploring the data, look at how much better the MVP seasons are than these averages. The value in the hover-text shows how much better these seasons are than the dotted line as a percentage. For Example, 1979 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had 335% of the blocks per game as these players. These comparisons shows how even if you took the MVPs from the 70s and 80s and dropped them into 2023, they would not only be productive NBA players, they would be the best of the best.

Hall of Fame Baseball Players

As the oldest of the three sports I am discussing today, major league baseball has gone through many drastic changes throughout its time. MLB fans have defined unofficial eras throughout its history that help to represent these changes. These eras mark major events throughout the history of baseball, such as in 1942, when MLB went through its integration process. The game evolved drastically during this time but one thing can be made clear. The best players in each era would be good no matter what. The visualization above represents the distribution of hall of famers based on the eras they played in and their wins above replacement. Wins above replacement measures how much better you were than the average player.

Best NFL players

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Why is this the case?

The simple answer is that there’s a wider pool of candidates than ever before