American Valor Quarterly Issue 11 - Fall 2014 | Page 39
Bill Gilbert: There’s a point too,
Gene, building on what Bob just said.
The question has been asked of you,
what would these players and the
other 500 major league players, minor
leaguers and the Negro leaguers, have
been if there hadn’t been a World War
II? Does anybody know exactly how
much greater they would have been?
There are computerized programs,
projections, that average out what a
player did three years before the war
and three years after the war and you
can establish an annual average.
On that basis, we know now, for
example, that Bob Feller would have
won another 107 games. That would
have given him 49 wins more than
Nolan Ryan has. He would have struck
out another 1,100 hitters. He would
have had five no-hitters, instead of
three, and 19 one-hitters, in