cortesoft is on track by pointing out how small the gaps are (in absolute terms) between bad, average, good and very good in baseball. And just as importantly,

cortesoft is on track by pointing out how small the gaps are (in absolute terms) between bad, average, good and very good in baseball. And just as importantly, the gaps have been shrinking. Stephen Jay Gould famously wrote about this in explaining why we don't see .400 batting averages anymore (that's a hit 4 out of every 10 times a player bats; it last happened in the major leagues in 1941). The average major-league player of today is significantly better than the average player of seventy years ago, so there are fewer opportunities for the best player in the league to take advantage of large numbers of truly-outmatched opponents and achieve inflated performance numbers. The highest batting average in the modern era of baseball is .426 by Nap Lajoie in 1901. 2015's highest batting average in the major leagues was .338, and it was .341 the year before; even an average of .360 or better is now rare (only happened eight times since the year 2000). And overall team performance is affected in the same way. The 1906 Chicago Cubs own the best win percentage in major-league history at .763 (116 wins out of 152 games played). That year the worst team (the Boston Americans, predecessors of today's Boston Red Sox) went 49-105, a win percentage of .318. Last year (2015) the best win percentage was .617 while the worst was .389. Only four major-league teams failed to win at least 70 games last year, and over half managed to win at least 81 games (81-81 being an even .500 win percentage with the season now 162 games long), while at the top there were seven teams with at least 90 wins, and four of them had at least 95 wins.