In his new book “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell argues that 1935 was the best year in the last century to be born an American. The number of births in 1935 was the lowest of the century, and as Gladwell points out, it helps to be born in a low birth year. It means less competition for schools or jobs, and more opportunities open. It also increases the likelihood that an individual will stand out from the crowd.
The book got me thinking: what if you wanted to be a ballplayer? What was the best year to be born if you wanted to be a major league ballplayer?
I simplified this question further: what if you wanted to be a Hall of Fame baseball player? Were there any years where an unusual number of players ended up being elected to the Hall of Fame? And if so, why?
There is an outlier year for players elected to the Hall of Fame. And there were significant historical contexts that made that year an excellent time to be born, at least if you wanted to make the baseball Hall of Fame. That’s what this essay is about.
The Outlier Year
228 players have been elected to the baseball Hall of Fame. The oldest player in the Hall of Fame is Jim O’Rourke, born in 1850. The youngest are Gwynn, Ripken, and Puckett, all born in 1960.
That’s 111 years and 228 players. Or to put it another way: roughly two Hall of Fame players are born each year.
Having zero Hall of Fame players born in a single year is pretty common. Having exactly four Hall of Fame players born in a single year is pretty impressive, but it’s also fairly common. There have been nine years with four Hall of Fame players born: 1857, 1859, 1880, 1886, 1887, 1891, 1898, 1905, and 1918.
Having exactly five Hall of Fame players born in a single year is pretty rare. It happened in 1876, 1893, 1931, and 1934.
Having six Hall of Fame players born in a single year is extremely rare. It happened once, in 1900. A pretty good class: Lefty Grove, Gabby Hartnett, Ted Lyons, Goose Goslin, Jim Bottomley, and Hack Wilson
Having exactly seven Hall of Fame players born in a single year has never happened.
But having eight Hall of Fame players born in a single year has happened. It happened once, in 1903. It’s the outlier year for baseball Hall of Famers, that strange year when a whole bunch of guys were born who made it to the Hall of Fame. Lou Gehrig, Carl Hubbell, Charlie Gehringer, Mickey Cochrane, Paul Waner, Tony Lazzeri, Chick Hafey, and Travis Jackson.
It would be easy to chalk up 1903 as a fluke year, an arbitrary event. It wasn’t. We are all shaped by the context of the world around us. Those eight men born in 1903 were fortunate that the context of their time heavily aided their ascension to the major leagues, and to the baseball Hall of Fame.
Size Matters
The first two factors that aided those born in 1903 relate to population size.
As Malcolm Gladwell suggests, it pays to be part of a small generation. But those born in 1903 were not part of such a generation: the last ‘aught decade was actually a stable birth decade. The 1900 census listed the US population at 76 million. A decade later the population was 92 million, a solid 21% increase in population.
Those born in 1903 faced a great deal of competition from their peers. Where they benefited was not from a small population among their own ranks, but a decreased population in those born in the years ahead of them.
One factor, of course, was the first World War: between 1917 and 1918, 117,000 Americans were killed during the war, and another 205,000 were wounded. To enlist, you had to be born by September 12th, 1900, and though I could not find statistics on the ages of those wounded or killed in battle, it is reasonable to believe that the majority of them were young men.
The death toll of World War I was considerable, but it pales in comparison to the casualties of the 1918-1919 Spanish Flu epidemic. In the United States alone, between 500,000 and 675,000 people died from disease, and a full 28% of the U.S. population became sick. Worldwide, the death estimates range from 50 million to 100 million casualties, or 2.5% to 5% of the world population. Stunningly, the majority of these deaths occurred in a span of just nine months.
What is particularly interesting about the Spanish Influenza is not the numbers of the dead, but the age of those who died.Most pandemic illnesses target the very young and the old. That is to say if you take most pandemic illnesses (cholera, typhoid, bubonic plague) and graphed the age of the victims on the x-axis and number of deaths on the y-axis, you’d get a U-shaped curve, showing that the people most affected by the illness were the very young and very old.
The Spanish Flu was different: the majority of people who died from the Spanish Flu were between 20- and 40-years old. The reason for this is something called a ‘Cytokine storm’, which is a dangerously exaggerated response by the body’s immune system to a pathogenic invader. In a strange paradox, healthier people are at a greater risk of experiencing a cytokine storm when infected by something like influenza. Thus the graph of Spanish Flu deaths is W-shaped, not U-shaped.
The people least likely to die because of the Spanish flu were those aged between 5 and 15, people born between 1903 and 1913. The people most at risk, leaving aside the very young and old, were those born to the generations immediately before 1903.
Gehrig and Gehringer, Cochrane and Hubbell: they were born on the edge of a cataclysmic abyss, and for that they were extraordinarily lucky. They were too young to fight in a war and too young to fall victim to the worst pandemic to ever pass over the world. For aspiring ballplayers, this precarious position had two benefits: it limited the number and quality of players ahead of them, and insured that they would have the advantage of age and size and entrenchment on the players coming up behind them.
The Babe Ruth Factor
The twin factors of World War I and the Spanish Flu gave players born in 1903 the chance to play baseball, but it was the changing shape of baseball itself, symbolized by Babe Ruth, that got those eight men born in 1903 into the Hall of Fame.
Look at the list again: Lou Gehrig, Carl Hubbell, Charlie Gehringer, Mickey Cochrane, Paul Waner, Tony Lazzeri, Chick Hafey, and Travis Jackson.
Who’s the outlier? Carl Hubbell. He’s the only pitcher on the list.
Baseball was changing. In 1918 American League teams averaged 3.64 runs per game. In 1919 they averaged 4.09 runs per game. In 1920 they were up to 4.76. The spitball was banned, the sac bunt eschewed, and clean baseballs were put into play. People tried to hit homeruns and offense increased by leaps and bounds.
The hitters born in 1900-1905 were the first to play their entire careers in the ‘new offense,’ and they posted numbers that no one had ever seen before. Gehrig retired with more homeruns than any player in history except Babe Ruth. Cochrane was the best hitting catcher anyone had ever seen. Chuck Klein hit 300 career homeruns. That might not sound like a helluva lot, but only Ruth, Hornsby, Al Simmons, and Gehrig had reached that illustrious territory before Klein did. Chick Hafey has similar numbers to Mike Greenwell, but when he retired he had more homers and a better batting average than Frankie Frisch or Joe Sewell or George Kelley or Zach Wheat.
Hitters looked good: it was the pitchers suffered: Carl Hubbell retired with 253 wins, a total that was in no way impressive back then. And to get those 253 wins Hubbell had to literally destroy his arm: decades of throwing the screwball resulted in Hubbell’s left palm facing permanently outward from his body.
The Greatest Years
The two biggest Hall of Fame classes were born in 1903 and 1900. This is no coincidence, but a confluence of numerous considerable factors that came to a head in three short years. A generation of Americans was decimated by war and pestilence, and from the ashes of their deaths new avenues of opportunity arose for the next generation, who would enjoy a decade of considerable prosperity. For baseball, brought to a brink by the fixing of the 1919 World Series and the death of Ray Chapman, redemption arrived via a series of considerable foundational shifts in the game’s structure, ushered in by the singular Ruth and the iron-willed Landis. And those men born in 1900 and 1903 were the great benefactors of that confluence of events.
(Dave Fleming finds it interesting that the Spanish Flu epidemic has little hold in the larger historical consciousness, and would like to discuss an action plan with the cytokins in his body should a similar outbreak occur. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com.)