Baseball's Best Decade (2 page)

Which decade produced the “best” baseball, and best qualifies as baseball’s
real
golden age? Compare. Enjoy the memories.

Then you decide.

January
7, 2014

The Hits Just Keep On Comin’

Rogers Hornsby

Comparing the Hitters, Decade by Decade

The most beautiful sound in baseball – and the most unique sound in all sports – comes from the meeting of wood and horsehide. It says summer. It says you’re alive. It says something exciting is happening … now.

Even the most efficient strikeout pitcher can’t elicit the same kind of excitement that a hitter can. When a pitcher throws a strike, nothing
really changes (unless it’s a third strike). When a batter hits that strike anywhere between the foul lines, everything changes. The possibilities are endless.

If baseball had a golden age exclusively for hitting, that would surely be the 1920s. The batting averages posted by the hitters of that decade must look like an unreachable, almost unimaginable peak
, even to today’s best hitters. The batting averages for so many hitters on so many teams were so astronomical that it might be easy to conclude that the pitching fell below today’s standards. Yet contemporary accounts suggest that the great pitchers of the 1920s would prevail as outstanding hurlers today or in any decade in-between … and that the greatest hitters of the 1920s would treat the majority of today’s pitchers with the same kind of ruthless punishment that they inflicted on all but the best pitchers of their own generation.

How good were the best hitters of the 1920s? Consider this:

• In 1924, Zack Wheat of the Brooklyn Dodgers hit .375 and
  didn’t
  win the batting title … in fact, he finished 49 percentage points behind league leader Rogers Hornsby.
  
• Among the top 10 hitters in the American League for each year from 1920 to 1929, the worst batting average was .323 turned in by Cleveland’s Joe Sewell in 1928.
  
• Three times in each league, the leading batter hit over .400.
  
• Ty Cobb hit a combined average of .357 for the 1920s. Al Simmons averaged .356 for the decade. Neither of them won a batting title during the 1920s.
  

Major league players as a group hit a combined .283 for the 1920s. In both 1921 and 1922, 5 different major league teams hit over .300 for the season.

The offensive onslaught continued into the 1930s. While batting
averages dropped slightly (the combined major league average for the decade was .277) and total major league hits declined by less than 1%, hitters traded batting average for slugging, as both doubles and homes runs increased … and scoring increased by 2%. Major league teams averaged a combined 9.86 runs per game, the highest average for any decade in the century.

From the 1940s through the 2000s, major league batting averages tended to range around .260, with the exception of the 1960s, when major league batting averages hit their low. While hitting was down overall in the 1960s, the best hitters of that decade recorded averages that were comparable with the best hitters in baseball history.

The highest single-season batting average recorded during the 1960s was .361 by Norm Cash in 1961, a respectable average in any decade (though in the 1920s, it would have been good enough to win the batting title only in the 1926 National League season). Pitchers dominated in the 1960s in a way that was comparable with the hurlers of the pre-1920s “dead ball era.” Only pitchers in the 1960s tended to have more pitches, more power and a larger strike zone to work with than the pitchers a half-century before.

That the hitters in the 1960s hit as well as they did attests to the quality of the best hitters in that decade. This is demonstrated by the fact that the batting champions in the 1960s, in their championship seasons, hit a combined .332 for the decade – down slightly, but in line with the batting champions of every decade since the 1930s.

After the 1930s, the batting champions for both leagues have tended to average between .340 and .360, with the notable exception of the 1960s, when averages even for American League batting champions stayed in the .320 range (and did so despite Carl Yastrzemski’s .301 in 1968). The “odd balls” here are the 1920s and 1930s, whose averages are extraordinarily high compared to the rest of the decades.

When the major league owners shrank the strike zone and lowered the pitching mound before the opening of the 1969 season, hitters in both leagues immediately responded with higher averages, which consistently trended upward through the 1990s, though still below the hitting heydays of the 1920s and 1930s.

But what caused the drop in batting averages from the 1940s on? Was it the emphasis on the home run that de-valued contact hitting? Was it bigger gloves and faster players who turned hits into outs and made keeping the ball in the park less rewarding?

Were the hitters of the 1920s and 1930s better than those in the later decades, or was the pitching worse? Look at the numbers for each decade, and you decide.

For the 6 seasons from 1920 to 1925, Rogers Hornsby hit for a combined batting average of .397
.

The 1920s were the hitters’ heyday. A .317 career hitter, Zack Wheat hit a career-best .375 in 1924 … good only for second place in the National League, 49 points
behind
Rogers Hornsby.