August 18, 2007
Round Number
Barry Bonds hit his 760th career home run tonight. I wonder if he'll pass Speaker's record of 792 doubles. Everyone's spent years impressed with over 700 home runs, but no one's some close to Speaker's 792 doubles.
Posted by David Pinto at
09:28 PM
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Gonna have to drop a big squadoosh on the chances of Bonds breaking the all-time doubles record, David.
No, not the point. We consider 714, 755 big, important numbers. But Tris Speaker had more doubles than anyone has home runs, and I bet most baseball fans are unaware of that number. Bonds needs 32 more home runs just to eqaul Speaker's amount of doubles. It's an underappreciated record.
re: speaker's record for doubles
it's an impressive record in one way, but in another sense it is not. In the years Speaker played, during the deadball era, the number of doubles recorded by players were far larger and more numerous than they are today. If you check the league stats for doubles during those years you will see that far more doubles and triples were hit during the 1900 decade and 1910s than during almost any other decade of baseball. After 1920, hitters essentially abandoned the strategy of attempting to get the extra base on a ball in the gap and instead swung for the fences, which resulted in far fewer doubles and triples since 1920.
The exception to this was when artificial turf was introduced in 1965. During the ascendancy of artificial turf in the 1970s, there were a larger number of doubles and triples hit by speedsters (I'm thinking KC & St. Louis in particular) through the gaps which made baseball revert in part to the old style game of doubles, triples and stolen bases.
However, with the disappearance for the most part of artificial turf and those burners, we don't see those doubles hitters anymore.
During the first part of his career, Bonds played on artificial turf in Pittsburgh and did hit a lot of doubles of the kind described above, and he was in fact a burner during his early years. Had he remained in pittsburgh until 3 rivers was torn down he would have recorded many more triples and doubles.
This is not to take away from Speakers' record, just to note that norming it to the number of doubles hit in his era, it's not as impressive as Ruth's or Aaron's HR record or Bonds' HR record. Hitters like Tris Speaker or Ed Delahanty have to be viewed relative to their league norms and then relative to some absolute norm, like runs created or runs per team per league, controlling for outs.
Once you normalize the number of doubles in that fashion, I think you'd see that Speaker's doubles totals are not as impressive as they appear, while Ruth's home run records are more impressive.
--art kyriazis, philly
Speaker also played in two ballparks that increased his doubles tremendously.
792 doubles may or may not be that impressive, but if the record may not be "underappreciated", Speaker himself certainly is. He hit .345 lifetime -- the sixth highest ever, and the fourth highest for post-1900 players -- AND was the greatest outfielder of his era. Ruth and Cobb, by contrast, were indifferent outfielders. If you have a Hall of Fame of all-time great all-around players, you'd have maybe two members -- Speaker and Willie Mays -- and I don't know who else.