We are now in the realm of the true baseball Gods--the three hitters who remain at the pinnacle of accomplishment across the 160-year history of the professional game. Year in, decade out; generation in, millennium out--they are there, and are likely to remain there until there is no more baseball.
By the measure of Top 300 half-seasons (either first half or second half), Ty Cobb ranks #3. (We'll cover the other two separately in subsequent posts).
His total of 19 just edges out Lou Gehrig and Barry Bonds, but it's probably not that close. The variably flawed measures that the cognoscenti continue to spar about (Wins Above Replacement and Win Shares) suggest that Cobb's career is of greater value than either Gehrig (who lost several years to a fatal illness) and Bonds (who was something of a late bloomer, not reaching truly elite performance levels until the age of 26). While those methods are flawed, they do come up with an accurate assessment in this case.
Our Top 300 half-season measure is an alternate method for assessing peak performance, and Ty Cobb clearly had his peaks. Let's take a look at all 19 of them:
That's a lot of peak performance, wouldn't you say? Even in our age that continues to belittle batting average, you can't help but be impressed by the fact that Cobb had seven .400+ half-seasons, beginning at the age of 21 in 1909--a time frame when the Deadball Era was thriving (is there some kind of contradiction there? "Deadballs" thriving?? We leave that to you...)
Of course, Cobb did not hit homers--that was the thing in the Deadball Era that was truly dead. But the man could hit doubles and triples with great regularity. (Remember to multiply the totals for doubles and triples you see above by two to get a sense of what those numbers would look like if prorated for a full season: there are ten instances where Cobb's doubles total projects to over 40 for a full season. Note that Cobb would hit 10+ triples in all nineteen prorated seasons that we can extrapolate from his half-season peaks.)
His greatest half-season is clearly his first-half run in 1911, a year when the ball was given some extra oomph. Halfway through that year, Cobb projected to hit 50 doubles and 32 triples--an unfathomable combination even during those times, when triples were the primary power stat. As it worked out, he wound up with 47 doubles and 24 triples for the 1911 season--a feat that no one has duplicated, before or since. (Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Adam Comorosky came close in 1930, with 47 doubles and 23 triples, but 1930 was also the hittingest year in baseball history.)
1925 also stands out: Cobb was 37, and he decided to change his batting style to show what he could do in the new landscape of the game as defined by Babe Ruth's slugging exploits. He didn't quite have the juice to hit homers with the regularity of a true slugger, but he put on a spectacular show for the first half of the 1925 season, hitting .410, slugging close to .700 (the highest half-season SLG in his career), and registered a 1.194 OPS.
We can have some more fun with Cobb's half-seasons, using them to familiarize you further with our concept of "wraparound seasons," or the "back-to-front" season-equivalent totals that can be fashioned by adding up the second half of Year X with the first half of Year X+1. When we do that for Cobb, we get six rather impressive wraparound seasons to contemplate:
Note that four of these "wraparound seasons" are composed of eight consecutive "high achievement" half-season. The young Cobb was probably the greatest terror ever seen on a baseball diamond at such an age (he's 21 through 25 during this time). That fact is not exactly unknown, but looking at in this way certainly amplifies it further!
Note that four of Cobb's wraparound seasons produce a .400+ BA, and two seasons in which he hits more than 25 triples. How many players have done that in a front-to-back season? Only five. (One of them, Cobb's teammate Sam Crawford, did it twice.)
Cobb also has ten half-seasons in the Top 100 for either first half or second half.
It's hard to imagine anyone being more astonishingly impressive than what's displayed here, but we'll return soon with the half-season data for the two guys who actually outpace Cobb. Stay tuned...
