Quote:
Originally Posted by dennis_keith
Still, the vast majority of these guys in Wikipedia's oldest 100 players list were short-term major leaguers. who didn't have enough time in the majors to qualify for a pension. (although many received small pensions retroactively, when the standards for pension qualification were lowered). These guys never got rich from baseball and yet they are still alive, in many cases, 60 years after their major leaguer days came to an end. Even guys who were journeyman major leaguers who played 8 or 10 years in the big leagues were more famous than they were rich. What was the minimum salary 60 years ago $8,000 a year, if that. Most of the biggest stars were still only making $35,000 or $40,000 in their peak years, many quite a bit less than that.
Most of these guys didn't get rich from baseball or have a great pension to fall back on to provide them with excellent health benefits. Yet here they are in their 90s, or knocking on the door of age 90. So, I think the number of these long term survivors has increased over the eight years or so that I have been following the oldest living major leaguers list and that reflects a trend towards longer lives in the United States in general.
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Let me explain the reason for my annoyance. People who are well off and never have to work for a living (not talking about ex-ballplayers here) and thus ARE living longer use junk science like life expectancy numbers as an excuse to raise the retirement age and cut Social Security benefits for the people who are not well off and working hard to earn a living who are NOT living longer. And every person who has the mind set that it is somehow empirical that people are living longer makes the work of those cutting benefits that much easier.
I call it a junk science because they extrapolate the life span of someone born today based on the life span of people born 80, 90, 100 years ago. You can't do that and reach a valid conclusion. There is virtually nothing today that is the same as it was then.
It is appropriate to say that people born in the thirties and forties had/have a longer life expectancy than people born in the teens and twenties. We have a sufficient amount of data to say that. It does not then follow that people born in the fifties and sixties will have a longer life expectancy than those born in the thirties and forties. But that is the conclusion that they draw.
The numbers can also be used (with some validity, though potentially overly broad) to compare the life expectancy of one group or demographic versus another. For example, how much would you like to bet that today's professional football players will have a shorter lifespan than today's professional baseball players? When broken down by class, it certainly appears as though the life expectancy of CEOs and politicians is growing longer while the life expectancy of the middle class has been growing shorter for much more than a decade. And poor people? I don't know the number but I'm guessing it isn't 80. So when a politician proposes raising the retirement age because "people are living longer", it is his class of people who are living longer while its those who are not who will feel the cuts.
Here's another factor not accounted for in the data. Those former players who are living well into their 80s today got regular jobs after leaving baseball. And, when they retired from
those jobs, most all of them got pensions from
those jobs. This is something that others fought hard for and won from the 50s through the 60s and early 70s. The question posed was "what do you do when you're too old to work and too young to die?" Before pensions, there was an epidemic in this country of elderly people dying in the streets. It doesn't require any math at all to conclude that someone with a decent pension is going to live longer than someone without. Well, the pension has gone the way of the dodo bird. They started taking them away--including from people already retired at the time--from the late 70s through the 90s. And the effect of that upon life expectancy isn't going to show up in the numbers for another decade or so.
So it is fair to say that baseball players who were born in the 30s and 40s are enjoying a longer lifespan than those who preceded them in the sport. It is NOT fair to conclude that this
"is a reflection of people living longer lives in America today" and/or reflects a
"trend of Americans living longer lives in general."