GAVVY CRAVATH

They called him Gavvy — Clifford Carlton Cravath of Poway, California — and in the dead-ball National League he was the Phillies' long-ball answer. Right-handed, right-field strong, he turned Baker Bowl's short porch into a counting house while the rest of baseball still treated home runs like accidents.

The peak summers stacked without apology: .341 with nineteen homers and one hundred twenty-eight ribbies in 1913, nineteen more bombs and a clean hundred ribbies in 1914, then twenty-four home runs in 1915 — a dead-ball power total that made polite parks feel suddenly small. Even 1917 still threw twelve over the wall with sixteen triples for gap insurance.

What stayed in the book was a .287 lifetime clip, one hundred nineteen home runs, and the memory of a Phillies cleanup threat who made the dead ball look negotiable.