There is some confusion as to whether players born in the 1800s are better than their modern brethren. Some think that Honus Wagner's statistics make him a better player than Derek Jeter. He was, but only versus his literally dwarfish contemporaries. Otherwise, it's all the Captain -- whether you like him or not.
On Saturday, Derek Jeter recorded the 3,431st hit of his career, passing Hall of Fame shortstop Honus Wagner for sixth place on the all-time career hits list. This was deemed significant given that many would still deem Wagner, who last played nearly 100 years ago, the greatest shortstop of all time. They would be wrong, terribly, terribly wrong, but now we're back on familiar ground, wrestling with folks who don't believe in the inexorable force of progress.
When Derek Jeter announced his forthcoming retirement back in February, I compared him to some of the great shortstops in history. There were very quick, light takes -- the section on Ernie Banks was all of two-sentences long -- and you'd think that assessments in that vein would have provoked argument given that a conclusion without a fully explicated set of reasons by it is just an empty assertion. Yet, it was one of the entries wherein I went into some detail and attempted to explain what I was thinking, that on Honus Wagner, that provoked the most controversy:
Wagner was born 140 years ago this month, was 5'11, and shaped like Gumby; the game he played only superficially resembled ours. He was a .328/.391/.467 hitter, but that doesn't do him justice -- relative to his leagues he was Mickey Mantle, Barry Bonds, Mike Trout. Yes, it was a primitive league, but he towered so far above it that he likely would have been a great player in any era. What shape that greatness would have taken is almost impossible to say.
Jeter or Wagner? Jeter. Wagner was a wonderful player, apparently a good guy as well, a captivating storyteller and ambassador for the game into the 1950s. Still, it's impossible to separate him from the fact that he played during the Theodore Roosevelt administration against mediocre, white-only players who swung table legs instead of bats. Jeter wasn't as dominant on either side of the ball, but we have to give some deference to the uplift in American nutrition that in a few generations greatly altered the look of the American alpha-male athlete: Derek Jeter is 6'3". In Wagner's day there was exactly one established position player of that height, the catcher Larry McLean. McLean played 862 games; no one else played as many as 400. During Jeter's career, 80 players 6'3" or taller have exceeded McLean's total. To put it another way, many of the great players of yesteryear must have suffered at some point in their lives from what we would characterize as malnourishment.
In my naiveté, I thought this one would sail on by, but the gentle lambs of the Internet found many a novel variation on ways to call me stupid. This troubles me, not because sticks and stones will break my bones (the only thing that has broken my bones to date is baseball -- once a baserunner running into my glove hand, once a pitcher crossing me up and bouncing a hard curve off my shoe-top), but because this is one of those facts that seemed, as our Founding Fathers put it, self-evident. By "self-evident," they meant, "so obvious it can't be debated," which was (a) in their case not true, but (b) in the case of Wagner and Jeter totally and completely true -- or at least, it should be. It's important to revisit because if you don't understand this point, you also don't understand some key things about the history of baseball and even that of America itself.
In his own time, compared to his contemporaries, Wagner was a better player than Jeter. However, the point of the Jeter comparison exercise was to compare players across time, and there Wagner can and must finish not only second, but a very distant second. To believe Wagner was a better player than Jeter one must also concede that all the best baseball was played prior to 1930 or so and that Wagner, clearly an exceptional athlete, was playing against competition that tested his abilities in the same way that Jeter's contemporaries tested his. This is flatly impossible for reasons physically specific to the Americans of Wagner's day and ours as well as the increasing professionalization of baseball over that time.
Prologue: Antietam
Abraham Lincoln was known as a giant in his day. He was six-foot-four. Please pause to note that 221 players of that height or taller have already appeared in the majors this year, about 30 percent of them position players, who tend to be shorter than pitchers. Examine the photo below: Lincoln is surrounded by a bevy of his generals at the time. Note that he's not standing at his full height; it took a long time to set up a photograph back then, and the President is leaning on a chair, knee slightly bent. Nevertheless, he's a full head taller than almost everyone in the picture.
(Wikimedia Commons)
Derek Jeter is officially six-foot-three, one inch shorter than Mr. Lincoln. Last year, the median height of a ballplayer getting in at least 81 games in the majors was six-foot -one. The Yankees' shortstop is a big specimen, even in his day. In Wagner's time, when the median height floated around 5'9" to 5'10", Jeter would have been a scary mutant -- as noted above, there were no real regulars that large. Also, he probably wouldn't have been allowed to play, but we'll get back to that.
No doubt Lincoln appreciated the fist-bump at a tough time, but Jeter was perhaps a bit too enthusiastic about the outcome of the Battle of Antietam, grossly mismanaged by Union commander George McClellan. (Wikimedia Commons with an assist from Justin Bopp)
The Union men depicted above are, give or take, the fathers of Honus Wagner's generation. Both of Wagner's parents were born in 1838. The range of birthdates of the men around the President range from the 1820s to the 1830s. General Alexander Webb, fifth from left (looking right at the camera) was born in 1835. Captain George Custer (yes, the ill-fated Custer), photobombing the shot at far right, was born in 1839. General George McClellan, the extra-short dude staring defiantly at Lincoln, had his first children just a few years before Mama and Papa Wagner popped out their first child in 1869. The gene pool on display here, the stature that was to be inherited by the next generation, is in no way different from that Wagner had to work with, with the exception that Wagner's folks were immigrants from Prussia and so were drawing from a slightly different genetic stock.
There was no dramatic upward surge in the stature of Americans in the generations following the taking of this picture. In fact, they began to shrink.
The Incredible Shrinking Human of the Late 19th Century
As surprising at it may seem, back when the majority of Americans were still living off the land, they didn't eat very well, and this condition only got worse as they began to move into cities and work in factories. According to Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet, a history by Harvey A. Levenstein, "This was reflected in the decreasing physical stature of Americans. After almost reaching modern levels in the later eighteenth century, around 1830 their mean stature began a prolonged decline which lasted until at least the 1870s, mainly as a result of the poor condition of many of the expanding working class."
Honus Wagner was born in 1874 to a Pennsylvania coal miner, and before baseball he went to work in the mines himself. "It was hard work, but good exercise," Wagner recalled. It is undoubtedly true that young Hans (and "Hans" or "HAN-nəs" is how Wagner's name was pronounced, not "HONE-us," just to get that straight) undoubtedly added some muscle this way, but it's important to keep in mind the difference between working in a mine and working out in a gym with specialized equipment under the supervision of a certified trainer.
This also tells us nothing about how Americans at the time were nourished. Diets were light on the kind of nutrients we get through fresh fruits and vegetables. According to Levenstein, "salted meats, potatoes, and cabbage were... ubiquitous features of the working-class diet." Whereas "there is no indication that many of even the poorest workers suffered from insufficient quantities of food" -- this would come later, during the Great Depression, something evidenced by the one-third of American men found unfit for service in World War II -- "the problem was in the quality and variety of what they ate."
While even the poorly paid could afford some fresh fruits -- particularly apples -- and vegetables during the summer and fall, the winter and spring saw affordable supplies dry up, forcing them back on the monotonous routine of potatoes, cabbage, and perhaps some turnips. These would be punctuated and enlivened by powerful doses of pickled condiments, but not in large enough quantities to overcome the absence of fresh fruits and vegetables. Milk prices also fluctuated markedly, and the poorer areas of the cities relied on "swill milk," a yellow brew made from the milk of scrawny cows fed on brewers' and distillers' wastes, often surreptitiously whitened with chalk or other additives.
"Other additives" brings to mind the description of milk in Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel of immigrant workers' lives, The Jungle:
How could they know that the pale-blue milk that they bought around the corner was watered, and doctored with formaldehyde besides? When the children were not well at home, Teta Elzbieta would gather herbs and cure them; now she was obliged to go to the drugstore and buy extracts -- and how was she to know that they were all adulterated? How could they find out that their tea and coffee, their sugar and flour, had been doctored; that their canned peas had been colored with copper salts, and their fruit jams with aniline dyes? And even if they had known it, what good would it have done them, since there was no place within miles of them where any other sort was to be had?
Lest you be tempted to think that Sinclair had embellished, look at the matters that obsessed, say, the District Health Officer of a city like Washington, D.C. as recently as the late 1920s. A scan of Washington Post headlines reveals prosecutions for the sale of decomposed meat, bad eggs, as well as watered-down milk, milk reconstituted from powder, and milk and ice cream (as well as other foods) contaminated with ground glass.
Conversely, "many rural folks... lived on diets more nutritionally deficient than those of the poorest urban workers... a belt of tragic poorly nourished ‘dirt eaters' stretched across the sand-barrens and pine woods from South Carolina to Mississippi. These yellow-skinned, pot-bellied unfortunates derived their names from the clay and resin they chewed to relieve the pain of the hookworms which infested them... their diet of processed corn meal and bolted flour likely led to many cases of pellagra, although that dietary-deficiency affliction did not come to public attention until the early 20th century." Also, they ate squirrels when they could catch ‘em -- Mmn, prions! -- and were chronically constipated. Imagine trying to leg out a triple under those conditions.
The point here is not that Honus Wagner had a poor diet prior to becoming a ballplayer; for all we know he ate like Orson Welles three meals a day. He was supposedly born bowlegged, so that visually arresting trait isn't in itself a suggestion of malnutrition (though that he remained that way may suggest a lack of vitamin D in his diet). In fact, the point here isn't about Wagner at all, but that whatever advantages or disadvantages he enjoyed, the vast majority of his contemporaries, whether they lived in the city or the country, were not raised in conditions that led to a class of super-athlete alpha-males. It led to the opposite, the incredible shrinking American.
Jacob Riis, "Children Sleeping in Mulberry Street" (1890) from How the Other Half Lives.
This was the competition against which Wagner played. There was no federal school lunch program (1946 under President Harry Truman) or Head Start (1965 under President Lyndon Johnson), or federal school breakfast program (1966, Johnson again, made permanent in 1975 under President Gerald Ford). If you were a kid at the turn of the 20th century, you were on your own. When the Great Depression came along, President Herbert Hoover offered, as kind of a lame excuse for government inaction, "No one has starved." They starved.
Before moving on, note we have not touched on one other aspect of modern life that today's athlete and indeed all Americans would be much changed without: antibiotics and other modern drugs. Think of the slugger Pete Browning, playing with chronic mastoiditis; pitcher Addie Joss dying of tuberculosis meningitis in 1911; pitcher Urban Shocker checking out as the result of some combination of pneumonia and heart disease in 1928, and his manager, Miller Huggins, dying of erysipelas, a simple skin infection, the next year. Those antibiotics not only have helped Americans evade early death and debilitating diseases, but has also likely accelerated our growth as well.
Four members of the 1912 World Series-winning Red Sox: Duffy Lewis (5'10"), Larry Gardner (5'8"), Tris Speaker (5'10"), and Heinie Wagner (no relation to Honus; 5'9"). (Library of Congress)
Jeter's competition is bigger, stronger, healthier, and -- again, let's just downplay this key factor here, though we'll return to it -- more racially diverse than it was in Wagner's day. We live in the day of giants. Wagner's accomplishments, while not meaningless, must be viewed with skepticism because he played in the day of the dwarfs.
Primitive Baseballs and Giant Bats
Prior to the major leagues invading California in the 1950s, the Pacific Coast League had a high enough standard of competition that could easily have led to its becoming a third major league had it possessed the necessary organization and leadership to do so. Many excellent players, who might have been solid or even star-level contributors in the majors preferred to stay there because both the crowds and compensation were superior than they would have found playing with, say, the St. Louis Browns. One of those was Buzz Arlett, a pitching and switch-hitter who starred primarily with the Oakland Oaks during a career that stretched from 1918 to 1937, averaging .330 and slugging .599. He also spent one year with the Phillies, when he was 32, and hit .313/.387/.538 in 121 games.
Arlett, a big man for the day, swung a 44-ounce bat. There is a photo of Arlett with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. He makes them look small. Ruth seems to be looking skeptically at a bat, possibly Arlett's, though Ruth's were in the same general weight-class. According to his SABR biography, "the [Phillies'] supplier thought the 44-ounce designation was an error." About 15 years later, then-Oaks manager Casey Stengel gave his players one of Arlett's bats to try. They acted as if he had given them a tree trunk to play with. "Next to [Mickey] Mantle, he could ride a ball harder from both sides of the plate than any man that ever lived," Stengel would recall later. Players were using lighter bats by then, and Stengel thought that some of them might get better results from a heavier bat.
He was wrong. Today we know that bat speed is a more important characteristic in driving the ball than bat weight. In an ideal world, a player could swing Arlett's 44-ounce bat with the same speed at which he can whip today's more common 32-ounce bat and knock the ball over skyscrapers, but that's physically difficult, if not impossible. However, experimentation has shown that a hitter derives more benefit from giving up weight, and therefore some fraction of the power that Ruth and Arlett sought, because the lighter bat "would allow the hitter more time to see the pitch, would give him more bat control, and would enable him to make good contact more frequently. They suggest that the ideal weight would be one in which the player has good bat control and can wait longer before swinging... The swing speed would be much higher and therefore the frequency of well-struck balls would outweigh the slight dip in power."
Of the above, concentrate on this one phrase: can wait longer before swinging. The physics of driving a ball is fascinating, but the very weight of these bats suggest something we intuitively know is true, whether from looking at old film of pitchers' mechanics or the ever-rising level of batter strikeouts: with the possible exception of the odd Walter Johnson, Lefty Grove, or Bob Feller, pitchers did not throw as hard in the past as they do now. The sight of a Ruth trying to get a 40-ounce bat off of his shoulder in time to hit an Aroldis Chapman fastball would be laughable; he'd have to start his swing from the on-deck circle.
Theirs were by no means the heaviest bats. Frank "Home Run" Baker sometimes used a 52-ounce bat, and Edd Roush's bats pushed 50 ounces as well. Al Simmons used a bat that was 38 inches long and weighed 46 ounces. It was simply a different time in terms of pitcher velocity.
According to the biography Honus Wagner by Dennis DeValeria and Jeanne Burke DeValeria, Wagner liked bats that varied between 34.5 and 38 ounces. "For a pitcher who serves slow ones and uses his head I use a lighter bat," he said, "but when a pitcher relies mainly on speed I find a heavy bat more serviceable." This seems exactly backwards according to today's conventional wisdom, but it might have something to do with the differing goals of hitters at the time, which always included bunting high on the menu.
Baseball Magazine editor F.C. Lane recalled in his 1925 book Batting that Wagner, "swung from a crouched position, griping the bat in iron hands while the muscles stood out on his forearms like steel cables. The one word which would best describe the famous Dutchman at bat was ‘strength.'" [sic]
Wagner circa 1910. (Getty Images)
I cast no aspersions on the DeVelaria's research, especially since they are quoting directly from Wagner himself, but whatever Wagner is holding in the photo above seems more like a four-pound kielbasa than a 35-ounce bat. Even if it is the latter, however, note its shape, particularly the thickness of the handle. Today, hitters shave the handles of the bat so all the weight is at the head, concentrated at the point of contact. Compare the handle of Wagner's bat to that of Mike Trout's:
Mike Trout (Jared Wickerham)
Mike Trout wants to hold the bat at the end and whip the bat head through the zone to drive the ball as far as possible. With less handle to grip, he has less control over the bat, and that means a corresponding sacrifice of contact, but the modern hitter is willing to swing and miss if it means that once every 10-20 at-bats he's going to knock a ball over the wall.
Conversely, Wagner, with his thick-handled bat, is choking up quite a bit. Swinging away didn't help him because this was the Deadball era, and bat-control was the name of the game. Like Ty Cobb, he sometimes used a split-handed grip so that he could decide at the last minute whether to bunt or slide his top hand downwards to swing away. According to the DeValerias, although the split-handed grip is now associated mainly with Cobb, for years it was referred to as the "Cobb-Wagner" grip.
Ty Cobb shows off his split-handed grip. If swinging away, slide the top hand down. If bunting, stay as set. (Getty Images)
Bunting, Bunting, Bunting and fielding of bunts, bunts, bunts
In Kings of the Diamond, an early series of profiles of Hall of Famers, historian Lee Allen and sportswriter Tom Meany said of Wagner, "Honus did not go for homers but hit the ball where it was pitched, spanking it right-handed to all fields." Perhaps this was a necessary reminder for 1965 readers, but seems obvious now. Honus was into "spanking" because he had no choice about it. He played during the Deadball era, a time when the ball had the resilience of a ripe grapefruit and did not go far when struck. Further, teams used one ball per game (fans catching fouls were not-so-politely encouraged to return the ball), and players spit, stomped, rubbed, and ripped at it for nine innings. By the middle of the game, not only was the ball no longer a spheroid, but even if you set off a keg of dynamite under it, it wasn't going anywhere. As such, there was a lot of bunting.
We don't have a complete record of bunt attempts in Wagner's day, nor of players bunting for base hits, which was a constant feature of the game, but we do know that from, say, 1900 to 1909 there was one successful sacrifice bunt per about 40 plate appearances. During Derek Jeter's career in the DH-huggin' American League, those numbers were one successful sacrifice per 173 plate appearances.
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There were also many outs made on the bases. Only two catchers this century have made 100 assists in a season, Paul Lo Duca with 100 in 2003 and Russell Martin last year with 103. In Wagner's day there were 10 different seasons in which catchers made over 200 throws, including the modern record of 214 set by Pat Moran of the Braves in 1903 (if we count the Federal League, then the record is 238, set by Bill Rariden in 1915). Of the top 300 assists totals compiled by catchers, 253 of them were made before 1920 and almost the entire remainder was made by the mid-1930s. In addition to the greater frequency of sacrifice bunts and bunts for base hits, from 1900-1909 there were 1.2 successful stolen bases per nine innings with a great many caught stealing (numbers are incomplete). During Jeter's career, that number was almost precisely half that, 0.6.
There have been 54 teams with 100 or more caught stealing since that statistic started being tracked. Forty-two of them rang up those totals between 1914 and 1925. No team had reached that threshold since the 1993 Angels. This year, the Rangers lead the majors with 47.
Between the soft ball and the differing batting tactics that it required, there can be little doubt that Wagner had to play shortstop in a different manner than any modern shortstop, including Jeter. He was fielding fewer hot smashes and doing more covering of the bases on bunt- and stolen-base attempts as batters made futile efforts to compensate for the ball's lack of resiliency. Dr. Seuss did a book for very young children called, Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You? that encourages children to emulate amusing sounds. When it rains, Mr. Brown says (or as the book has it, "goes," "DIBBLE DIBBLE DIBBLE DOPP." Coincidentally, that is also the sound of Honus Wagner fielding a ball during the Deadball era -- not "crack," but "dibble dibble dopp" -- lowercase.
A Momentary Visit to the First World War
The estimated height of the average infantryman was 5-foot-5.
Members of the American Expeditionary Force on parade, 1917. (Getty Images)
A Momentary Visit to the Olympics
Oddly, all of the Olympic records set in 1912 have been broken by now. It is not because 102 years of East Germans were juicing, but good try.
Honus Wagner's 1910 basketball team. (Getty Images)
A more than momentary visit to Stephen Jay Gould and the world of Evolution
The late, much-missed paleontologist/evolutionary biologist and baseball fan Stephen Jay Gould wrote often on baseball. One of his best essays on the game, "The Extinction of the .400 Hitter," came in 1983. Gould proposed to answer the question of why there had not been a .400 hitter in baseball since Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941. Prior to Teddy Ballgame's big year, .400 averages were fairly common, with 12 such seasons (450 plate-appearance minimum) preceding Williams in the 30 years between 1901 and 1930. After Teddy not only did the .400 average disappear, but the .390 and .380 average largely did as well, with just four examples (two of each) taking place in the years since. Three of the four -- Tony Gwynn (.394 in 110 games, 1994), George Brett (.390 in 117 games, 1980), and Williams (.388 in 132 games, 1957) required shortened seasons to maintain their averages. Only 1977 MVP Rod Carew (.388) made it through something close to a complete season, playing in 155 games and coming to the plate nearly 700 times.
Gould said that several explanations had been offered for the disappearance of .400 averages. One, "naïve and moral, simply acknowledges with a sign that there were giants in the earth in those days. Something in us needs to castigate the present in the light of an unrealistically rosy past." Gould asserted a strong explanation based on the way new species initially experience chaotic mutation as they emerge before settling into their recognizable forms: "As systems regularize, their variation decreases." In other words:
"When baseball was young, styles of play had not become sufficiently regular to foil the antics of the very best. Wee Willie Keeler could ‘hit ‘em where they ain't' (and compile a .432 average in 1897) because fielders didn't yet know where they should be. Slowly, players moved toward optimal methods of positioning, fielding, pitching, and batting -- and variation inevitably declined. The Best now met an opposition too finely honed to its own perfection to permit the extremes of achievement that characterized a more causal age... The entire game sharpened its standards and narrowed its range of tolerance."
In other words, Wagner exploited a far more primitive game of baseball than anything Jeter has ever had to face. When did baseball change? It's difficult to pinpoint the moment. Certainly not until long after the color line was broken, and not until the last vestiges of it faded with the abandonment of unwritten, anti-meritocratic rules against playing a majority-African American or entirely African American lineup. This took decades. The true moment of modernity probably didn't take place until near the end of the 20th century, when not only had the racial barriers fully fallen, but national barriers began to fall as well. The answer to his question is inevitably subjective and imprecise, but if you want a moment on which to plant a flag, call it September 1, 1971, the day the Pittsburgh Pirates, Hans Wagner's Pirates, played the first all-minority lineup. That team went on to win the World Series for reasons having nothing to do with September 1, but it was an appropriate capper for a team that destroyed one of the last vestiges of 19th-century apartheid baseball.
And Everything Else
In the interest of not going book-length here, we can summarize all the other competitive differences in a table. In no particular order:
Then/Now | Wagner | Jeter |
Competed against only white, largely domestic talent. | ✓ | Being of mixed race, Jeter would not have been allowed to play in Wagner's day. The color line was not broken until 30 years after Wagner's retirement. With players from around the world now in the major leagues, Jeter faces a higher and more meritocratic level of competition than Wagner ever did. |
Competed against all talent regardless of race or country of origin. | First player born in: Venezuela: 1939 Panama: 1955 Wagner did have one contemporary born in Australia and competed against the occasional white Cuban. | ✓ |
Games officiated by professional umpires. | The NL turned over some of their umpiring crew every year, hiring amateurs in their places. This practice was in place until after Wagner retired. | ✓ |
Games officiated by full umpiring crew. | The NL went to two umpires in 1910, the 14th year of Wagner's career. Three-umpire crews weren't used consistently until the ‘30s and four-man crews were standardized in 1952. | ✓ |
Played mostly night games. | The first major league night game was played at Cincinnati on May 24, 1935. By 1948, all of the then-existent clubs except the Cubs were playing at least some night games. A simple majority of all games were not played at night until the mid-1960s. Hitting at night is harder than during the day. | ✓ |
Players wore tiny gloves that were almost more suitable to going to the opera than fielding baseballs. | ✓ | When Wagner began his major league career in 1897 there were still a few players who did not wear gloves at all. |
Played on uneven fields that allowed for bad-hop hits. | ✓ | And bad-hop homers. From 1909 to 1924, players who bounced a ball over the wall in right field were credited with a home run. There was also a watering trough for horses in play for awhile. |
Played in giants ballparks that emphasized batting average at the expense of home runs. | ✓ | Wagner's first Pirates ballpark (through 1909) was 400 feet down the left-field line, 461 feet to the left-field power alley, and 515 feet to center field, 439 feet to right-center, and 380 feet down the right-field line. Exactly one ball was hit over the wall in the 20th century. (cf. Green Cathedrals). At Forbes From 1909 to 1924, players who bounced a ball over the wall in right field were credited with a home run. There was also a watering trough for horses in play for awhile. |
Pitchers threw sliders and split-fingered fastballs. | The exact date that the slider first appeared and who perfected it is open to debate, but the two most promising candidates are George Uhle (1919-1936) or George Blaeholder (1925-1936). Either way, both played post-Wagner and the pitch didn't come into common usage until the postwar years, one of the reasons offense began to drop in that period. The split-fingered fastball is really a forkball variant -- which didn't come around until a few years after Wagner retired. | ✓ |
Pitchers threw spitballs, emory balls, shine balls, and other doctored pitches. | ✓ | Baseball outlawed the spitball and its various performance-enhanced cousins in 1920, though a handful of pitchers who relied on these weapons were grandfathered in. The last of them, future Hall of Famer Burleigh Grimes, hung around until 1934. This is one aspect of competition where Wagner had it harder than Jeter does. |
Teams had batting coaches. | "I believe it would pay every major league club to have a man do nothing but coach batters," said Ty Cobb in a book published in 1925. "A trained man who knows batting could help batters out of a slump." Cobb was a retrograde thinker in many ways, but here he was ahead of his time: teams sometimes employed hitting coaches during spring training, but full-time batting coaches didn't become a regular part of the game until the late 1950s. | ✓ |
New talent sought out by a national network of professional scouts. | The first full-time major league scout wasn't hired until 1909. Future Hall of Fame executive Ed Barrow "discovered" Wagner -- who had been playing in the minors for a year already --in 1896 when he was tipped off in a bar. Barrow had heard of Hans, but thought older brother Al "Butts" Wagner the better prospect. | ✓ |
Teams provided young players with professional instruction to bring them to major league standards. | The modern farm system was created by Branch Rickey in the 1920s. | ✓ |
Faced the same pitcher all game long, even if he'd thrown 190 pitches. | ✓ | Such as in this classic from 1914, in which opposing starter Rube Marquard went 21 innings and faced 79 batters. One pitch-count estimator puts that at 178 pitches. Jeter played in 2570 games from 1996 to 2012. There were only 152 occasions when a pitcher threw more than 119 pitches at the Yankees. They haven't seen a 140-pitch start since 1998, and just one 130-pitch start since 2003. Wagner did a great deal of hitting against tired pitchers. |
Faced a series of increasingly hard-throwing relievers every game. | On average, seventy percent of all starts resulted in complete games during Wagner's career. During Jeter's career, just four percent of starts resulted in complete games. | ✓ |
Did not wear helmets and pitchers were free to throw inside, knock hitters down, or even hit them. | ✓ | Jeter plays a far safer game than Wagner did and can dig in at the plate or hang over the inside corner without fear of retribution. |
Played in a small league in which only three-quarters of the teams were of major league quality at any time. | ✓ | Although there is a persistent idea that multiple expansions diluted the level of major league talent, this was more than offset by the simultaneous expansion of talent procurement, from the abolition of the color line to the expansion of Latin American scouting and so on. Conversely, major league teams in Wagner's time often acted as patsies for the rest of the league, filling out rosters with "talent" that would have made the 2013 Astros look like the 1927 Yankees. With a 154-game schedule, a 100-loss season equals a .351 winning percentage. From 1901 to 1917, 30 teams had records below that level. To come up with the last 30 such teams, you have to go back to 1955. During Wagner's career there were seven teams with winning percentages below .300. There have been three in the entire postwar era. |
Access to professional training and equipment. | ✓ | |
Players spent the winter working out and staying in shape. | ✓ | |
Players spent the winter loading trucks, delivering mail, and digging graves so they could afford to eat. | ✓ | Wagner ran a sporting-goods store. It wasn't digging graves like Richie Hebner did, but it also wasn't hanging around a Florida mansion with a custom gym. |
Finale: In which Honus, Bilbo, and Frodo sail into the West
Writing back in the 1990s, I posed the question of how the great 1906 Cubs (116-36) would have done if they had had a chance to play against a team composed of the likes of Mark McGwire. My hyperbolic supposition was that the question would have remained unanswered because their first reaction would have been to scream, "Agh! Giant!" and run like hell. The same goes for Jeter. As the title of Laurence Ritter's classic oral history of the Deadball era tells us, Wagner and his contemporaries were the glory of their times -- but that is all they were too small, too poorly trained, to ill-nourished, too untested by real competition to be the glory of ours.
Jeter is not the greatest shortstop of all time, but he is one of the greatest and that is enough for us to know that he was a better player than anyone born in the 19th century. Either that's true or all the greatest players in history played in the years before World War II, when a man could hit .424 out of his pure superiority to the puny .310 hitter of today.
That belief would mean that baseball history stopped some 70 or 80 years ago and that the game has only declined in the years since. You can believe that if you want to; Lord knows people have believed stranger things in our time, but if you do then you have my pity, for what a sad, pessimistic, and stultified world you live in. Honus Wagner was a great player in the days of William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, a primordial great. Derek Jeter is better. It's not even his fault; it's just an accident of timing. To assert otherwise is to assert a false nostalgia and fail to see the great things that are happening before your own eyes.