If you’re reading baseball blogs and baseball web sites in general, you most likely have visited Baseball Reference. It’s one of the best resources out there for baseball stats. There are stats for every player and every team since stats were kept.
What some may know about is their Progressive Leaders feature in their Leaders section. It’s quite cool.
For any given stat, Progressive Leaders displays for each year, the career leader, the single season leader, the active career leader, and the leader for that particular year.
Let’s take Homeruns, for example:
It shows (as we all know) that Roger Connor held the career HR record with 138 when he retired in 1897. Ned Williamson held the single season mark with 27. A quick look shows that when Ruth began hitting dingers, he quickly vanquished Williamson’s mark in 1919 with 29 and it wasn’t long before he broke the all-time career record. What’s great about the Progressive Leaders feature is we can quickly find out that it was 1921, when he hit 59, that Ruth passed Connor HR mark.
By the same token, we can tell that when Ruth retired, Lou Gehrig became the active career record.
On a side note, it’s interesting to note the progression of players who held the active career HR title. They include:
Foxx
Ott
DiMaggio
Mize
Williams
Musial
Mantle
Mays
Aaron
McCovey
Stargell
Jackson
Schmidt
Dw Evans
Murray
McGwire
Bonds
And that’s just a start… take a look at runs scored and hits and doubles an so on and so on… :-)
Followup: I read somewhere that Roger Connor died not knowing he was the all-time leader in homeruns for 25 years.