Now that
Sight & Sound has saved world cinema culture by moving VERTIGO back down to #2 on its list, we can all breathe more easily (though the extra oxygen helps...) and focus on
truly elemental things--such as what hitter in baseball history had the best first half.
To do that, we won't have a bunch of bleary-eyed meta-intellectuals conduct a poll...we'll do it by focusing on OPS+. That's adjusted on-base plus slugging, a stat that gets maligned now and again for lacking a few nuances, but that, oddly enough, continues to work better than all of its increasingly abstract and over-determined would-be replacements. (Please note that we said which hitter, not which second baseman or catcher or centerfielder: this is all about hitting, and not the skanky modeling mishegas that has taken over in the post-latter day of "sabermetrics.")
The format here is the same as what we did for the second half performances earlier (you'll find them down the slipstream a bit). They're presented by decades, and them generally broken up into components of two-to-four years. Players in the Top 40 are highlighted in orange; record performances in particular stat categories are shown in red as they evolve over time. Here we go...
Nap Lajoie's start in 1901 looks a bit more impressive than
Ed Delahanty's from-the-chute totals/averages for 1902, but 1901 was a very robust hitting year...so much so that Nap only ranks #74 according to OPS+. We are reminded that
Buck Freeman was a formidable slugger who hit 25 HRs in a season when that was almost impossible to do, and we're also given a glimpse of just what an on-base machine
John McGraw was before he hung up his spikes to become a manager.
You may not be convinced that Lajoie's start in 1904 was better than what he did in 1901, either. But relative to the league he was in, he shows up just ahead of himself on the Top 300 list. Honus Wagner shows up in both '03 and '04 (which won't be the last time we see him...) and there are two guys who played catcher a good bit (Roger Bresnahan and Frank Chance) flexing their batting muscles in the first half of their respective seasons. (Chance even takes over the lead for most SBs in the first half.)
We toss together three years as we move toward the low ebb of offense in the Deadball era, though these first-half peaks cut against that reality. Frank Chance joins John McGraw in the .500+ OBP club; we have two more Top 300 year from Honus Wagner; Elmer Flick grabs the lead in first-half triples and might crash into our consciousness as a Hall of Famer thanks to his start-up performance in 1907. Harry Davis does some nice slugging in 1906, grabbing the lead in first-half doubles and homers (at least for now).
In 1908, our first Ty Cobb sighting (it won't be the last...and he won't be down in 290th place the next time, either). Honus Wagner's extra power in '08 (check the triples and homers) combined with the game's offensive nadir causes this first half to be rated much more highly in the Top 300 than his follow-up startup in '09.
The numbers will get more spectacular in the next decade (at least for a little while). Stay tuned...and no matter how beautiful the woman might be, if she jumps into San Francisco Bay, don't jump in after her!
