The calculators do ignore a lot, because (as has been amply demonstrated here) inflation affects different goods at different rates. So you can't use the calculators to tell you what kind of a house Ruth could have bought. It's more like, if you bought a random assortment of stuff in 1934 how much would you expect the same random assortment of stuff to cost in 2017. Which you can't use for any precise purpose, but gets you a sort-of-rough idea about how far baseball paychecks used to go. And I take it that "a sort-of-rough idea" is good enough for government work, as well as for posts to baseball card websites.
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