squidpants

so I was fiddling around on Baseball-reference.com, a really great baseball website with stats from literally every player ever, back into the 1800s. But looking up some old, old school guys like Larry Corcoran, Cap Anson and Tris Speaker, I noticed something weird: pitchers seemed to give up tons of runs, but around half were unearned. They already had gaudy stats, like Corcoran winning 43 games and pitching 536 innings, which is twice what the most durable pitchers throw nowadays. And that's only good enough for 43rd on list for most innings pitched in a season! But the odd thing is that Corcoran gave up 218 runs that year, but only 116 of which were earned. Nowadays, unearned runs are pretty rare, and usually only happen with errors, I think. To pick a random pitcher, Chris Carpenter gave up 75 runs last year, and only 5 of those were unearned. I wonder why they gave up so many back in the day? Maybe fielders made a ton of errors? And looking at the stats for that team, the 1880 Chicago White Stockings, that works out, as the team had a whopping 329 errors that year in 86 games! And they were the best fielding teams in the league - the Cincinnati Reds gave up 407 errors. (I also like the team called the Worcester Ruby Legs.) So I wonder why teams gave up that many errors? In 2004, the worst team in the NL gave up 139 in 182 games. Maybe there were more distractions back then, or lumpy fields, or bad gloves or something. It's a mystery.

Then I noticed something else odd - it was the "dead ball era" or something, players didn't hit a lot of home runs for various reasons - the ball, huge fields, etc. It was not uncommon to get 2 home runs and 80 rbis. So Cap Anson hit from 0-2 home runs every year from 1871 - 1883 (mostly 0, only 2 once) and then in 1884, he hit 21. The league leader, Ned Williamson, hit 27, but only 2 the year before, and so on down the top 5 home run hitters. I wonder if they changed the rules or something. The next year, everybody was back down, and the league leader hit 11 homers. And a quick Google search finds a Wikipedia article saying that his home field had a very close fence, and that balls hit over it usually counted as ground rule doubles, but in 1884, for some reason, they counted as homers. The top 4 home run hitters that year were also White Stockings, with the fifth place hitter pretty far from them. So there you go.