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57.  The Nap Lajoie Era

              Oversimplifying yet further, the history of Second Base from 1900 to 1940 can be reduced to four eras.   1900 to 1910 is essentially the Nap Lajoie Decade, 1910 to 1920 is the Eddie Collins Decade, 1920 to 1930 is the Rogers Hornsby Decade, and 1930 to 1940 is the Charlie Gehringer Decade.   After Gehringer second basemen will fall in to the normal pattern of (a) domination by players for three to five years, or (b) no clear number one player at the position, but somebody has to rank first.  

              There is a virtue in the single-player straight-decade domination, in that it enables us to focus on the secondary players at the position in a different way.    From 1900 to 1908 the top second baseman in baseball was Nap Lajoie.  The other top second basemen of the era were Danny Murphy of Connie Mack’s Athletics and Johnny Evers.    Evers was still fairly early in his career by 1908, although that was his peak season.

              No one was really close to Lajoie in any of those seasons. . ..no one was on his heels.  

              I was never sure how to pronounce "Lajoie" until I worked with his grandson, Bill Lajoie, with the Red Sox.  Bill pronounced it "La-Joy" with just a hint of an "uh" sound after it, "La-Joy-uh", but really just "La-Joy".  Not Lah-Joe-A or anything like that.  

58.  The Eddie Collins Decade

              After Lajoie the top second baseman in baseball was Eddie Collins.  Eddie Collins was perhaps the closest thing ever to a perfect player, Collins or Willie Mays or maybe Stan Musial.  Collins did not hit for power, but in his era there was really no power.  He hit for an extremely high average, was tremendously fast, walked a lot while rarely striking out, was an outstanding defensive second baseman, and played something close to 154 games every season.   He was the best bunter in baseball, in an era in which the bunt was a huge part of the game.   In my view he was a greater player than Lajoie, which is not to put down Lajoie, who was the dominant second baseman in baseball for a decade, which is a long, long time to dominate a position. 

              Other than Collins, the leading second basemen of this era were Laughing Larry Doyle and Del Pratt, who are not Hall of Famers but who were fine players.  The only other Hall of Fame second baseman of the Collins era was Johnny Evers, who won a National League MVP Award with the Braves in 1914, and who of course was part of the Tinker to Evers to Chance combination.

              Eddie Collins would remain one of the top second basemen in baseball for years after he was pushed out of the #1 spot by the Rajah.  He was the same player in the 1920s that he was in the teens, more or less, but there were a lot more runs in the game in the 1920s, so the 110 runs a year that Collins created had less impact in the 1920s.  

59.  The Rogers Hornsby Decade

              Rogers Hornsby, of course, was one of the greatest hitters of all time, and was the greatest second baseman of the 1920s.   Early in his career he was a shortstop, but moved to second base in 1920:

              Hornsby, of course, had trouble catching pop ups; he would get a little dizzy when he looked up in the air.  I say "of course" because all baseball fans knew that 40 years ago; I would guess a lot of you now don’t know it.  Anyway, I was wondering if this would cause him to have a lower ratio of putouts to assists, since this would mean that there were putouts that he didn’t get on Pop Ups.  Strange that I had never thought to look at that before.

              The answer is, yes, it shows.  A typical second baseman has 79% as many putouts as assists.  Hornsby had only 62% as many, which is the lowest ratio for any long-term second baseman except Ryne Sandberg.  Contemporaries to Hornsby:  Bucky Harris, 88%; Buddy Myer, 86%; Eddie Collins, 86%; Marty McManus, 85%; Billy Herman, 84%; George Cutshaw, 84%; Billy Wambsganss, 81%; Hobe Ferris, 79%; Oscar Melillio, 77%. 

              Let’s say that 79% is the norm in Hornsby’s era, as it appears that it wasn’t any less than 79%.   If that is true, Hornsby is 861 putouts short of the norm.   We can’t assume that all of those were lost plays, of course; it is possible that many of them or most of them were pop outs taken by some other fielder because Hornsby had trouble with them.  But it does seem likely that there was some loss of effectiveness there. 

              The primary reason that we study statistics is so that we are not misled by them.  Before sabermetrics, baseball historians saw Hornsby’s big hitting numbers as proof that he was greater than the best second basemen of the dead ball era, because his hitting numbers were bigger.  With sabermetrics, we learn to translate the hitting stats into runs, and to express the runs as wins.   We now understand that when there are more runs, it requires more runs to win a game; thus, that Hornsby’s advantage may not be as large as it appears.

              Eddie Collins is the only second baseman of the Eddie Collins era who is in the Hall of Fame.  But in the Rogers Hornsby era, the 2nd-best and 3^rd-best second basemen (in the late 1920s) are also in the Hall of Fame (Frisch and Lazzeri), although it might be more accurate to say that Frisch was the 2^nd-best second baseman of the Hornsby era and Lazzeri was the 2^nd-best second baseman of the Gehringer era.  Anyway, the same is true at all of the positions; there are also more first basemen and catchers and left fielders and center fielders in the Hall of Fame.  It is likely that this is because the inflated hitting numbers of the 1920s have historically misled people into believing that these players were greater than they actually were, relative to the stars from other eras.

61.  Charlie Gehringer’s Short Decade

              Charlie Gehringer was only seven years younger than Rogers Hornsby, so he didn’t quite get a full decade to be the #1 second baseman in baseball. 

              Gehringer was a consummate gentleman who lived with his mother and went to the church to pray literally every day.   He was very much respected by those who knew him, but the nickname which is associated with him, The Mechanical Man, was not intended as a compliment.  It was like the term that people use for Kansas City quarterback Alex Smith, a "Game Manager".   It suggests what he was not more than what he was.   He played the game without passion, without anger or without evident joy; he was just there, going through his motions, doing his job.   In the early 1950s he was thrust into the role of Detroit’s General Manager simply because the owner had so much respect and affection for him that he implored him to be the General Manager, but Gehringer had no training or background to be a GM and was really awful at the job, which led to a down phase for the Tigers. 

              The other interesting thing about him is that Gehringer got steadily better, 3% better every year, more or less, for an exceptionally long period of time.  He may have had the longest period of getting consistently a little bit better of any player in major league history.   Frank White was like that as well.