Where your argument breaks down is... well, it's not because of what you're saying, but because of how 99.99999999999% of dumbasses understand it. Most people take that as meaning that McCracken was better than Yogi. But in real life, Yogi would probably knock Branch out of his damn shoes. Because that's the nature of sports.Relative to competition ..
Comparing today's stats or players vs yesterdays is stupid. Comparing the percentage ranking of a players stats in either era will supply an answer or starting place to gauge how effective that player was (in his era). Since those players smoking cigars played against players smoking cigars, and todays' roid enhanced athletes are playing against other roid enhanced athletes, then the playing field is the same. BECAUSE in competitive sports everything is relative to the competition. So, no, we cannot compare McCracken to Ferrell, but I would be willing to bet that McCracken had stats that wer in the top 2% of his era. Thus we can gauge McCracken relative to his competition was better than Yogi fking Ferrell because his WERE NOT!
Jesus Christ! Why is that concept so hard to fking understand? Are we going to take away this year's championships because the stats imply that this year is the weakest statistical year since at least 1995. Seriously, the only team currently that would rank in the top 10 last year, would be UNC. If so then Yogi's stats are even worse, because using a four year SOS and using averages stats during those better years - will dip him below average. If so, our championship is also tainted because it came against the weakest conference field in ten years.
And that's the real reason these inter-era comparisons are stupid. Because "relative to the competition" is meaningless when the competition is so dramatically different.
It's quite possible that, relative to his competition, Yogi is good but not great, but at the same time, in a hypothetical world where all players could compete against all other players of every era, each in his prime, Yogi would end up one of the top players of all time. Simply because, in that hypothetical universe - again, which is the universe most dumbasses are imagining when they supposedly put these lists together - almost all of the greatest players of all time would end up being recent players.