Clifford Carlton "Gavvy" Cravath, also nicknamed "Cactus", was an American right fielder and right-handed batter in Major League Baseball who played primarily for the Philadelphia Phillies.
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Clifford Carlton "Gavvy" Cravath, also nicknamed "Cactus", was an American right fielder and right-handed batter in Major League Baseball who played primarily for the Philadelphia Phillies. One of the sport's most prolific power hitters of the dead-ball era, in the eight years from 1913 to 1920 he led the National League in home runs six times, in runs batted in, total bases and slugging percentage twice each, and in hits, runs and walks once each. Cravath is almost certainly the first player to hit 200 home runs in affiliated baseball -- 119 in the majors, 107 in the minors and seven in the 1903 "independent" Pacific Coast League. He led the NL in several offensive categories in 1915 as the Phillies won the first pennant in the team's 33-year history, and he held the team's career home run record from 1917 to 1924. He is one of eight players to lead the majors in home runs for a season six times in a career. He is the only player to hit more than 100 home runs in the Deadball Era (1901-1919). However, he played his home games at Baker Bowl, a park that was notoriously favorable to batting statistics. Cravath hit 93 career homers at Baker Bowl while he had 26 homers in all his games away from home. However, Cravath admirers point out that none of his contemporaries were able to exploit Baker Bowl in similar fashion: From 1912 through 1919 he hit a fifth of the Baker Bowl homers with less than a twentieth of the plate appearances and hit 60% as many homers as all visiting teams put together. Moreover, he was an exceptionally slow base runner; so much so, in fact, that it was actually Cravath about whom sportswriter Bugs Baer famously wrote, "His head was sure full of larceny, but his feet were honest," a distinction which, along with Cravath's extreme lack of foot speed, has long been mistakenly ascribed to Ping Bodie. But again, Cravath's defenders point out that he was 31 by the time he settled in the major leagues and he demonstrated speed when he was younger, ste
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