If you have a 3 word anchor text on a backlink ex. leather baseball glove, and you are also targeting a 2 word search term within that 3 word term ex. baseball glove, will that 3 word anchor text backlink have the same value for both keyword search terms?
Exactly as said above. You'll have to place both the anchor texts seperately to get the benefit. If what you asked were to be true, then optimizing for a sincle keyword, say 'Seo' would automatically optimize for all keywords that include the term 'Seo', e.g. 'Seo Tips', 'Seo Company', etc... Hence this is not possible.
better if you use both saperately one anchor text with 2 words and another with 3 , b'coz crawler always looks for exact phrases and words.