All this romance surrounding the 50th anniversary of the 1941 baseball season is getting a little tiresome.

Any American raised to revere the game knows the legacy of the ’41 season, which saw Boston Red Sox slugger Ted Williams post the last .400 batting average for an entire campaign at .406. Meanwhile, New York Yankees star Joe DiMaggio was assembling the 56-game hitting streak which is widely held to be an unbreakable record.

The passage of half a century has elevated those two achievements to legendary status, and rightfully so. But while we acknowledge these two major accomplishments with film clip, song, and bended-knee interview this week during the All-Star break, we should also acknowledge the game has conspired to keep those records safe for their respective holders.

Quite simply, if we could transport the Ted Williams of 1941 and the Joe Dimaggio of 1941 to the present-day American League, I seriously doubt their skills would enable them to post anything approaching the statistics that helped make them famous.

Here’s some of the reasons why:

1. The AL was smaller then. In ’41, there were eight teams in the entire AL, the furthest outpost from the East Coast being St. Louis. So what, you say? So the players’ biological clocks never faced more than a one-hour time zone adjustment. Yes, travel was by train. But that mode of travel at the time was comfortable, enabling players to eat, sleep, and move about with minimal disruption of their normal physical routines. Contrast this with today’s red-eye flights to 14 cities from one coast to the other, with three-hour time changes and jet lag.

Advangate: 1941.

2. Relief pitching. There were relatively few strictly relief pitchers in the heyday of Williams and DiMag and the best in ’41 – righthander Johnny Murphy with a league-leading 15 saves and a 1.98 ERA – played for the Yankees, which meant DiMag never had to face him. The next closest save masters in the AL that year had 7 each. Contrast this with today’s revolving door bullpens, where each team covets a 40-save closer, a righthanded and lefthanded “setup” man, middle relievers, long relievers, etc. Heck, Williams would never have seen a righthanded pitcher after the seventh inning today.

Advantage: 1941.

3. Equipment. Specifically, gloves. Williams and DiMag racked up their numbers hitting against fielders wearing much smaller gloves than these jai lai baskets worn by today’s phenoms. This factor alone would have curtailed their ’41 marks far short of where they ended up.

Advangate: 1941.

4. A less diverse playing corps. This is a polite way of saying Williams and DiMag didn’t have to play in a league featuring black players. By limiting Major League baseball to primarily the white race (there weren’t many orientals, hispanics, or native Americans playing, either), ownership diminished the game’s available talent pool. This is not racist. This is mathematics. You can argue talent has been diluted by expansion, but the fact is there are a lot more Americans now than there were 50 years ago, and the game no longer discriminates against any one of them.

Advantage: 1941.

5. Less media attention. Yes, both Williams and DiMag drew attention to themselves as the ’41 season ran on. But they were dealing with the one-dimensional media crush posed by the print guys, who generally left them alone once they left the ballpark. At the time, Williams’ record, especially, received less fanfare than it would now days. It had only been 17 years since Rogers Hornsby had hit .424 before Williams did it. Try and picture what Ted and Joe would be dealing with if they carried their streaks in today’s game. There’d be a camera crew in their face everywhere they went, doubling, maybe tripling the pressure on them.

Advantage: 1941.

About the only advantage I can think of for today’s player chasing the marks set by Williams and DiMaggio in ’41 is artificial turf. The ball travels faster on turf, which generally creates more hits. Then again, turf also creates more injuries.

There’s nothing wrong with remembering Williams and DiMaggio as great ballplayers who set two great records 50 years back. But let’s not diminish the accomplishments of today’s players by holding them up for comparison to numbers that, realistically, can never be duplicated.