baseball trivia

There's never an end to parsing stats if you really want to go down that road.

In Ruth's day, today's ground rule doubles were considered home runs, they were called "bounce home runs" or something to that effect.

Conversely, a game-winning home run wasn't counted as such unless it was a solo shot that won the game. If it was a two-run shot with the winning team having a one-run lead, the batter was only credited with the base hit to the base he advanced to that allowed the winning run to score.

Of course, then you get into ridiculous ballparks (both ways, HR-friendly and ridiculously non-HR-friendly), the conditions of the ball (filthy until the 20s), legality of certain pitches, pitching distance, how much the HR was emphasized to begin with, etc.

In the end, it all evens out in a sort of cosmic way.

 

Actually Starman, it did take six balls for a walk in 1884 and 1885, according to this site:

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/hitting/hiwalk1.shtml

You beat me to posting the stuff on Williamson, but I'll add a little additional info. Williamson hit 25 of his 27 homers at home that season. The next previous high for his career was nine.

Lakefront Park was actually going to be demolished prior to the season, as per the political style of the time. Someone in the city decided to do a friend a favor and the city took over the land to build a railroad station. Anson and the Stockings convinced the city to let them have the park for one more year so they would have time to find a new park and not become homeless for that year. They got their new park the next year, although they spent a couple of months on the road at the start.

Oh, and Manky, nice work on topping yourself from the Jeter thread.