Guess The Players: Deadball Sluggers
The 20-odd years between 1900 and the emergence of Babe Ruth as a slugger are commonly referred to as the dead-ball era of major league baseball. Partly that was literal: The actual baseballs in use were kind of mushy, and were thrown back into play a lot more, even if scuffed and dirty. But mostly the term referred to the low run-scoring environment, which was pretty extreme.
That ugly orange part of the chart is the dead-ball era, the lowest average run-scoring span of that length in major league history. It produced a pretty boring style of play, one that Ruth shattered with his booming home runs and uppercut swing that revolutionized the sport. Pretty soon after he emerged, the ball was changed, and so did batters’ approaches, and runs started coming in bunches.
The sharp change is pretty well illustrated by examining two players who were considered sluggers in that era, and the subtle difference in their careers that drastically affects how they are viewed today. Here are their career hitting statistics:
Pretty similar, huh? Put in terms of their respective 162-game averages, they look nearly identical:
Armed with nothing but this information, you’d have to say that the two players, as hitters, were essentially equal. The second one stole a few more bases, and knocked in a few more runs, but everything else lines up pretty closely. There’s more to the story, of course, so I’ll go ahead and reveal one of the players.
Player 2 is Frank “Home Run” Baker.
He’s in the Hall of Fame, and deserves to be there. From 1909 until 1914, Baker led the American League in home runs four times, and in RBI twice. He also led the league in triples once. He finished in the top-10 in MVP voting three times, had a combined batting average of .321, and a combined OPS+ of 153.
Nine times, Baker was in the top-10 in the league in home runs. The same for RBI. He had seven top-10s in runs scored, and doubles, and slugging, and OPS, and six times each in WAR and batting average.
Baker also supplied firepower and heroics in the post-season. As a member of Connie Mack’s 3-time World Champion Philadelphia A’s, Baker batted a combined .409 for the three title teams, and knocked in 16 runs in 16 World Series games.
He sat out the 1915 season in a contract dispute, and was never quite the same dominant force when he returned, but he was pretty clearly the best third baseman in big league history until Eddie Mathews arrived in the 1950s. He deserves every bit of his Hall of Fame plaque.
So now let’s go back to that other player, the guy who had nearly the same offensive statistics. Surely he must be similarly honored, right?
Well, no. But he did also have a wonderfully memorable nickname.
Player 1 is William “Baby Doll” Jacobson.
He never received any support for the Hall of Fame, and the reason is because of that shift from the dead-ball to the live-ball era.
Jacobson started when the ball was quite dead. He made his major league debut with the Detroit Tigers in 1915, and though he was already 24, he struggled, batting just .215 in 37 games before being traded mid-season the the St. Louis Browns.
He didn’t fare much better there, hitting just .209, and making such a poor impression that he spent the entire 1916 season in the minor leagues. Back up with St. Louis in 1917, he improved a bit, but was still a pretty bland hitter. His batting line was .248/.294/.340, good for a slightly subpar OPS+ of 97.
Then came World War I, and Jacobson spent the entire 1918 season in the United States Navy. He was already 28 years old when the 1919 season began, pretty old for someone who had never managed to make much of an impression in the big leagues.
But Jacobson was a completely different hitter when he returned. He made much better contact, cutting his strikeout rate by 25%, and was driving the ball better. Despite having 80 fewer plate appearances than in 1917, Jacobson increased his total of doubles and triples and matched his home run total. His batting average jumped from .248 to .323, and his OPS+ shot up 30 points, to 127.
For the eight seasons from 1919 until 1926, Jacobson was excellent. He had a collective batting average of .327 and averaged 206 hits and 99 RBI per 162 games. His raw numbers, as we’ve seen, were very similar to Baker’s.
But Jacobson was doing this at a time when baseball was reinventing itself. The dead-ball days were gone, and the era of Babe Ruth and swinging for the fences had arrived. During Home Run Baker’s peak, all teams in the American League averaged just 3.9 runs per game. During Baby Doll Jacobson’s peak, the league averaged 4.8 runs per game, a huge 23% increase.
As a result, Jacobson’s numbers, though superficially similar to Baker’s, were actually significantly worse in context. For instance, he never led the league in any major offensive category. The closest he came was a second-place finish in triples in 1922. He was in the top-10 in homers only three times, the same for RBI, and hits, and runs scored. He was in the top-10 in WAR just twice, and his best finish in the MVP voting was 7th in 1925.
None of this is to say that Jacobson was a bad player, because he wasn’t. He totaled 28.9 WAR and a career 112 OPS+, not bad marks for someone who got such a late start to his career and only played 11 total seasons.
But his career pales in comparison to Baker and his 62.8 WAR and 135 OPS+ and league-leading home run totals.
Basically, their nicknames tell the story of their respective careers. Home Run Baker became the standard for home run hitters during his career. Baby Doll Jacobson, despite similar numbers, had a career, and nickname, that in comparison was just kind of cute.