The best evidence of this is what happened when they put today's top players on a 10 foot table at the 2013 Derby City Challenge. Each player gets 16 chances for $100 dollars.
The "old timers" originally played the game on a 10 foot table. I'm not sure what Mosconi's high run on a 10 foot table was but Crane ran 300.
For the week, with the world's top players taking a run at it, only one player got to 100 balls on a 10 foot table and that was snooker player Stuart Pettman with a run of 117.
The world's best couldn't get to half of Crane's high run, in fact only one guy got to 1/3 of Crane's 300.
If you thought Mosconi's 526 on an 8 foot wasn't legitimate because the table was too small, get on a 10 foot and run 300.
And Mosconi or Crane never ran 11 racks of 9 ball (or 15, or whatever the accepted high record is). See how silly that argument sounds?
Here are some facts that you conveniently ignored:
-Nobody plays straight pool any more (and haven't for 40+ years), and the few that do play it very little. Just like Crane and Mosconi played relatively little 9 ball and it wouldn't be fair to say how crappy they were based on the fact that their highest 9 ball runs aren't even a third of what the highest 9 balls runs of today are.
-Ten foots tables are rarely played today and in fact hardly even exist anywhere (and they were even more non-existent until a couple of years ago). Nobody has much playing time on them. But 10 foots were readily available for all of Cranes career and were even the primary table for a big part of it.
-The ten foot tables back in Crane's time had pockets that were significantly easier than the pockets of today. This is due both to the way they were cut, as well as the larger pocket sizes. It is even conceivable that some of the tough Diamond 9 footers of today are more difficult to make runs on than the 10 ft that Crane set his personal best on. And it is absolutely certain that the Diamond 10 footers of today are many orders of magnitude tougher than the ten foots back then.
-You are comparing a few hours of high run attempts at the Derby by today's players (on much tougher equipment no less) against Cranes best run of 70+ years. I don't know of anyone that would argue that it is reasonable to believe that a few hours of effort is going to be enough to surpass the very best that someone else was able to put up in 70 years, even setting aside the fact that they were trying on a much tougher table.
There is no straight pool record that couldn't be beat by one or more of today's players. These records have stood (and will continue to stand) solely because it isn't worth the effort to break them. This is for all practical purposes a dead game and there just isn't much benefit or any real value to be gained to offset the great effort that would be required. If straight pool had remained the dominant game for all of this time, all of these records would have been broken several times over.
And for the record, it is conceivable that Crane and Mosconi could have broken their own records. While they had tons more incentive to break them than today's players do, they likely didn't feel the incentive back then was worth all that much effort either. Their records were set because straight pool is almost solely what they practiced and played, and they practiced and played it a lot. If today's players and players all along were practicing and playing straight pool like that then those records would probably have been broken incidentally (probably several times over) without having even specifically set out to break them.
The best evidence that today's players could break the straight pool records of old are two things:
-In the nearly 100% of the million other skills that can be definitively quantified and measured, humans are better at them now than they were 60-70+ years ago. This is true in sports or any other skill of any kind. There is no reason for pool to be a lone exception.
-Better feats of skill, even in straight pool, have already been done by modern players. Anybody that doesn't think a run of 491 (or any run over 400 for that matter) on a 9 ft is a better feat requiring more skill than a 526 on an 8 ft with buckets is just out of their mind, literally. Like absolutely looney bin crazy. A 309 on a 10 ft with generous pockets similarly probably fails to meet the standard of a 491 or 400+ on a tougher 9 ft.
