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Originally Posted by Aquarian Sports Cards
Ty Cobb led the league with 9 home runs in the dead ball era, it's true. All 9 were inside the park, so not particularly indicative of some hidden power he opted not to use.
That being said I do have to agree with you that as a team sport World Series performance just can't be the "be all, end all" by that logic Ted Williams was an abject failure as a baseball player and Billy Martin was an all-time great. You can't just throw out career accomplishments because the Red Sox (for one example) never had any pitching to speak of in Ted's career.
For my money Cobb, Ruth and Williams are the three greatest ball players ever. I'm not overly hung up on how one ranks them, or even if someone disagrees, but for me Ruth's pitching puts him over the top of a very tight race, and just for Ted Z, Ruth was also one of the greatest PITCHERS in World Series history. So he's got that going for him, which is nice.
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True they were all inside the park home runs, but that had much to do with the size of the fields and if they even had a fixed outfield wall. And again I ask, how come no one else matched or beat that number then? Ruth had all the advantages of smaller parks, a "live" ball, the banning of spitballs, and a major league ownership group supported by by New York media/marketing that wanted him to keep hitting more and more home runs so they'd keep packing the fans in. And don't forget, during the bulk of Ruth's career what is today considered a ground rule double when a fair ball bounces over an outfield fence, back then was counted as a home run.
And it was because of all these changes that I had also previously brought up in an earlier post the major league record Cobb shares with many others by having hit 5 HRs over two consecutive MLB games. Cobb was the second person to ever do this, achieving the feat in 1925 when he was already 38 years old. And by the way, all 5 five were over the fence. Ruth never equalled this feat despite all his home run prowess. And it wasn't equalled again till Tony Lazzeri matched the feat in 1936. It didn't happen again till Kiner did it on two separate occassions in 1947. The story/myth is that Cobb didn't really care for Ruth and all his HRs and supposedly told some reporter he could hit HRs if he wanted to. It's a bit like the Ruth "Called Shot" story, but regardless, Cobb does still hold a piece of a HR record that Ruth couldn't best or ever match.
Oh, and the first person to actually create the initial record of 5 HRs over two consecutive games was Cap Anson who set it in 1884. How much you want to bet at least one of Anson's HRs was similar to what Cobb did in 1909? If so, that would make Cobb the first person to have set/met that record by actually hitting 5 balls over the fence, at the age of 38. Cobb was too good of a hitter for that to have been some lucky fluke. Whether he said something to a reporter or not, he obviously did something different with the way he batted over those two games in 1925. Could he have so many HRs like Ruth, probably not. But could he have hit more runs over his career, that seems a lot more possible.