Baseball’s Surprising Stats: Joe Jackson

This is part 3 of my series, “Baseball’s Surprising Stats.”  The object of this series is to revisit players most of us already know something about, then to uncover one fact or statistic about that player that isn’t widely known.

Today, we’re going to take a look at the career of Shoeless Joe Jackson.  Specifically, we are going to research one particular question that I discovered I did not know the answer to when I started brainstorming ideas for this series.

The particular question that I discovered I didn’t know the answer to was, “How many batting titles did Shoeless Joe Jackson win during his career?”

Shoeless Joe Jackson is third on the all-time list. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When Joe Jackson was banned from baseball at the end of the 1920 baseball season, he finished his career with a lifetime batting average of .356, the third highest career batting average of all-time.

Jackson’ s career high batting average was .408 in 1911.   Unfortunately for Joe, Ty Cobb of Detroit, just 24-years old, won his 4th batting title that year with a .420 mark.

Jackson batted .395 the following season, only to finish second once again to Ty Cobb’s league-leading .409 average.

In 1913, Cobb dropped below .400, hitting a mere .390, but Joe Jackson finished 17 points behind Cobb with a .373 mark.  Thus, three consecutive second place finishes for Jackson in the race for the A.L. batting title.

In 1914, Jackson dropped down to .338, good for 4th best in the league.  1915 was even worse.  His .308 batting average was the second lowest of his career.

JacksonCleveland (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

1916 saw Jackson rebound to .341, but that was just 3rd best in the league behind Tris Speaker and Ty Cobb.  In 1917, Jackson hit a career low .301, which would have to be considered his own personal Mendoza Line.

Jackson was injured for most of the 1918 season; he played in only 17 games.  In fact, Jackson topped 100 games played just nine times.

Jackson returned to prominence in 1919 and 1920.  During those two years, he hit .351 and .382, respectively.  Neither mark, however, was good enough to win a batting title.  Jackson finished 4th in 1919 (Cobb won yet another title), and he finished 3rd in 1920, behind George Sisler (.407) and Tris Speaker.

After the 1920 season in which Babe Ruth slugged a record 54 home runs (no one before had ever reached even 30 homers), it was clear that the advent of the live-ball era had begun.

Probably, Joe Jackson expected at that point that he would still be playing Major League baseball for several more years.  He also might have expected that his first batting title was not too far off.  After all, his .382 batting average in his final season was the third highest mark in his career.

But due to the repercussions of the Black Sox Scandal, Joe Jackson was not to play another inning of Major League baseball.

The question that I posed at the beginning of this article was, “How many batting titles did Joe Jackson win his career?”

The answer, which I have to admit came as a bit of a surprise to me, is that despite finishing his career with the 3rd highest career batting average of all-time, Joe Jackson never won a batting title.

Jackson is probably the greatest hitter of all-time never to have won a batting title.  But, of course, batting titles are just one measure of greatness.  By any other measure on the field, Joe Jackson remains one of the greatest, if one of the most controversial, baseball players of all time.

Related articles

• Shoeless Joe’s Legacy: An Interview with Arlene Marcley (ondeckcircle.wordpress.com)
• Baseball’s Surprising Stats: Cy Young (ondeckcircle.wordpress.com)

The Baseball Hall of Fame: A Qualitative Analysis, Part 1

Many times over the past couple of weeks I’ve read the following comment regarding a player that someone doesn’t think should be inducted into the Hall of Fame:

 ”If he is elected, it will lower the standards of the Hall of Fame.”

 Or, alternatively, “The Hall used to have very high standards, but they’ve been watered down over the years.”

 I know you’ve heard or read these comments as well.  Perhaps you’ve even uttered them.

I decided to take a look back at HOF elections going all the way back to the first one in 1936 to see if there really was a Golden Age when only the best of the best were inducted, and where the proverbial train went off the rails.  

I didn’t have to search very far.

What follows is Part 1 of a multi-part series analyzing the year-by-year inductees (MLB players only) to the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame, gratuitous commentary included.  (BBWAA: Elected by the Baseball Writers Association of America; VC: Elected by the Veterans Committee):

1936 — BBWAA: Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner.

So far, so good.  Eleven writers left Ruth off their ballots, perhaps out of concern that his induction would “water down The Hall.”

1937 — BBWAA: Nap Lajoie, Tris Speaker, Cy Young

Nice to see Cy Young just barely squeak in with 76% of the vote in his second year on the ballot.

1938 — BBWAA: Grover Cleveland Alexander

Career WAR of 104.9 is fifth best all-time for pitchers.  Poor bastard suffered from epilepsy, shell-shock from WWI, and alcoholism.  But boy, could he pitch.  His 90 career shutouts are still the N.L. record.

1939 — BBWAA: Eddie Collins, Lou Gehrig, Willie Keeler, George Sisler. VC: Cap Anson, Candy Cummings, Buck Ewing, Hoss Radbourn

Keeler was a career .341 hitter, but a career WAR of 60.8 ties him with Buddy Bell for 103rd place among position players.  Not a slam dunk.

Sisler hit over .400 twice, and set single-season hit record (257) later broken by Ichiro.  A.L. MVP 1922.  Yet career OPS+ 124 is the same as Sixto Lezcano and Bobby Bonilla.  Career WAR of 50.4 is just 168th all-time.

Old Hoss Radbourne tossed 678 innings in 1884.  Ouch.

Cummings pitched six years in the 1870′s, and allegedly invented the curveball.  So is 1939 the year the HOF begins to lose its way?  Much worse is on the way.

1942 — BBWAA: Rogers Hornsby.

The only player elected during the five years of the WWII era.  The nation must have been rationing HOF votes along with everything else.

1945 — VC: Roger Bresnahan, Dan Brouthers, Fred Clarke, Jimmy Collins, Ed Delahanty, Hugh Jennings, King Kelly, Jim O’Rourke

Just nine years after The Hall’s initial Mount Rushmore election, the Veteran’s Committee apparently

Image via Wikipedia

got drunk and elected every 19th century Irish ball player they could think of.  Maybe they were celebrating the end of WWII.

Bresnahan invented shin-guards, which is nice, but career WAR of 41.6 is pretty low.  Brouthers and Delahanty definitely belong in The Hall.

Clarke is borderline, as is Jimmy Collins (a great defensive third-sacker.)  Collins accumulated 1,999 hits.  You would think he would have found a way to get just one more hit.

King Kelly was a legend in his own time.  How do you objectively assess a legend?  You don’t.  We simply don’t abide his kind these days.

Hughie Jennings is interesting.  He led his league in WAR four straight seasons (1895-98), which is pretty damned impressive.  He accumulated 35.3 WAR in just those four years.  But that represents fully 76% of his entire career value (46.4).  So, do you prefer a player with a high peak, or a player who plays reasonably well over a long period of time?

Jim O’Rourke is one of my favorite players in The Hall because he hails from my hometown of Bridgeport, CT, and because he was known as Orator Jim.  It was said of him, “Words of great length and thunderous sound simply flowed out of his mouth.”  That is my all-time favorite quote about a ball player.  If there is an orator’s HOF somewhere, he should be in it.  As for the baseball HOF, well, perhaps not.

So by my count, the class of 1945 includes two definite HOF’ers, four borderline inductees, one poor choice, and King Kelly.

1946 — VC: Jesse Burkett, Frank Chance, Jack Chesbro, Johnny Evers, Tommy McCarthy, Joe McGinnity, Eddie Plank, Joe Tinker, Rube Waddell, Ed Walsh.

Tinkers to Evers to Chance wasn’t great poetry, and it wasn’t a great day for The Hall.  Tinker was an excellent defensive shortstop but a poor hitter who doesn’t belong in The Hall.  Evers won the 1914 MVP award, but also doesn’t belong.  Chance was the best hitter of the three, had a short peak, and finished with less than 50 career WAR.

At age 30, in 1904, Jack Chesbro started 51 games for the N.Y. Highlanders, won a Major League record 41 of them, pitched 454 innings, and posted a WAR of 8.8.  Also reached 20 wins four other times.  But he won fewer than 200 games in his career, and his career WAR is less than 40.  If he is in on the strength of one huge season and a few good ones, then a case can be made that Roger Maris also belongs in The Hall.

Jesse Burkett, one of the great hitters of the late 19th-early 20th centuries, belongs in The Hall, as does Gettysburg Eddie (326 wins) Plank.

Though he pitched just seven full seasons, Fordham University’s Ed Walsh won 40 games for the ’08 White Sox, and his career ERA of 1.82 is the lowest in MLB history.  So you gotta give him a nudge into The Hall as well.  Rube Waddell was one of the strangest, and one of the greatest, pitchers of all-time.  He led the A.L. in strikeouts six consecutive years, but would go chase a passing fire truck in the middle of a game.

Iron Joe McGinnity completed 314 of his 381 starts, topping 300 innings pitched in the first nine of his ten Major League seasons.  Led N.L. in wins five times.  Topped 400 innings pitched twice.  Back-to-back seasons of over 10.0 WAR.  He’s O.K. by me.

Outfielder Tommy McCarthy must have slipped into the Hall of Fame when no one was looking.  There is no other way to account for his inclusion.

By my count, that makes five solid HOF’ers inducted in ’46 out of a group of ten players.

1947 — BBWAA: Mickey Cochrane, Frankie Frisch, Lefty Grove, Carl Hubbell.

With the Old-Timers Gang out of town, the BBWAA reasserts itself with some classy picks.

1948 — BBWAA: Herb Pennock, Pie Traynor.

Pennock was a very poor choice; a case can be made that Pie Traynor belongs in the HOF, but not a very strong one.

1949 — BBWAA: Charlie Gehringer. VC: Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown, Kid Nichols.

Each of these three are fine choices.  Gehringer was one of the all-time great second basemen.  Brown and Nichols were among the very best pitchers in their respective eras.

Of the first 45 players elected to the Hall of Fame up to this point, approximately 28 were excellent choices, six were poor choices, and the other 11 were borderline or questionable picks.  That means fully 38% if the picks were not of the highest quality.

That brings us up to the 1950′s, which I will tackle in Part 2 of this series.  As you shall see, the questionable inductees continue unabated.

Image via Wikipedia

• Dear BBWAA: please lower your Hall of Fame voting standards (hardballtalk.nbcsports.com)
• Murray Chass’s Hall Of Fame Vote Is Based Partly On His Dinner Plans [Baseball Hall Of Fame] (deadspin.com)

“The First Fall Classic”: A Baseball Book Review

Mike Vaccaro’s book, “The First Fall Classic,” published by Doubleday Books, is a lively, engaging, and well-researched look at the 1912 World Series between the New York Giants and the Boston Red Sox.  If there is just one book you might ever want to read about baseball in the pre-Babe Ruth years, this is the one for you.

The strength of this book lies in Mr. Vaccaro’s obvious enthusiasm for his subject matter.  He has an eye for details, and his book is ripe full of engaging little moments where we feel not like the reader of a book, but like an eaves-dropper listening in to a fascinating story.

An example of this occurs early on, when Tris Speaker, the Red Sox center-fielder, hits a monster home run during batting practice, witnessed by several of the Giants players.  In Vaccaro’s words:

There was an audible gasp, then instant silence.  It was the longest ball anyone had ever seen hit in this stadium, or in any of the previous three stadiums bearing the name, “Polo Grounds.”

“Holy smoke,” Fred Merkle said, loud enough for McGraw to hear.

“You know how many runs they get for that, Merkle?  They get zero runs for that.  Next time I catch you admiring their work it’ll cost you twenty-five bucks.”

The book is organized in such a way that, for the most part, each chapter is a self-contained, one-act drama about each of the eight (yes, eight) World Series games that year.  The final chapter, however, is entirely dedicated to the climactic tenth inning of the final game, a showdown between Smoky Joe Wood and Christy Mathewson.

We can feel the tension that Mathewson and his manager, John McGraw, felt being so close to their first World’s Championship since 1905.  But with 30 game winner Wood in the way, it was far from a done deal.

The cast of characters throughout this book, both baseball and civilian, is wide-ranging and colorful.  We are updated throughout regarding the 1912 Presidential election campaigns of Teddy Roosevelt of the independent Bull Moose Party, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, and incumbent President, and huge (both literally as well as figuratively) baseball fan, William Taft.

The baseball action on the field is also complemented by a sensationalist, headline grabbing murder trial involving a police lieutenant on a special vice squad, Charles Becker, who was charged with murdering a Jewish bookie named Herm Rosenthal.  Headlines of the day called it, “The Trial of the Century.”   At times, even the proceedings of the murder would be  interrupted, however, by news of the World Series.

In fact, reading about how much the 1912 Series affected virtually the whole country, one is left with the sobering realization that even though baseball today remains one of our most popular escapist leisure activities, it just doesn’t occupy the same place in America’s consciousness the way it did a hundred years ago.

This book review is not the time or the place to speculate as to why that is, but it is clear that ballplayers a hundred years ago were, from a socioeconomic standpoint, closer to the average American citizen than they are today.

Players like Giants second baseman Larry Doyle, Red Sox outfielder Red Murray, and Giants pitcher Jeff Tesreau, emerged from coal mines, farms, small Atlantic seaboard hamlets, and remote country hollows.  With a few notable exceptions, such as Christy Mathewson, Harry Hooper, and Larry Gardner who all attended college, most of the players of this era, like the fans who adored them, had relatively little formal education.

But they sure knew how to play baseball.

I was also surprised to learn that there was a deep, dark cultural divide on the Red Sox, between the Protestant southerners (like Smoky Joe Wood and Tris Speaker) and the northern Catholics on the team (like Heinie Wagner, Bill Carrigan and Bucky O’Brien.)  On at least one occasion, these teammates engaged in a fistfight over their cultural differences.

Then there was the issue of corruption that surrounded baseball in those days.  Specifically, the issue of gambling.  Bookies and odds-makers were omnipresent in ballparks in those days, and even Giants manager John McGraw was known to associate with Arnold Rothstein, an underworld bookie.

In fact, this book provides so many anecdotes regarding this issue that it is unsurprising that, just a few years later, the Black Sox Scandal took place.  What does come as a surprise, at least to me, is that so much gambling and fraternization with known criminals and undesirables was tolerated by so many for so long.

But then again, we have our own modern parallel, the steroids issue.  Nearly a century later, baseball finds itself dealing with a scandal that could have been avoided if so many key people hadn’t turned a blind eye to this problem for so long.  And, once again, the key motivating force behind baseball’s modern scandal, is, at root, money.

In a sense, then, this book makes clear that baseball, and the men who play it, organize it, and manage it, have changed little over the past century.

Lastly, Red Sox fans will especially enjoy the prominence given by the author to the “Royal Rooters,” the Red Sox Nation of their era.  Their unofficial leader, Nuf Ced McGreevy, is a character that could have been invented by Charles Dickens.  And the story of how these uber-fans were betrayed by Red Sox owner James McAleer makes fascinating reading.

My criticisms of this book are few and relatively minor.  The relevance of the so-called Trial of the Century, which the author revisits from time to time, is questionable, at least insofar as the author provides it a position of prominence.

Also, an index would have been helpful in trying to more easily return to certain players, characters, or anecdotes.

The epilogue, however, is an eye-opener in that we learn about how many of the players of the 1912 World Series came to meet unfortunate, sometimes tragic, ends.  More than a few died sooner than they should have.

Overall, then, I highly recommend this book to any baseball fan looking for an interesting, entertaining summer read.  At just 290 pages in length, “The First Fall Classic” is certainly also a manageable read even for those with a full summer schedule.

Perhaps the best way to finish this book review is with a quotation from Giants second-baseman and team captain, Larry Doyle:

“Damn, it’s great to be young and a New York Giant.”

To which I can only reply,

Damn, it’s great to read a book about baseball players who loved the game a century ago as much we still love the game today.

‘Nuf Ced.