I’ve fallen behind on the posts for our COG election winners, so here’s a recap post on the most recent inductees: Eddie Collins, Walter Johnson and Ty Cobb. All were deservedly no-doubters as COG honorees, so much so that Grover Cleveland Alexander, another most worthy candidate, is still waiting his turn. More on this illustrious trio after the jump.

The accomplishments of these three honorees are immense, each surpassing 120 WAR and 75 WAA, with Johnson and Cobb topping the 150 WAR mark, and Cobb also besting 100 WAA (Johnson just missed with 97.3 WAA). Each has had an excellent biography written as part of SABR‘s Biography project, which I commend to your reading.

Rather than document these players’ superlatives, I thought I’d try something a bit different. As all three were contemporaries and all played their entire careers in the AL, I thought I’d look at their performances against each other using Baseball-Reference‘s box scores. B-R has these for games back to 1914, so they comprise the larger portion of each player’s career, albeit not necessarily all of their prime seasons.

Johnson pitched 95 complete games against Cobb’s and Collins’ teams from 1914 to 1927, compiling a 59-36 record with a 2.07 ERA, dominating totals that would be expected of Johnson, even late in his career. Of those 95 games, Cobb and Collins each appeared in 39, with neither player appearing in the remaining 17 contests (there were no games with both players appearing, when they were teammates in 1927). Here’s how Johnson fared against Collins and Cobb in those games.

Pretty consistent results for Johnson in these games. It might be tempting to suppose that Johnson’s lesser performance in games without Cobb and Collins was because he lost a bit of edge, relieved that they were not in the lineup. It is likely, though, that that is not the case as 7 of the 17 games were in Johnson’s final two seasons when even Big Train was not quite the pitcher he had been earlier in his career.

Separating Collins from the rest of his team when he opposed Johnson in those 39 complete games yields this result.

As might be expected, Collins easily outshines the rest of his team, though with decidedly un-Collinesque numbers, as indicated below.

But, a bit different story for Cobb.

As with Collins, Cobb enjoyed far better results against Johnson than his teammates. But, his results against Big Train were hardly different from his performance against every other pitcher.

In Cobb, Johnson had evidently met his match (though, he did have the last laugh with that 25-14 record). Johnson could at least take a tiny bit of solace in that he at least fared a bit better against Cobb than his teammates.