I'm not sure if that's correct. As far as I'm aware, the 'progressive' option has nothing to do with the final quality.
Standard baseline saves the image information from top to bottom, and when it's loaded into your browser, that's the way it displays.
Progressive encoding is essentially a series of scans, starting with a very low-quality image that loads very quickly. They progressively improve in quality as more information is loaded (hence the name). When you open it in a browser, you get to see a rough version of the entire image, so users can see something very quickly without having to wait for the whole image to load. When it does load, however, the quality is no better or worse than standard, non-progressive JPEG.