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With all the dilution of talent today

The United States' population has grown by about 40 percent since 1960. And MLB now draws on the huge talent base in Latin America and Asia. Since the ratio of ballplayers to population is no larger than it was in the "good old days" I see no reason to think that talent is diluted.

(Not an original idea of mine - got it from Bill James).

I disagree with what you've posted there, at least in terms of how it affects talent level in baseball. I had a big-league scout explain it to me back in the late 1980s when I was still a serious baseball fan. He said one big change that had taken place in the U.S. between the 1950s and the 1980s was this: Back in the 1950s, you could go to almost any high school in the U.S. with an athletic program and find the best athletes playing baseball. A trend that started in the late 1960s and accelerated through the 1970s was that top high school athletes became more interested in football than baseball. In the last 25 years, you may find that basketball has become more appealing to top athletes than baseball, too.

If you really want to see evidence of this, just look at Major League Baseball today and notice how few great black American players (as opposed to dark-skinned Hispanics) there are in the game today.

There's a lot of truth to your statement about Latin American and Asian talent comprising a big chunk of MLB rosters these days, but that doesn't necessarily bode well for big-league baseball. I've pointed out that this trend may very well relegate baseball to the same status as soccer among American sports fans.