The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs

My son sent me this. It’s interesting:

As impressive as Ruth’s 1921 numbers were, they could have been more so under modern conditions. Bill Jenkinson’s 2006 book, The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_Babe_Ruth_Hit_104_Home_Runs>, attempts to examine each of Ruth’s 714 career home runs, plus several hundred long inside-the-park drives and “fair-foul” balls. Until 1931 in the AL, balls that hit the foul pole<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foul_ball> were considered ground-rule doubles<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-rule_double>, and balls that went over the wall in fair territory but hooked foul were ruled foul. Many fields, including Ruth’s home Polo Grounds<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polo_Grounds>, had exceptionally deep center fields—in the Polo Grounds’ case, nearly five hundred feet. The author concluded that Ruth would have been credited with 104 home runs in 1921, if modern rules and field dimensions were in place. Still, Ruth set Major League records in total bases (457), extra base hits (119) and times on base (379), all of which still stand to this day.

Amusing, but there weren’t that many pitchers throwing 95+ MPH gas and split-fingered fastballs in 1921. He’d never be able to get around that giant piece of lumber he called a bat on someone like Justin Verlander, and what would he make of hitting against Randy Johnson in his prime?

A while back, I recall somebody saying that thanks to the wealth of data on baseball (even if a lot of it isn’t comparable across different times), it’s possible to see how good individual players are relative to the average player at the time. That provides, basically, an inflation / technology adjusted measure that you can compare players with. I don’t recall who came out on top in the measure though (who the biggest outlier was).

It’s an incredibly inexact science, and there’s no real way that I’m aware of that you can get any kind of accurate picture of how pre-integration performances would look today.

The changes in baseball over the years go far beyond integration.

I think for any sport that has evolved over the years, the best way to tell how good a player was is to compare him with his peers from that era. A player who was a lot better than his peers for many years is probably one of the all time greats, regardless of the specific stats.

The caveat to this approach is that if a given player played the sport when it was far less (or more) popular than it was today, some adjustments should be made. i.e. If you were the king of some sport 100 years ago at a time when only a handful of top athletes competed in it, that’s less impressive than if your sport attracted a lot of top quality competition. With regards to baseball, this issue is a bit of a wash. On the one hand, in the Ruth era, blacks did not play MLB, and I think the hispanic presence was minimal, if any. On the other hand, at that time, baseball was the pre-eminent American team sport. Today, a bigger share of top athletes probably focus their skills on football or basketball.

The top American athletes, sure, but that’s more than offset by the influx of foreign born top athletes.

Well, for that matter, the population of the US, even if restricted to pro-athlete age ranges, is probably much higher than it was in the 1920s, which also supports the theory that today’s elite athetes are probably significantly more elite.

Also, in sports with objective measurement standards (all kinds of races, distance throwing and/or jumping, and so on), IIUC, the achievements of modern athletes dwarf those of a few decades ago. Some of that is due to equipment and facilities (and to penalize an athlete from years gone by for poor equipment/facilities seems unfair), some is likely due to better and more intense training regimes (here it’s more debateable whether we should normalize across eras for discussion purposes). Some may be due to the larger pool of individuals able to devote time to elite athletic preparation and competition.

Crap, cant find what it’s called now, but there’s a fallacy based around the fact that records keep going up = people are getting better. That’s not the case: because of how records are defined, they will keep going up over time.

Well, in a broad sense, just the fact that there are more record-eligible competitions will cause a slow upward drift in records.

Imagine that dice rolling competitions were popular. Everyone rolled fair dice, and no particular skill was involved, but for some reason, folks are interested in the results.

If one event is “highest score rolling 30 dice”, and the event started in, say, 1900, with 8 competitors doing it two times annually, and due to steady, smoothly increasing popularity we now have 8000 competitors doing it 6 times annually, we would expect the top totals for a year and so on to have steadily increased as well. The record total would likely now be much higher than it was in 1900 or 1910, but progress in the record might be a bit uneven.

That said, I think the real world progress in athletic records owes a lot to improvements in training and equipment.

Stephen Jay Gould demonstrated the opposite, that over time as competence increases, records will even out and find a natural upper limit. The best example is the Kentucky Derby, where thousands of years of animal husbandry have flattened out what is possible with a horse, and the times haven’t moved significantly in decades.

As the variation in the outliers decrease, you see his “rise of excellence” at work, and while the average remains the same, the tails move inward. This is the argument why there will never be another .400 hitter in baseball without a rule change. There used to be quite a few, but during that period, the awful hitters were worse as well, keeping the average steady (somewhere around .32, I think) and the same as today. But with the rise of excellence in baseball, as the game became refined and defined, the statistical tails pulled inward, so that the worst batter is now better, and the best batter is now worse, and the average holds steady.

Check out Full House for a smart guy’s take on it.

H.

I think I understand the argument you’re suggesting, and I think that’s an interesting thing to think about, but I think it’s a different effect than I was describing. Partially because you’re talking about averages, whereas I was talking about records.

What I meant is that simply, a record is defined as the highest value for a particular achievement. Therefore, it’s meaningless to interpret a steady increase in the world record as evidence of a change in population, because you’re selectively only recording the farthest outlier. This selective recording bias means that records always go up, but it doesn’t tell you anything (by itself), about the population in general.

Basically, if you have the “Roll 30 dice (d6)” competition, and look at the world record for highest total sum. Maybe the first year that record is 90. Then, the next year it’s 100. Then 2 years later it’s 103, and 50 years later the record is 110. It’s not that the dice rollers are getting better, or that the dice values are changing, it’s just that because you’re only recording the highest value, the quantity of the highest value keeps going up.

So, it isn’t really a super interesting claim or anything, just an observation about how records are just subject to selection bias. What you’re talking about is probably more interesting though.

Yeah, but if it’s purely random you’d expect to see the record increasing fairly regularly for the first few years (there’s a 50% chance that the second year has a better top roll than the 1st), but then the pace of it being broken slowing way down. If someone rolls a 170 in the 7th year, the next person is going to have to get very lucky to beat it and chances are it won’t happen for a long time. If something doesn’t follow that general pattern (say a home run record standing for 30 years and then being broken or nearly broken for a few years in a row) chances are something else is going on.

And mine only applies to directly-competitive games, where offense/defense contend against each other. I see what your saying, it’s obvious in retrospect. And as with dice, the increases will eventually slow down simply because the next outlier takes more and more time to hit.

H.

Absolute complete nonsense. Anyone with the eye and wrist speed of Ruth would easily adapt to today’s pitching. Ruth used a heavy bat but it was not a fat bat compared to today’s corked bats and balls. Ruth faced some of the greatest power pitchers of his era including Johnson and grove and homered off of them regularly. Today’s players don’t have to face spit balls etc. Ruth would be as dominant today as he was in his own era. Remember also Ruth was hitting in some enormous parks unlike the tiny parks of today. Same applies to the likes of foxx Gehrig etc.

Uh…hi thread resurrector!

The center field fence in the Polo Grounds was the only real cavern in those old ballparks. Well, maybe there and dead center to old Tiger Stadium and Griffith Stadiums.

But the left and right field lines in the Polo Grounds were shallow. Ask Bobby Thomsen. Same for Tiger Stadium. And parks like Fenway, Forbes, Shibe, Sportsman’s, Wrigley, Crosley…heck, even a spacious park like Griffith Stadium in DC was just 320 feet to rightfield.

Ruth would’ve stood no chance against a modern major leaguer even at replacement level. In 1917 a laboratory recorded Walter Johnson’s fastball at 134 feet/second. That’s 91.36 mph. At the time, Johnson’s fastball was considered the fastest, most un-hittable fastball in baseball. Today if your fastball tops out at 91 in the big leagues, it means you get guys out with breaking stuff.

Yeah, that’s the trick with evaluating players across eras. Ruth may have the largest delta between him and his contemporaries, but drop him today, with not a change, and he’d get smoked. Training, mechanics, diet, and simply the pool of talent see to that.

I’ve no doubt he could make some of the adjustments. The pitch speed, for one, would be tough but perhaps not insurmountable.

But thanks for the bump, I’d never seen this analysis before. Definitely a fun thing to think about. 104 HR would have been quite the thing.

FYI, I doubt steve will ever see this, as he’s long ago moved on, but there were few folks here who were more steeped in the deeper nuances of baseball analytics.

Flat pitcher’s mound then or not?

Not flat. In fact, by the 1920’s, a 15-inch height had been standardized, with a pitching rubber. That got lowered to the current 10-inch height after 1968.

Thanks, couldn’t remember.