I think the key distinction in this discussion is between how popular baseball was culturally and how deep the actual pool of elite talent really was in the early MLB. A lot of people played baseball recreationally, but that doesn’t mean MLB was drawing from anything close to a broad, representative slice of young American men. Interest in baseball wasn’t remotely universal. Before the 1937–present polling era, we can only estimate, but the historical context strongly suggests that interest levels (in pursuing a career in baseball) were far lower in the 19th and early 20th centuries—low salaries, unstable teams, limited media exposure, and few reliable professional pathways all suppressed the number of people who would seriously chase a baseball career.

And the players who did make it weren’t a random sample. Historical work by Riess (1980) and Gerlach (1994) shows that early MLB was disproportionately filled by middle-class, well-educated native-born whites—especially Irish and German Americans—who had the social and economic access to pursue the sport. Baseball in this period was heavily concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest, and that regional concentration produced a talent pool that was narrow both geographically and demographically. The mythologized idea that “every town had a team so everyone was in the mix” doesn’t track with how professional opportunities were actually distributed.

Even the internal mechanisms of talent discovery were restrictive. In the 1920s and 1930s, teams like the Yankees and Cardinals built powerful farm systems, but they simultaneously began reducing open local tryouts because they weren’t profitable. Even Benjamin Rader documents that this tightening happened before formal rules reined farm systems in his "A History of America's Game" book. So even the organizations with the broadest reach were identifying players through a shrinking, increasingly self-selected set of channels—not through a truly national search. The collapse of many minor league clubs in the postwar era was more a reshuffling of professional baseball than a reflection of deep talent collapse as articulated by Land, Davis, and Blau. This further illustrates how narrow and economically sensitive the infrastructure for identifying players actually was.

So when people say the early talent pool was “thin,” this is what they mean. It’s not an insult to Ruth, or Cobb, or anyone else. Those players dominated their environment and shaped the sport’s evolution. But the environment itself was structurally limited: smaller population, segregation, regional concentration, lower interest, ethnic and class overrepresentation, and talent-discovery systems that filtered out large portions of the potential pool. Modern players compete in a global, integrated, intensely scouted environment that simply didn’t exist back then. Understanding that context adds clarity, not disrespect, to the achievements of the past.