They Smoked Between Innings and Called It Training: The Lost World of the Early Baseball Player

Babe Ruth reportedly showed up to spring training in 1925 in such poor physical condition — the result of a winter spent eating, drinking, and doing essentially no exercise — that he collapsed on a train platform in Asheville, North Carolina, and had to be hospitalized for six weeks. The episode was attributed, variously, to an intestinal abscess, a hangover of historic proportions, or what the press euphemistically called "the bellyache heard 'round the world."

What it definitely was not attributed to was a failure of conditioning. Because in 1925, conditioning wasn't really a concept that professional baseball took seriously.

Ruth went on to hit .290 with 25 home runs that year, which was considered a down season. He also weighed somewhere north of 250 pounds and smoked cigars with the enthusiasm of a man who had never heard the word "aerobic."

This was baseball. And it looked nothing like what you see today.

Training Then: Mostly Just Playing the Game

For most of baseball's first century, the dominant theory of player conditioning could be summarized as follows: play baseball, and you will get better at baseball. Off-season training was largely unstructured and often nonexistent. Players worked other jobs in the winter — farming, factory work, selling insurance — and showed up to spring training carrying whatever shape those months had left them in.

Weight training was actively discouraged by most managers well into the 1970s. The conventional wisdom held that lifting weights made you muscle-bound, slowed your swing, and ruined your feel for the game. This wasn't fringe thinking — it was the mainstream position of professional coaches and team management for decades.

Nutrition advice, to the extent it existed, was casual and largely wrong. Players ate whatever was available on the road, which typically meant diner food, train station sandwiches, and a lot of red meat. The idea of working with a dietitian, tracking macronutrients, or timing meals around performance would have sounded like science fiction.

And then there was the drinking. Alcohol was woven into the culture of professional baseball in ways that are genuinely hard to imagine today. Players drank on trains between cities. They drank in hotel lobbies after games. Some drank during games. It wasn't considered a problem unless it visibly interfered with performance — and even then, the bar for "visible interference" was set fairly high.

The Body as Equipment

The numbers tell part of the story. In the early decades of professional baseball, careers were short and physical decline was steep. Many players peaked in their mid-to-late twenties and were effectively finished by their early thirties, their bodies worn down by accumulated injuries that were poorly treated, or simply played through.

Injury management in the 1920s and 1930s consisted largely of: tape it up, walk it off, or sit out until it stopped hurting. There were no MRIs, no arthroscopic surgeries, no carefully managed rehabilitation protocols. A torn rotator cuff wasn't a surgery with a known recovery timeline — it was the end of your career.

Pitchers threw enormous workloads by modern standards. Complete games were expected. Pitch counts were not tracked, and the concept of protecting a pitcher's arm from cumulative stress was decades away from mainstream acceptance. Some pitchers threw 300 or more innings in a season. Their arms paid for it.

What Changed, and When

The transformation didn't happen all at once. It was a slow accumulation of knowledge, technology, and cultural shift that picked up speed in the 1980s and 1990s and has continued accelerating ever since.

Strength and conditioning coaches became standard fixtures on MLB rosters. The resistance to weight training collapsed as it became clear that properly designed programs improved performance rather than hurting it. Sports nutrition evolved from general advice into individualized, science-backed protocols. Players began working with dietitians, sleep specialists, and biomechanics experts as a matter of routine.

Surgical and rehabilitation medicine advanced dramatically. Tommy John surgery — ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction, first performed in 1974 — gave pitchers a path back from injuries that would previously have ended careers. Today's athletes recover from procedures that would have been career-ending a generation ago.

Data changed everything. The rise of analytics in baseball brought with it an intense focus on measurable physical performance — exit velocity, spin rate, sprint speed, arm strength. When everything is measured, optimization follows. Players train specifically for the metrics that matter, guided by coaching staffs who use video analysis and biomechanical modeling to refine mechanics down to the smallest details.

The Modern Athlete Is a Different Animal

The average MLB player today is bigger, faster, and stronger than his counterpart from a century ago — and he stays competitive significantly longer. Players routinely perform at a high level into their mid-to-late thirties. Some of the best seasons in recent memory have been turned in by players in their late thirties, athletes whose predecessors would have been long retired.

Pitchers throw harder than at any point in baseball history. The average fastball velocity in MLB has climbed steadily for decades. Position players hit the ball harder, run the bases faster, and cover more ground in the field than previous generations.

None of that happened by accident. It happened because the people around the game started treating the human body as something to be understood, invested in, and carefully maintained — rather than simply used up.

Baseball as a Mirror

What makes baseball such a good lens for this story is its continuity. It's the same game, played on the same dimensions, with the same basic rules, for over 150 years. That consistency makes the contrast between then and now unusually vivid.

The players of 1925 weren't less talented or less dedicated than today's athletes. They just existed in a world that knew far less about what a human body was capable of — and what it needed to perform at its best.

Ruth was extraordinary by the standards of his era. By the standards of today's sports science, he was a gifted athlete who spent his career leaving performance on the table.

Imagine what he might have done with a sleep tracker and a nutritionist.