I was wondering whether anyone had ever written something sabermetric-ish about the career ratio of triples to home runs for selected players.
The person who posted a while back about Sam Crawford got me thinking about this...since Crawford was (and still remains) the all-time career leader in triples.
Crawford had 309 triples in his career, which is way under the 762 home runs Barry Bonds has...which might superficially lead one to the bizarre statistical conclusion that it's harder to hit a triple than a home run, despite the fact that home runs are so much more useful in terms of winning ball games. (Home runs are about par with doubles, as Tris Speaker has the record with 792, and singles are much easier, with Pete Rose having 3215 of those.)
Of course, we're all aware that there were eras in baseball history where home runs were harder to hit, and where legging out a triple became much more of a valued activity. The deadball era from baseball's founding to the end of the 1910s were the highwater mark for this sort of thing. Teams ran more (stolen bases were through the roof) and the power hitters on the team tended to hit more triples than home runs.
What I'm wondering is, has anyone written up something that might use the ratio of triples to home runs characteristic for an era (say, 1900-1919) as a way of projecting how many home runs that player might have hit in another era?
Something along these lines...suppose we had an era where people normally hit 3 triples for every 1 homer. But Joe Player from that era hit 2 triples for every 1 homer. That suggests that Joe Player was heavier on the homers than he should have been for that era, and thus would have hit somewhat more homers than would be normal for a live ball era as well. But Bob Player hit 4 triples for every 1 homer. That was even more triple-happy than was normal for the era, so in a live ball era, it would be expected that this player would still be more focused on triples than the long ball, even if he started to hit a few more homers because of the new liveness to the ball.
(Gary Player would still be playing golf and would not be relevant to the example, of course.)
I think that would be an interesting thing to look at, because the big triple hitters in history were disproportionately from the dead ball era, but there were a couple who were not. Stan Musial and Roberto Clemente, for example, played in the live ball era, but hit a number of triples characteristic of players who relied upon triples much more heavily. Both Musial and Clemente hit more home runs than they did triples, but their ratio of triples to homers even so would be much more weighted towards triples than is normal for their homer-happy eras. So perhaps if they played in the age of Wahoo Sam, they might have racked up somewhere in his neighborhood of triples?
Probably some people would like to take this sort of projection the other way, though...to ask how many homers Wahoo Sam or some of the other dead ball era types might have had.
