Awful hitters who didn't require any effort to get out. Lots of them. Take the 1946 Cardinals. They had Stan Musial, Enos Slaughter, and Whitey Kurowski, but their other 5 hitters OPS'ed under .700. And they led the league in runs. I don't know if that's really the right answer. I'm not saying you are wrong, because clearly there are better hitters today than back then due to the talent pool increase. However, your Cardinals example was pretty narrow and was just looking at one team in a single year. Let's look at NL league OPS by decade. Now, we have to remember that the very low .OPS in '06 and '16 is due to the fact that slugging wasn't very high in those days i.e. deadball era. 1906: .658 (league slugging .330) 1916: .655 (league slugging .341) 1926: .757 1936: .823 1946: .717 1956: .748 1966: .725 1976: .715 1986: .731 1996: .735 2006: .785 Those are some pretty significant differences. 1946-1966 has an average OPS of .730(just averaging your 3 numbers). That's 55 points of OPS for every single player, league wide, it's a huge deal. The disparity is even greater when you consider there were 16 teams in '46 and '56, and 20 in '66, and 30 in 2006.