1915 to 1955 to 1996

Three years from baseball history roughly separated by forty years. A deadball era season that serves to represent the hardscrabble, knock 'em down play of baseball long ago. Another season set smack-dab in the middle of baseball's glory years. And a third season sitting just after baseball had reached it's lowest point of public approval since the you know what of 1919 had done it's dirty work.

What to compare today? I'd like to look at those three seasons top players in terms of games played. The goal will be to examine whether there were more players who played through their injuries or didn't sit because they had a mild headache in 1915 than in 1955. And whether the glorious players of the 1950's, who played for the love of the game, threw caution to the wind more often then the greedy bums of the present day game do.

In short, I want to see if there is any discernible difference between each season's regulars in terms of their games played. Specifically, I have tabulated the number of players who played in at least 90% of their team's games in each of the three years. For the 154 game 1915 and 1955 season this means those players with 138 games played or more were given a nice black checkmark and asked to advance to go. While the 162 game 1996 season required +144 games played to move onto the big chart. My findings were as follows:

Looks like 1915 and 1955 were pretty close using this metric while the 1996 players were about 10% less durable. A larger difference then I would've like to have seen but not the armageddon view that baseball old-timers ascribe to the durability of today's players.

One more thing I looked at was what percentage of their team's games did all of these players play aggregate in each of the years.

While 1996 had about 10% fewer players reach 90% of their team's games those players that did played at nearly the same rate as their 1915 and 1955 counterparts.