Afternoon Baseball

They say baseball spans all eras. I think it does -- just visit the HOF, and even the old, sketchy video of a guy like Ruth tells you he was damn, damn good. But 100 year ago, the stats alone would tell you that almost nothing was the same.
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In 1906:
Ty Cobb was about to begin his first full season in the major leagues. He would put up a .316/.355/.394 with 23 steals in 98 games. In that offense-lacking era, however, his OPS+ was 131 and he ranked in the top 10 in batting average and on-base percentage. Cobb was 19 years for the entire season.

In 1906, the Chicago White Sox won the World Series, defeating the crosstown Cubs. The White Sox hit .230, slugged .286, but had an on-base of .295. The league was .249/.303/.318, though, so they weren't quite as bad as might be seemed.

On the flip side, the American League gave up 3.67 runs per game, 2.69 of them earned. The NL was 3.57/2.62. The 1989 Dodgers, with a 2.95 ERA, are (I believe) the last team to go sub-3, for a comparision.

In 1906, the White Sox had the best attendance in the AL with 585,202. The Yankees drew more than 4 million last year. The Sox also had 6 pitchers compile 1342 of the 1375 innings thrown by the team that year, including 278.3 innings by Hall of Famer Ed Walsh, who would go on to pitch 886.3 innings in the next two seasons and predictably, blow out his arm by age 31.

Around the rest of the game, George Stone of the Browns was the only player to slug .500, and he also led the majors in hitting at .358. His slugging and on-base decreased every year after that, though, and his last season was 1910, although he ended up at .301/.360/.396 lifetime.

Six players had 13 or more triples; no players had 13 home runs. Elmer Flick led all with 96 RBI (and it took him 624 at-bats).

Three Finger Brown had an ERA of 1.04. Roger Clemens' 2005 ERA of 1.87 would have failed to make the Majors' top 10.

A pitcher named Willis won 23 games. It was Vic Willis of the Pirates, though, a 1995 HOF inductee who won 249 games in 13 seasons, winning 20 eight times and losing 20 three times, including a fun 12-29 in 1905.

The older player was 46-year-old Sam Thompson, who had played from 1885-1898 and returned for 31 at-bats with the Tigers in 1906. He went 7-for-31 with 1 triple and 3 RBI. But in his career, he hit .331 and slugged .505 with eight 100-RBI seasons, having hit 20 HR all the way back in 1889.

Three of the youngest players were Cobb, Henry Mathewson (the brother of Christy who won no games, but until the 1980s was the second half of the winningest brothers combo ever), and Eddie Collins. Collins and Cobb would be teammates 21 years and more than 7,000 hits and 1,500 stolen bases later.