Posted By:
Dave ReyGil --
I'm not suggesting players should be stripped of their records for exploiting advantageous ball park or rule circumstances, I just attempt to put their accomplishments into proper context.
Williamson no doubt had some power, as the doubles totals from the year before show, but he was not a primordial Babe Ruth.
Sandy Koufax is an example of a player that benefitted greatly from his ball park (the Mt. Everest of pitching mounds) and the strike zone rules of the mid-1960s, but I would never suggest we take wins or strikeouts away from his career totals. But we should judge the greatness of his accomplishments through the lens of context.
Even through that lens, he was a wonderful, upper-tier HOF pitcher -- if you give him slack for retiring young... which I am willing to do.
Sometimes the obviousness of the circumstance is such that it is clear that the statistics generated by those exploiting said circumstances are bogus. The Williamson and Chicago home run "records" of that season are exactly that sort of situation. The accounts of the games during the time when the "record" was being set routinely laments the cheap hits and runs the 200-foot rightfield boundary and the switch from a double to a homer for clearing that boundary allowed and encouraged.
And while it may seem "smart" to exploit a ball park or rule, it rarely pays off in the W-L column... Those 1884 White Stockings only managed to tie for fourth in an eight-team league... That's usually because generally there are smart guys playing for all the teams.
A strange phenomenon of the 1880s, as recounted by Bill James, is that almost every player hit considerably more HRs at home than on the road during that decade, suggesting familiarity with ball park and grounds quirks, and figuring out how to best exploit them, played a big part in that decade's strategy...
Another caveat to the 1884 Chicago HR season is that the rules governing pitching were so very different from the modern rules -- that, more than the silliness of the "gaming" of the ball park by the White Stockings, is a better argument for disregarding, not just the Williamson HR "record," but most of the pitching records of the time, as well.