Quote:
Originally Posted by Scott Garner
3,000 hits and 3,000 strikeouts were not newsworthy at the time that these events occurred. When I owned the Speaker ticket I recall looking up archived microfilm (it has been a long time LOL) box scores and write up about the game. Not a single newspaper that I looked at commented on the 3,000 hit milestone! At the time it wasn't apparently something that the sports writers of the day even talked about. The fact that Speaker was only the 2nd batsman to accomplish it at the time in the modern era (Cobb being the other), you would think it would be worth mentioning, but no!
Along the same lines, Walter Johnson reached 3,000 K's and I'm not sure that he received much press on this as well at the time.
Perhaps this is why tickets were not saved; these milestones were not celebrated...
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I just finished reading The Numbers Game by Alan Schwartz, which is an excellent history of statistics in baseball. It turns out that the record keeping was so shoddy back during the pre-war era that no one would have known at the time that a particular hit was a player's 3,000th. MLB's record keeping wasn't formalized to the point that such data would have been available until years later.