And 162 games was pretty close to the former 154 game schedule they had when they had a balanced schedule with 8 team leagues.
Some people say don’t lessen the number of games due to wanting to compare statistics from year to year, and to compare stats you need to play the same number of games.
But not sure that matters. The way they use pitchers nowadays, for example, with pitch counts and 5 man rotations, we may not see any more 300 game winners in pitching. This would be true whether they play 162 games or whether they cut back the schedule.
Home run records are meaningless due to the steroid era anyway.
Great hitters will still get 3000 hits and hit .300 in a season or a career.
Just a thought.
Even in the old days, traditional stats from different decades weren’t directly comparable, e.g., the ‘30s had much higher hitting stats than the ‘50s.
For me, the DH was the big discontinuity in stats.
And as you cite, the 5-man pitching rotation really changed things compared to the 4-man rotation, when guys like Sandy Koufax and Ferguson Jenkins made 40+ starts a season, compared to the low 30s now.
One of the most amazing performances is Albert Belle’s in the strike-shortened 144-game 1995 season — 52 doubles and 50 homers. IIRC, it was the first 50-50 season (I don’t know if it’s been done since).