Nice article. Thanks.

I enjoyed that.

The smoothest player I ever saw with my own eyes was probably Tony Fernandez. Fielded smooth, ran smooth, hit smooth. No Lajoie, of course, but a pretty damn fine player in his own right.

Something the article doesn't make clear:

Lajoie did once bat .426. And Lajoie did play part of his career under deadball conditions. But he did not bat .426 under deadball conditions.

The AL in 1901 scored about 5.35 runs per game - a level of offense that wouldn't be seen again until the mid-20's and more scoring than characterized most of the the 20th century. 1901 conditions were partway between the high-scoring 1890's and the true deadball days, which didn't really get rolling until 1903 or 1904.

I'll also mention that the 1901 AL was certainly a major league, but it was an upstart league, and it hadn't yet arrived at the depth and quality that it would reach in the next few years. Lajoie as a hitter and Young as a pitcher towered over that particular league.

If anyone was paying attention at the time, Lajoie's .426 wouldn't have been seen as a record, not compared to Hugh Duffy's .440 in 1894. (And some other people in the 1880's under somewhat different rules.)

When the pitching distance was moved back to its present value for the 1893 season, offense surged to levels we've never seen in our lifetimes: over 7 runs a game in 1894 (taking some of the edge off Duffy's accomplishment). Over the next decade, offense declined fairly quickly for three reasons:

(1) Fielding gloves: already in general use in the early 90's, but quickly improving in quality.
(2) The foul-strike rule: counting fouls as strikes for the first two strikes increased strikeouts, decreased BA, and depressed offense.
(3) (A speculation on my part): the dominance of one-run strategies in the playing style of the time (SB, sacrifices, hit-and-run) inhibited multi-run innings and held down scoring.

After half a dozen years or so of the deepest deadball conditions (R/G far below 4.0) they introduced a livelier ball for 1911, setting off a 3-year spike in offense (Lajoie was too old by then to take full advantage) that got dragged down again by an increase in pitchers' use of scuffing, spitting, and discoloration. This was finally reversed by clamping down on ball disfigurement - that, and the Babe Ruth example changing the tactics.

I know most of you know this - but I feel the urge to speak up when someone calls everything before 1920 "deadball"; that's lazy, and the truth is more complicated.

Lajoie was a great, great player, of course. In our HoM ranking election for second basemen, with 23 voters, 10 voters had him 3rd, 12 had him 4th, and one had him 7th. His overall rank was 4th behind Collins, Hornsby, and Morgan, with a clear separation between him and the fifth place Gehringer.

The foul-strike rule was not in place in the AL in 1901, correct? My understanding, and it could be wrong, was that that rule difference (the NL did have the foul-strike rule in 1901) was responsible for the large difference in offensive levels between the leagues.

Without bothering to check, I think the AL added the foul-strike rule in 1903, and the "dead ball" era was off and running.

OCF, I always see different things so it's not clear to me. Was the ball made livelier in 1920? They cut down on the spitballs and the scuffing and starting getting rid of dirty balls, but was there another change made to its actual core at that time? Or was that only done in 1911?

I'd guess another reason offense declined after '94 was simply pitchers getting used to the new distance and adjusting their style.

That Russel Ford anecdote sounds apocryphal. It should be easy to check.

The foul-strike rule came along pretty late in the offensive decline, and, as suggested above, its introduction was not simultaneous between the two leagues. I think that improvement in gloves (and maybe also improvements in groundskeeping) accounted for a lot of the decline in scoring from 1894 to 1901 or so. But after that, the foul-strike rule was big.

I'd guess another reason offense declined after '94 was simply pitchers getting used to the new distance and adjusting their style.

That's a population adjustment but not really an individual adjustment. At the individual level, most of the pitchers who had been dominant before the transition weren't dominant after it - Clarkson, Hutchison, and so on. With one generation wiped out, a new generation had to come along. Young and Nichols, already established before the change, thrived in the new era, but it seemed to take until about 1900 before top pitchers started coming along in bunches. Or maybe that's a secondary result of the change in run environment.

One other thing that may explain a little: pitching mounds. I don't think the 60'6" rubber was necessarily originally elevated on a mound. When were mounds first built, and when did they become universal?

I don't think there was any change in ball specifications in or around 1920; throwing the damaged balls out of play was the biggest item there. Of course over the years, many more de facto changes in balls have been theorized than ever officially acknowledged.

That Russel Ford anecdote sounds apocryphal. It should be easy to check.

Retrosheet doesn't go back that far. At the very least, someone is going to have to do some digging to find the newspaper accounts.

Lajoie does seem to have been a fairly free swinger in general. But in 1910, which might be the year in question, he did draw 60 walks while leading the league in BA and doubles.

The NY Times has box scores from each of the eight games Cleveland beat New York in 1910. Ford didn't pitch in any of them, so at least one part of the story is incorrect.

Lajoie did have 3 for 4 and 4 for 4 games, but he didn't walk in either of them. He injured a Yankee pitcher with a line drive in a third game.

The four-hit game ends with "Cleveland must pay dearly for this, by cracky."

Also, Ford beat Cy Young when Young was trying for his 500th win.