OF DICK AND DEV: AN ANTI-CLIMACTIC SENSE OF AN ENDING

LET us begin with two endings: the final steps of a Kafkaesque journey to posthumous redemption, and the sudden, all-too-anonymous conclusion of a brilliant but sadly squandered life. Much treachery and tragedy intervened in the events leading to these sobering anti-climaxes, some (if not most) of it self-inflicted: but these two men--the "notorious" Dick Allen and the "flamboyant" Brock Hanke--spent too many years of their lives diminished by a particularly virulent form of insiderism that continues to plague the world of baseball. 

Thus shall it ever be so. Here we write often about the opening up of vistas that few if any (want to) see, perspectives that began half a century ago when a cynical-yet-idealistic seventeen-year-old went to college and bonded with a draft-dodging denizen of the hippie demimonde with prodigious and protean skills who reeked of endlessly provocative opinions. 

That was Hanke (pronounced "hank-y"), who anointed me into his loopy world when I professed affection and support for an embattled slugger who didn't want to be called "Richie." 

DURING the balance of the 1970s, our allegiance to a pre-Bill James "sabermetric" approach to baseball deepened, eventually leading us into a variable association with Bill's 1980s efforts to create a blanketed play-by-play capability (Project Scoresheet). It would also lead to Hanke's (temporary) anointment as the successor to Bill's Baseball Abstract (until Bill pulled the rug out from under him).

All through that period, as we developed our own mythical world (assorted tales of the San Antonio Trotters, a form of "sabermetric wish fulfillment" blown up from our days of wrangling in intramural softball), one axis of our foundational beliefs was in the conjoined greatness and martyrdom of Dick Allen, whose career took a series of dramatic and confounding turns until it came to a sudden, anti-climactic end in 1977. (As we rewrote the landscape of baseball via the Trotters in those days, we naturally found a way to include Dick on that team, which had progressed from rag-tag to dynastic in the intervening years: as a prestige platoon player, "Big Dick"--as Hanke liked to call him--upped his lifetime HR total much closer to 400 before "officially" retiring at the end of the decade.)

The liaison with Bill James started then (it was actually yours truly who discovered him first, being one of a few hundred who purchased his self-published 1978 edition), but it was Hanke and his applied math background that confirmed the essential efficacy of Bill's early work, which led to our years of producing baseball annuals in the 1990s, which were subverted by what has now become more of a plague on the game than a means to its transformation. The true scandal of "sabermetrics" is how it has undermined baseball even as it purports to anatomize it, and how it became an instrument of an ever-more invidious form of insiderism.

SUCH behavior was first exposed by Bill James in his cynical, overblown Politics of Glory, which unceremoniously combined new numerical formulations with callous muckracking, skewering baseball's Hall of Fame in ways both rightful and reprehensible. In an age (mid-1990s) when new statistical measures (OPS, OPS+) were opening eyes to the hidden accomplishments of hitters long shunned by Cooperstown, James took out a contract on Dick Allen and shot him down with a series of pronouncements that deserved a libel suit. 

Even though some of James' long-time allies/colleagues took up against him, the damage done to Allen's chances for statistical reconsideration (and enshrinement in the Hall of Fame) was epochal.

James' behavior became the template for a new flavor of "sabermetrics" which would fire hot for a decade until generational change permitted the "outsiders" to become "insiders." (James himself helped spawn this movement when he took a job with the Boston Red Sox, being the first of many to make the world safe for sabermetrics, but not necessarily vice-versa.)

Prior to that, Bill's second edition of his Historical Baseball Abstract (2001) employed his Win Shares method (moving "beyond" the Wins Above Replacement method he'd created in the 1980s, a tool that Hanke inserted into his 1989 Baseball Abstract, unwittingly setting in motion a process that would turn the measure into a lightning rod for insiderist "culture wars" that continue to persist). The results of the Win Shares method produced some inconvenient truths--one of which was that, according to James' own measures, Dick Allen (even with his relatively short, injury-riddled career) had cleared the bar for induction into the Hall of Fame.

James' response to this was to hint that Allen's "psychological problems" had caused him to squander a level of talent equal to that of the game's greatest players (oddly, limited to other African-Americans such as Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson), which apparently constituted grounds for ongoing skepticism about his suitability for Cooperstown. When pressed further, James noted that Allen's eventual admission was "inevitable" and that he'd simply look the other way regarding whatever the "insiders" did. 

Meanwhile, the Wins Above Replacement method managed to target Dick as well: its distorted defensive calculations produced a penalty that was virtually unique, dropping his "overall" score into a range where ruby-throated "sabermetric" chirpers could make unctuous ululations reiterating his "marginal" status for induction. 

All of this kept in play a lingering uncertainty that prevented the "new numbers" (per Jayson Stark, in a rare disingenuous moment) from crashing through to give "Crash" (Allen's nickname, given to him due to the sound of what happened when his 42-ounce bat met the baseball) the needed cred to make it through baseball's ultimate insider kluge, the umpteen-times-shuffled-off-to-Buffalo "Veterans Committee."

Dick became philosophical about his ongoing banishment, beginning with his autobiography (appropriately enough, entitled Crash!)--over the years, he did what he could to mend fences, knowing that whatever outcome would ensue was out of his hands. He was gracious, grateful and moving when the Baseball Reliquary inducted him into its Shrine of the Eternals (who, a few years later, would create one of their typical "strange bedfellows" situations by inducting Bill James!)

Meanwhile, in response to the media shift and his own incipient health issues, Brock Hanke absented himself from the "real world" cauldron of baseball opinion, opting for an association with the Hall of Merit, a cadre of individualist systematizers who devised their own (and more convenient) rules of induction for an alternate baseball Hall of Fame. At my request, he made a half-hearted attempt to get that intriguing group to run a parallel experiment using the more draconian inductions standards imposed on the brick-and-mortar Hall of Fame (75% of the total vote). In two words: they declined.

AND likely you know the rest of Dick's story: missing induction via that ever-shifting committee in 2015 by one vote, then succumbing to cancer in December 2020 as another incarnation of insiders decided not to vote because COVID made it "too cumbersome" to operate in true insider fashion. And then, another stinging one-vote miss in 2021.

In 2022, Brock Hanke received some sobering news about his physical condition: he'd developed a weakness in his pulmonary system that would become more pronounced over time. Work he had done to address the problems in the Wins Above Replacement method--a project he'd fretted over for years--was again shelved without seeing the light of day. (This had been a lingering pattern for him over time as the escalating signals of his ultimate health issue affected his ability to physically function, an occurrence that seemed to make him gun-shy with respect to the increasingly "inside" world of advanced baseball statistics.) My attempts to engage him on such matters and to advocate that he make his findings public were not successful.

With a caretaker living with him in his suburban St. Louis home, he still sounded reasonably alert in February of 2024--the last time we were to speak. His stamina was clearly reduced: he begged off the call shortly after being reminded about my homage to his fictional self's Hall of Fame-level career that I'd reconstructed from our long-ago forays into what is now called "fan fiction." (Perhaps unsurprisingly, those texts had turned into another critique of Wins Above Replacement.) All in all, however, there was little indication of any imminent change in his condition.

Becoming involved in my efforts to wrap up that long-running French film noir project (occasionally referenced here), my opportunity to reach out to him was curtailed, and the summer passed into fall. After returning from the first of two "final finale" screening series in San Francisco in mid-October, it seemed to be a good time to reestablish contact. An email went unreturned (not an especially concerning event: Hanke was a notoriously poor correspondent). But then the attempts at reaching him by phone produced the troubling fact that his long-time land line at his home had been disconnected.

An initial search of the Internet did not produce an obituary, but a more specified query revealed that Brock Hanke (known to me always as "Dev"--his 1970s nickname) passed away on the thirty-first of May. A subsequent search produced a sound file from a sports radio show from just two days before his death where he'd made an appearance, where he definitely sounded diminished. (Few people were as verbally articulate as he was, and here he sounded--to use an "analog analogy"--like a 45rpm record being played at 33.)  And yet it's clear from the audio transcript that during his on-air chat time, Dev had little or no sense that he was about to pass away...

SO both men--Richard Anthony Allen and Brock Jay Hanke--did not survive long enough to see "Big Dick" finally crash through into the bubble-world of the hallowed. We put aside our lingering sense that perhaps the blemish of Allen's unjust absence from the Hall might still be an appropriate symbol for the hollowness at the center of its "hallowed halls," and we celebrate for his family, his friends, for those who resolutely championed him for so long, and for that long arc of justice (to reframe the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.) that finally bent toward mercy, forgiveness, vindication--and redemption. 

And yet it is a bittersweet, anti-climactic ending for both men--and for countless others like Hanke, who'd advocated and hoped and prayed for some form of intervention that would have brought the events of Sunday, December 8th, 2024 to us so much sooner, when so many more folks could share in the moment, when its potential for a form of healing bliss was so much more palpable. 

Many will remember Dick Allen, and that is all to the good. But few if any will remember Brock Hanke, and while some of that is on him, it is sobering to contemplate how so much talent can have so little tangible to show for it. Let's hope that wherever his essence might be at this moment, he is finding enjoyment in Allen's belated vindication. Farewell, my friend!

YANKEE POST-MORTEM: BIG INNINGS IN THE WORLD SERIES

THAT Game Five really was a strange game, indeed...the Yankees did a bizarre volte-face after looking as though they were serious about getting back to LA.

The Dodgers' surreal five-run rally got us thinking...how many 5+-run innings have occurred in the Worls Series. To answer that question, we dug into Forman et soeur's online data resources...

Here's the TimeGrid™ chart for that (at right):

IN all the craziness of that Dodger fifth inning, we might easily forget that the Yankees also had a five-run inning (the night before in Game Four--in the eighth inning to break that game open). 

All in all, we 've had 105 5+-run innings in World Series history. which have occurred in 69 of the 120 World Series that have taken place since 1903.

Now for some of the details in the chart, working backwards in time:

In 2023, the Texas Rangers had two 5+-innings in the same game en route to winning the World Series.

In 1993, the Phillies and Blue Jays had 5+ run innings in the same game (Game 4, a 15-14 slugfest won by Toronto). The Phils actually had three such innings in that Series, but still managed to lose.

In 1987 the Twins had two and the Cards had one, but none in the same game--Minnesota won the Series in the first instance of the home team winning all of the games played.

In 1979, the Orioles had three such innings and the Pirates none, but the O's still lost the series in seven games.

In 1975, the Red Sox did it twice while the Big Red Machine had no such big inning, but the Reds still won the Series.

In 1968, the Tigers only did it once...but it was a ten-run inning, tying the record most runs in a World Series inning (make your guesses now as to the identity of the team that did it first).

In 1961, the Yankees had two such innings in the same game en route to a 13-5 win (and a Series win) over the Reds.

In 1960, the Yankees had three such innings, in the three games where they routed the Pirates (Games 2, 3, 6), but the Pirates had one of their own in G7 and won the game and the Series on Maz's homer.

In 1956, the Yankees and the Dodgers had such innings in the same game (Game 2, won by the Yanks, 13-8; Game 5 was Larsen's perfect game).

In 1952, the Yankees had two such innings, but they actually lost one of the games in which they did it (though they did win the Series).

In 1942, the Cardinals and the Yankees had 5-run innings in the same game; it was won by the Cards 9-6 en route to a surprising Series win over the Bombers in five games.

In 1936, the Yankees had three such innings against the Giants, two of them in a game where they set the record for the most runs scored in a World Series game (18). They won the Series in six games.

In 1929, the Cubs and the A's had 5+ run innings in the same game (Game 4); the Cubs got five in the sixth to take an 8-0 lead, but the A's scored ten (10!) in the seventh in the biggest World Series comeback ever.

In 1923, the Yankees had two such innings and finally won their first World Series against the Giants (after having lost to them in 1921 and 1922).

In 1912, the Giants had two such innings (Games 6 and 7), but there was a tie game in the Series that year and they lost Game 8 to the Red Sox (who won their first title...there would be three more that decade before the Curse of the Bambino would set in).

In 1908, the Cubs had two such innings, beating the Tigers for the second straight time in the Series (Detroit would lose again in 1909, becoming the only team to lose three World Series in a row).

One last fact: World Series teams who've scored 5+ runs in an inning almost always win (no big surprise there!), but there have been seven losing teams who've done so in the Series: the Cubs in '29, the Yankees in 1942, 1953, and 1956, the Mets in 2000...

--And the Phillies in 1993, who managed to lose two games in the same series (!!) in which they scored 5+ runs in an inning. 

So the '24 Yanks are, after all is said and done, just a slightly anomalous underachiever. As was the 2024 World Series itself--looking as though it might be more interesting, then turning into mush with the two MVPs unable to replicate (via slump and injury) their regular-season dominance. So it goes...

WORLD SERIES: QUANTIFYING THE YANKEES' UPHILL BATTLE

The Dodgers' makeshift "Big Two" (Jack Flaherty and Yoshinobu Yamamoto) did well enough in tandem...and bolstered by continuing home run heroics, those Boys in Blue leave Dodger Stadium up 2-0 as the 2024 World Series--the first pitting baseball's two most storied franchises since 1981--moves to the Bronx tonight.

And that puts the Yankees into a sizable hole. The question that needs asking/answering is: just how sizable is it, and what does past history tell us about teams that go 0-2 on the road at the outset of the Fall Classic? (That's outset, not onset--though the onset of gopheritis certainly put a pox on the left arms of Nestor Cortes and Carlos Rodon...)

AS always, we go pig-for-truffle to bring you the whole data--the tree and the roots, the leaves, the bark, even the woof and warp if you don't rein us in. And as always, we'll flip the script and invert our presentation by showing what happens from the perspective of those home teams who barrel out of the gate at 2-0 in hopes of riding the rail all the way to the finish line. 

This takes us all the way back to 1907, when the Chicago Cubs first throttled their opponents twice at home (those luckless Detroit Tigers, still the only team in baseball history to lose three World Series in a row). 

As you'll see, it took the fifteenth time this this happened for a team that went 0-2 on the road to start a World Series (the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers) to actually prevail at the end. Oddly, that occurrence set off a little chain of counterintuitive repetitions: four more consecutive instances of defying the norm (1956 to 1971), followed by a series of stutter-steps into the mid-80s, before finally settling back into a "groove of orthodoxy" in 1987 in which we are still enmeshed.

THAT's sixteen straight times where the team going 2-0 at home goes on to win the Series, with the majority of them (11) resulting in sweeps (aka "the big 4-0") or a five-game romp (4-1).

All in all, teams that take advantage of the home field advantage in the World Series wind up winning those series in more than 80% of the cases.

AND that is what the Yankees find themselves up against as they take the field tonight, with Aaron Judge still reeling in the kryptonite of the post-season, and the unheralded Clarke Schmidt taking the mound for a team that needs Judge (and the bottom part of its batting order) to show something resembling a pulse before it's time for the body bag.

Of course, the Dodgers have blown 2-0 home advantages before (think 1956 and 1978), but they pulled their own Houdini act in this regard in 1981, the last time these teams met. If the Yankees could somehow get things in gear to do so in 2024, that would make three consecutive times that the teams have traded such counterintuitive outcomes between themselves--a record that Jayson Stark (aka baseball's "Mr. Unique) would clasp to his bosom with devilish glee.

A World Series with real drama is what we want, of course--because obviously we are starved for it in real life. (Insert your favorite rude noise here.) But seriously, a seventh game is the only type of Armageddon that we can sit back and enjoy, and we really need that given the specter of doom that has encircled the land of the free (for now...) and the home of the formerly brave (looking at you, Jeff "Bozo" Bezos) at this late date in latter-day tomfoolery. 

SO...root for that seventh game already. It may be all we get in this uniquely felonious fall...

OHTANI'S OTHER "50-50"...

WE are still in the final throes of wrapping up the French noir book, but the light in the tunnel is getting brighter and brighter.

Of course, we can't compete with Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani, whose dual 50+ homer totals in 2024 have made them the thirteenth instance of two or more players to hit 50+ HRs in the same season in all of MLB history.

BUT there's a better lede for this story, and we're not going to bury it any longer. In the midst of Ohtani's historic 50-50 season, there is actually another "50-50" that was achieved when the Dodgers' $700 million man put the slug on the hapless Marlins a few nights ago.

What the heck are we talking about? Well, it turns out that when Ohtani hit #50, he became the fiftieth player to hit 50 or more homers in a season. (As you likely know, he's now up to 53--though he still trails Judge for the MLB lead.)

Now that's what one can call a nifty coincidence. 

And that calls for a Time-Grid™ chart, now, doesn't it? 

Let's take a look at when those fifty 50+ HR seasons have occurred...

That was Babe Ruth all by himself in the 1920s, with Hack Wilson in 1930, Jimmie Foxx in 1932, and the first duo (Foxx and Hank Greenberg) in 1938.

Nine years later, Johnny Mize and Ralph Kiner became duo #2, followed by Kiner again in 1949.

Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle did it in back-to-back seasons (1955 and 1956), then Mantle and Roger Maris teamed up to set a new "duo HR record" in 1961 (with 115 between them). Willie joined Mickey and Kiner and Foxx in the "double 50" club in 1965.

Then, a twelve-year gap until George Foster joins in 1977, and a thirteen-year gap until Cecil Fielder does it in 1990. (That's right, the 80s are the only decade in the live ball era in which no one hit 50+ HR in a season.)

But things changed a bit in 1995, when Albert Belle kicked off the biggest five-year total of 50+ HR seasons  to date (11 from 1995 to 1999). The unlikely duo of Brady Anderson and Mark McGwire cracked the half-century HR barrier in '96 (with McGwire doing it with the least number of PAs in season--just 548), followed in '97 with McGwire (58) and Ken Griffey, Jr. (56, the first of two back-to-back 56-HR seasons).

THEN...1998. Four hitters with 50+ in a year, two over sixty (McGwire with 70, Sammy Sosa with 66), with Griffey and Greg Vaughn cracking the 50 barrier. 1999--a rerun of the great homer races, McGwire becoming the first man to have four consecutive 50+ HR seasons; Sosa would match him in 2001).

Sammy would go it alone in 2000, but in 2001 three new sluggers would join him: Barry Bonds, with 73; Luis Gonzalez, with 57, and Alex Rodriguez (52, the first of three 50+ seasons he'd achieve). 1998-2002 would produce thirteen 50+ HR seasons, the highest five-year total in baseball history. A-Rod and Jim Thome were the duo in 2002 to set that record...

Andruw Jones would join the club in 2005, with the lowest BA, OBP, SLG, OPS, and OPS+ of anyone with 50+ homers in a season. (Jose Bautista would get under Andruw's .263 BA five years later, but not is OPS.) Ryan Howard and David Ortiz hit 58 and 54 respectively in 2006; A-Rod would be joined by Prince Fielder in 2007; Prince is the youngest hitter to slug 50+ HRs in a season (age 23), and the only son to follow his father (Cecil) onto the list.

Chris Davis hit 53 in 2013 and then rapidly turned into a pumpkin; Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton would headline the first big "launch angle season" (2017) with 52 and 59 HRs respectively. Pete Alonso was the only 50+ HR hitter in a bigger year for taters (2019).

Judge reasserted himself with a vengeance in 2022, setting a new AL record for HRs (62). A magical season in Atlanta got Matt Olson across the 50-HR barrier in '23, and that brings us back to Judge and Ohtani, the toasts of the coasts and a duo that we want to see collide in the World Series in spite of ourselves. 

Judge now has three 50+ HR seasons, trailing Ruth, McGwire and Sosa (who all have four). Will he keep up the pace in the next several years and make the record his own? Stay tuned...

THE WHITE SOX & THE WORLD OF 10+ GAME LOSING STREAKS

HERE is a belated look at the hapless Chicago White Sox and their season in Hell, even as we grapple with the final throes of our wrought-from-hell volume on forgotten French film noir. (Yes, we've been absent for a reason...)

Our way into this sad tale is through the lens of their epic 21-game losing streak, a downward spiral that began with their loss in the second game of a doubleheader against the Minnesota Twins on July 10th. They would not win again until August 6th.

During those twenty-one losses over twenty-six days, the Pale-to-the-point-of-invisibility Hose scored a total of 49 runs, while their pitchers allowed 136. 

There was a premonition that they'd be just this bad: a previous 14-game losing streak, from May 22nd through June 6th, which is a new record for most number of games lost in two same-season losing streaks: 35 (surpassing the performance of the 1916 Philadelphia A's, with 32 (20 + 12) during their 36-117 season (which is the lowest winning percentage for a team in a full season--the other record that the White Sox are chasing...or is that the other way around?)

BUT back to losing streaks in general. As usual, we seek the data no one else provides. First, how many 10+ game losing streaks have occurred in baseball since 1901? That covers a lot of teams over an even greater number of seasons. Our patented TimeGrid™ chart (at right) has the answer, also showing the year-by-year (or, perhaps, blow-by-blow...) results.

That's a total of 395 losing streaks of ten or more games--and when we look across at the decade summaries, we see that these numbers have remained fairly constant over time. What that really means, though, is that there are proportionately fewer long losing streaks during recent seasons, despite the higher raw numbers in the 1990s and 2000s: remember that in these decades there are nearly twice as many teams as was the case in the 1930s. (On the other hand, 2021 set a record with nine 10+ game losing streaks, eclipsing a mark that had held up since 1909.)

Our color-coding here might be a bit confusing: the years with six or more 10+ game losing streaks are shown in various shades of orange, but you'll note some years where the data is shaded in dark blue--these are baseball's expansion years. We wanted to see if those seasons produced more long losing streaks, and the answer is yes: years with first-year teams average a bit more than five per season, as opposed to just a little more than three per season overall. 

What do such losing streaks mean in terms of seasonal performance? That data is not readily available without some cumbersome compilation, but when we eyeballed the full list of 395, we found only one team on the list that managed to make it into the World Series. (We'll withhold the name of that team until the conclusion of the post...)

BUT there is a more rarefied area of futility available to us within this data: that would be the teams who manage to lose fifteen or more consecutive games. How many such streaks have there been? 

At left are all 33 of those extended mini-seasons in Hell. We present them in reverse chronological order so that the forlorn White Sox can be on top of something...

What emerges sharply at the outset is that these are all really bad teams: only four of them exceeded a .400 WPT in the season they had their 15+ game "siesta." 

Also emerging is the fact that virtually all of these teams had execrable pitching while they were in extended winless mode. This will be highly evident when you examine the ERA column for these teams, which shows only nine of the 33 teams posting sub-5.00 ERAs during their "clustered swan dives."

2021 was the first season since 1927 to have two such long losing streaks in a single year. But more notable--in fact, incredibly remarkable--is the fact that those two 2021 "long losers" were quick to rebound from their dismal seasons: the Diamondbacks went to the World Series in 2023, while in the same year the Baltimore Orioles won 101 games. (No such luck for the teams who joined hands in futility during 1906, 1909, and 1927--mostly teams from Boston, by the way.)

Note that our seasonal record for the 2024 White Sox is out of date--we researched this a couple of weeks ago, intending to post it earlier, but...French noir intervened. Their current record is 31-105 (still, somehow, one game better than those 1916 A's, who were 30-106 at the same point in their dismal year).

Just think: these White Sox missed by just one loss during their May-June swoon from being the only team to appear twice on this list in the same year. Of course, there's still time: the Im-paled Hose have yet another losing streak in the works--they are up to eight in a row with their 5-1 loss to the Mets tonight, and there's a chance that they will become only the fourth team to have three 10+ game losing streaks in the same season. (With two more losses in a row, they would join the 1909 Boston Braves, the 1961 Washington Senators, and the 1962 New York Mets.)

NOW, finally: what team lost 10+ games in a season and still made it to the World Series? The 1951 "miracle" New York Giants, that's who. Leo Durocher's boys lost eleven in a row from April 19th to April 29th that year, but still managed to play catch-up with the Brooklyn Dodgers in a playoff series that might still be lodged in your memory banks. Leo the Lip always insisted he was a singular presence in the game: with this factoid, he's definitely got some bragging rights...

[UPDATE 9/1: The White Sox have joined the ranks of "seasonal three-peat 10+ losing streak teams" with their loss today to the Mets. They are now 31-107; to escape sliding under the '62 Mets, they'll need to go 10-14 the rest of the way...stay tuned.]

10+ HR MONTHS: THE 1980s

WE are once again swamped with other projects--for those interested, our long-running French noir series in San Francisco wraps up this fall, and there is an incredible amount of work involved in that: a 33-film, two-part series, plus a long-gestating book on the subject (covering the 155 rare films that we've screened in the twelve festivals since its inception in 2014). 

We keep hoping that the workload for all that will be brought under control, and there is some light at the end of the tunnel, but it's still a dim light--thus we'll be working in this material in the in-between times. Thanks for your patience...

SO--on to the 1980s, the calm before the storm of the offensive explosion. In a decade that had slightly fewer 10+ HR months than the 1970s, there were some rumblings of the future uptick in both homers and run scoring levels that would transform this list into something beyond most folks' abilities at memorization. Two months--September 1985 and May 1987--give us a dim sense of what will become a flood tide of similar monthly totals in the decades that follow...

Some will remember the big homer year of 1987, which prompted an order from MLB to its umpiring crew to reset the parameters of the strike zone, the effect of which can be seen both in the overall HR/G totals in 1987 and 1988, but also in the dramatic delta in 10+ HR months (from nineteen to just two).

Despite the downturn at the tail end of the decade, the number of 10+ HR months were a good bit more plentiful in the second half (49 in 1985-89 as opposed to 29 in 1980-84). Though he's not on the repeater list (at left), Mark McGwire made a big splash in 1987 (his rookie year) with 15 homers in May en route to 49 for the season. 

And yes, we forgot the color-coding for this one: for ease of reference, there were only four instances in which a hitter had two 10+ HR months in the same year during the 80s: Mike Schmidt in 1980 (on his way to his single-season career high of 48; Don Mattingly in 1985 (a power surge in August & September that got him to 35 for the year, a seasonal total he never surpassed); George Bell and Dale Murphy in 1987 (both men achieving their single-season high water marks in HRs. with 47 and 44 respectively). 

Those totals will be drastically different in the next decade...

Here is the list of all the hitters who had one 10+ HR month in 1980-89 (at right.) The colorization for the year in which they achieved this is, alas, also missing (c'est la guerre). 

Some names on this list are likely to have been misplaced in your memories: for starters, Ben Oglivie (actually hit 40+ HRs in a season, though it was 1980, not the season in which he had his 10+ HR month). Next we submit for your perusal the "blink and you missed his career" phenomenon also known as Dave Hostetler, sort of an 1980s version of Vince Barton, who hit 10 HRs in his first full month in 1982, but wound up with just 22 for the season, winding up with a lifetime total of 37 HRs.

Then we have have Jim Presley, who never hit 30 in a season (his top total of 28 came the year before his 10+ HR month, and he actually started what became a precipitous decline in 1987, the year so many others were giving us a preview of the "launch angle" era). Keith Moreland, a solid hitter and multi-position player for the Cubs from 1982-87, rode the '87 homer wave to his highest single-season total (27) at age 33. (Turns out that Keith enjoyed a power surge at Wrigley Field, hitting 67 of his exactly 100 homers from 1982-87 at home; he was traded to the Padres in the 1987-88 offseason and promptly stopped hitting the long ball.)

People also tend to forget just how good a hitter Cecil Cooper was, especially at his peak (his first seven seasons with the Milwaukee Brewers, from 1977 to 1983). Cecil hit .300 or higher in all seven years, led the league in RBI twice and drove in 100+ four times, and had a 137 OPS+ with 156 HRs, including two 30+ HR seasons. (His 10+ homer month came in one of those 30+ seasons--1983.) 

Buddy Bell hit 201 lifetime HRs, but never more than 20 in a single season; that year was 1986--exactly 20 (which included his 10+ HR month--August). 

Lee Mazzilli looked like a possible star for the Mets up through his age 25 season (1980, also the year he had his 10+ HR month--July, when he hit 11). But he tailed off sharply in August/September, and played his way into a trade by 1982. (The one-time "Flushing Meadows Heartthrob" would return to the Mets in time for their World Series win in 1986, however--but as a backup.)

Since the 1990s listing will be bursting at the seams with 10+ HR months (213, almost three times as many as the eighties...) we will toss in an item that would ordinarily be included in our discussion of that decade. One item we've been tracking in the data is the incidence of 10+ HR months where batters hit less than. 300--we provided an overview of that pattern previously, which indicated that the percentage of such instances had remained quite constant until the 21st century (around one in three, a percentage that shifted upward notably in the 2010s and is continuing to accelerate). 

In keeping with the decay of batting average (we don't quite agree that "batting average is dead," as Russell Carleton suggests, though analytics departments have delivered a series of body blows to it in the past decade thanks to the "launch angle age" becoming a overweening "strategy" for the game) we are also tracking the 10+ HR months where hitters have a batting average which is less than .250. 

That has not happened as often as one might think, because a "clustered performance" such as this one still tends to reflect an excellent overall hitting month--but the data suggest that Carleton's notion of front offices being increasingly willing to ignore low BAs in exchange for homers is accurate. The TimeGrid™ chart (at right) shows that 50% of the 10+ HR months with a < .250 BA have occurred since 2010. 

The lowest batting average for a 10+ HR month was first fashioned by our old friend Vince Barton (Cubs, 1931) with a BA of .224. It was matched exactly by pioneering low-average slugger Pat Seerey in 1948. Hank Bauer managed to get below that figure in 1956 when he hit .211 with 10 HRs in May 1956. It wouldn't be until 1994 when Matt Williams would get under Bauer's BA with a 10+ homer month accompanied by a .208 BA--followed swiftly by Cecil Fielder "seeing him and lowering him" down to .204. In 2001, someone had the fist sub-.200 BA 10+ homer month: we'll let you guess as to who that might be. 

And, as the chart suggests, even that is not the current record for the lowest BA accompanying a 10+ HR month: that record was set in 2022, and we'll let you guess who that is, too. Stay tuned...

10+ HR MONTHS: 1960-79

IT has always been Brock Hanke's thesis that the "Lords of Baseball" dampened the home run for roughly twenty years after Roger Maris exceeded Babe Ruth's fabled total of sixty...and, if not literally true, it certainly seems figuratively true. 

Our survey of "10+ HR months" tends to bear that out, even with the peregrinations within the data for the two decades shown at right (a strike zone expansion in 1963 undone six years later; the unprecedented and never-repeated four team expansion in 1969; the adoption of the designated hitter in 1973; another "half-round" of expansion in 1977).

Clearly the decline in offense during the so-called "second deadball era" that still haunts the scurrilous scribes today as the ghost of that era's ghoulishly dessicated batting average comes to visit them in the dead of night...but note that the corrections implemented to course-correct the decline in power that came to a head in 1968 produced only the briefest burst in the two years after baseball's biggest-ever expansion. It wasn't until 1977 that the game began to leave  its power drought behind once and for all. 

BUT we're here to celebrate and catalogue the folk who continued the semi-honorable pursuit of doggedly swinging from the heels, and whose efforts would from time to time produce monthly homer totals in double figures. Such an occurrence has become rampant in the last thirty years or so, which makes these forays into the past more poignant (and less crowded).

Let's look at the top producers of 10+ homer months in the 1960s (at left). As always, what first leaps out of the list (save for the fellow at the top: we'll return to him shortly...) is how rare it was for Henry Aaron to hit ten or more homes in a single month--we'll do a deep dive on Hammerin' Hank's monthly totals and make it part of a special post later on in the series. 

What also leaps out here, if your eyes are drawn to the trickeries in our color-coding mechanism, is the fact that Roger Maris became the second player in baseball history to have five 10+ homer months in the same season--no wonder the Lords wanted to do something to quell such blasphemy! But, of course, our yearly log demonstrates the measures they took in 1963 did not manage to detract from the relentless, clockwork-like power probings of the man Fritz Peterson called "The Fat Kid"--Harmon Killebrew. 

Given the offensive deprivations put into place during that "second deadball" era, it's possible to consider Killebrew's 10+ homer month achievement (sixteen in the 1960s, twenty overall in his career) as being every bit as impressive as Ruth's lifetime total of twenty-five. Let's do him the favor of displaying his full 10+ homer handiwork (below).

What's  alsonotable about Killebrew's achievement--as we'll find out in greater detail later on--is that he pioneered the phenomenon of the 10+ homer month accompanied by a persistently sub-.300 BA. Thirteen of his twenty 10+ homer months include that feature, which had first become a bug immediately after WWII, when it happened seven times in 1947. Over baseball history, the percentage of sub-.300 BA 10+ homer months is still lingering around one in three (34%), but the "sons of Harmon" have taken over in recent years and have pushed that percentage well over 50%--paging Kyle Schwarber and the 10+ HR month in which he hit .168 (!!). 

BUT let's not get ahead of ourselves. Here are the "also-rans" (or, if you prefer, the "one-hit wonders" of the 10+ homer klatsch during the 1960s (at right). As might be evident to those who've perused the earlier versions of this list, the instances of truly "unlikely" hitters who make their appearances on these list are declining in number. Some of these folk actually have more than one 10-homer month to their credit--they just happened to have them in months occurring in an adjacent decade (Ted Williams: 40s, 50s; Eddie Mathews and Ernie Banks: 50s; Dick Allen and Billy Williams: 70s).

There are still a few anomalies here, however: guys like Chuck Essegian, known almost exclusively due to his pinch-hit homer spree in the 1959 World Series, or Chuck Hinton, who (like Essegian) got a late start in his major league career. There's also Gene Oliver, famed mostly for being the nemesis of Sandy Koufax, who finally received steady playing time in mid-1965 and bagged a 10-homer month in the midst of that. And--last but not least--the unbelievable Felix Mantilla, who parlayed a fortuitous trade to a congenial home ballpark (Fenway) into an unexpected power surge. (Mantilla, nicknamed "Felix the Cat" due to his slight 160-lb. frame, hit more than a third of his lifetime HRs in Fenway, where he accumulated less than 20% of his total plate appearances.)

LET's move on to the 1970s, where it will immediately become clear how the Lords were able to leach out the power levels from the game as it was played in the sixties (even with the enlarged strike zone). 

Note first that the leader in the decade (Mike Schmidt, who'll have more 10+ HR months in the 80s) has only six instances, as opposed to Killebrew's sixteen. No one comes close to approaching Maris' five 10+ HR months in a single year, not even George Foster, who probably caused some defibrillating moments in the cold hearts of those "Lords of the Game" when he hit 52 homers in 1977. The youthful Johnny Bench, who looked like he might be a truly prolific slugger early in his career, was quickly ground down by the seventies trend for "iron man" catchers. And Reggie Jackson, who'd electrified folks in 1969 with his first-half homer surge (including two 10+ homer months), never followed with a similarly prolonged stretch of homer hitting as his career continued to play out. There are fifteen hitters on this list, but only nine new names, as opposed to twenty and fourteen respectively on the 1960s "multiple 10+" list.

And here are the one-timers in the 1970s--many of whom, as you'll see, are there by virtue of the homer surge that occurred during the first half of the 1970 season. 

That's a total of nine 10+ homer/month one-timers (try repeating that phrase rapidly...) in '70, though the Giants' two Willies (Mays and McCovey) had been previously prominent on the 60s list. But such an overall surge certainly boosted the chances of hitters like Bob Bailey, Rusty Staub, Tommie Agee, Tommy Harper, Tony Conigliaro and Tony Perez. 

The big drought on this list occurs in 1974-76, when only two players--John Mayberry and Richie Hebner--manage to hit 10+ homers in a month. Hebner, a guy who hit 203 lifetime HRs but only had one 20+ season over his career, is the unlikeliest guy to have a 10+ homer month in the season in which he did it (1975), a year when he hit a total number of just 15. 

The unlikeliest of all on this list, however, has got to be Mike Hargrove, known mostly for his skill at drawing walks and for the colorful nickname "The Human Rain Delay"--earned for his propensity to jump in and out of the batter's box at every opportunity (a "pioneering" behavior that came to infect baseball more generally in the years that followed, leading slowly but inexorably to the present-day pitch clock). Hargrove hit just 80 lifetime homers, 18 of which came in 1977, including ten in August (five in a six-game stretch) and sixteen in the second half of the season.

And we'd be remiss not to mention our old fave Sixto Lezcano, whose 1979 season was a gem--164 OPS+, 28 HR, 101 RBI, .321 BA, capped by a 10-homer month in August--making it appear that he was poised for greatness. It didn't quite happen, but it was fun while it lasted (a statement applicable to many activities that remain all too associated with some form of "feckless youth"). It's nice to have him on the list, and it's a nice place to stop (for now). Stay tuned...

10+ HR MONTHS: 1940-1959

WE figured out how to make the data displaying the "10+ homers in a month" that occurred in the 1940-59 time frame less overwhelming for our presentation format--so let us praise the Lord and pass the historical ammunition already. 

However, let's start by reminding you what the overall "data arc" for these occurrences looks like (the TimeGrid™ chart at right), which may make it clear that we may not be able to successfully show the "divisional play" details without visual pain/strain.

We bring you 145 instances of "10+ homers in a month" for 1940-59; that total will rise to 194 for the 1960-79 frame, and will then nearly double in 1980-99, when the post-postmodern "homer happy" world arrives and seizes us by the throat. It will be messy, but let's not get ahead of ourselves: there is still plenty of time for us, in the words of our dear departed friend Michael Peake, "to drive off that bridge when we come to it."

SO let's just dive into the data and let it have control of our wayward steering wheel...

The 1940-49 row shows how "clustered slugging" disappeared from the game in during WWII, with literally no one hitting 10 homers in a month for both 1944 and 1945. The total number of such occurrences just managed to reach the same level that had occurred in the 1920s (though sixty percent of that total was supplied by one man--Babe Ruth).

Post-war 10+ homer months take their time to reassert themselves, but they are jump-started by the oft-forgotten longball exploits of Ralph Kiner, whose prolific slugging set the tone for much of what has followed suite ever since. (Though Aaron Judge is clearly more athletic that Kiner overall, he is the latest incarnation of the behemoth-like right-handed slugger who has come to be the iconic symbol of the game over the past seventy years.)

The other "ur-models" of this archetype (Hank Greenberg, Joe DiMaggio) each lost significant portions of their careers to WWII, thus likely losing several more instances of "10+ homer months" in the process. Of the two Greenberg was the more prolific, but he was also three years older, which suggests that their overall home run production in the lost years (1942-45) would likely have been similar (producing at least two more 10+ homer months for each of them over that time frame.

The "master chart" in our TimeGrid™ chart shows the consistent uptick of this phenomenon during 1950-59, but it also shows how the frequency level remained in alignment for what occurred in 1947, eroding a bit in the second half of the fifties, and only propelled to a new level by the game's first expansion in 1961.

BUT let's go ahead and look at the denizens of the "10+ homer month" list in the 1950-59 time frame. As you'll see, we solved our data presentation problem by breaking the list into two--first, those hitters who managed the "10+ homer feat" more than once during the time frame.

This is your "slugger class"--the higher-end homer hitters of the decade, whose power levels as a group peaked in the middle years (1954-56) before dissipating somewhat as the decade played out. The Dodgers' slugging core (Duke Snider, Gil Hodges) has its potency fatally undermined by the simultaneous onset of old age and the cross-country move to a ballpark that was on balance less conducive to slugging (particularly for a lefty masher like Snider.)

But as you'll now see, there's another level of slugger capable of a "home run cluster" now and then, the type of hitter that teams became particularly focused upon finding during the decade. These are the folk represented on the second fifties breakout (at left), reflective of that nascent shift in the hitter types which is just getting underway. It will go a bit dormant in the 1970s, but will start to re-emerge in the mid-1980s, spiking in 1987 (a year that resulted in a change in how the strike zone was called, which served to delay the onset of lusty homer hitting that would inundate the game in the mid-1990s). 

THESE guys are the type of hitter that will start to have multiple manifestations of "clustered homer hitting" (as manifested in the "10+ homer month") on a more frequent basis in the 1990s, leading us to a kind of "steady state" phenomenon in which an average of 30 such "10+ homer months) would occur over the ten-year period from 1995-2004. 

There was simultaneously a peak level of performance and a depth of second-tier power hitters during this time frame, with the result that these "10+ homer months" reached their peak in the 1995-99 time frame. The 1999 total of 42 such occurrences in that single year is still the record, despite the exponential increase in the number of players swinging for the fences in the most recent ten-year period (2015-24). 

JUST to mark a little time, and to facilitate similar future comparisons, here's a chart that shows in which actual month the "10+ homer months" occurred in 1950-59. 

Possibly you'll remember from an earlier post that the traditional mid-April start date for the season that persisted into the early 1970s had prevented anyone from hitting 10 homers in April. That fact is dramatically present in the "month-by-month chart. The distribution pattern of lower totals on the edges of the season, as captured by the progression here (0-16-30-29-22-7), remained relatively constant until it began to flatten out into the August-September time frame in the late 90s--which is still the case today.

AND now for the truly fun part of this data set, those folk who make the "10-homer in a month" roll call despite having yearly totals that are a good bit less robust than you'd expect for someone who'd hit double figures in a single month. 

As we get deeper into the 50s, the dominant offensive shape pattern (the player having the spectacular overall performance in a month, including a high batting average) seems to leach itself out of the data. In the 1940s, all three "unlikely" members of the list conform to type; in the 1950s, however, we see that eight of the ten hitters on the list have sub-.300 BAs, showing that the throughline to the age where some have proclaimed that "batting average is dead" really begins in that decade. 

Bob Speake is the poster child for this "unlikely" list in the same way that Vince Barton was for the 1930s: two guys who had a hot long-ball month before pitchers figured out how to neutralize them. It's possible that there will be someone who has an even tighter ratio of seasonal HR totals to his "10 in a month" month than Barton (just 16 lifetime homers--even Speake had 31!), but it seems at least as unlikely than the fact that both of them are on the list at all. (But, as Jayson Stark likes to say:"because--baseball!"). 

WE will leave you to guess who on the 1950s lists of "10 homers in a month" will turn out to have even more occurrences on the list than Willie Mays (nine in the 50s, 18 overall in his career). Look over that list, and make your guesses--we move on to the seductive sixties in short order...

10+ HOMER MONTHS: 1920-1939

DON'T expect to see all of the types of charts that we'll display in this installment of the "10+ homer months" series--if you go back two posts and look at the number of 10+ homer months that begin to accumulate in the 1950s, you'll understand how one of our charts in this post would overwhelm everything...

We've been teasing you with the identity of the hitter with the most 10+ homer months, but we figure that most of you have not been fooled by our feeble attempts at misdirection. So, without further ado, here are the twenty-five (25!) 10+ homer months by a man that needs no introduction:

Some of the slash line numbers in this display merge seamlessly into surrealism, don't they? Seven of these 10+ homer months feature SLG values above .900; five of them produce an OPS of 1.500 or higher. 

We think you won't be surprised to discover that the first nine entries on the list are also the first nine times in baseball history where a batter hit 10+ homers in a month...

...and we'll find out as we go along whether any other slugger will duplicate Babe Ruth's feat of five 10+ homer months in the same season (1921). 

Recall that there are currently 1289 instances of 10+ homer months...and note that on this chart we see five instances where the Bambino hit 14 or more homers in a month (capped by his great September 1927 run to sixty homers). A question for you to consider as we continue with the series: how many instances are there of a hitter slugging 14 or more homers in a month?

NOW for the chart that you will understand is going to be impossible when we move into decades where the home run has become chronic. From 1920-39, however, homers were less plentiful overall, reserved for a smaller class of elite hitter--all of whom you will see on the chart below...

As you can see, the list is sorted in descending order of frequency: the numbers for Jimmie Foxx, Hank Greenberg and Joe DiMaggio are not all-inclusive, as each of these sluggers continued on into subsequent decades. But you can see the clustering of 10+ homer months in their big seasons, which also includes Hack Wilson's 56 homer season in 1930. Foxx and Wilson both logged four 10+ homer months in their biggest homer seasons; Foxx, Greenberg and Lou Gehrig managed three of 'em in other years.

Interestingly, Ruth only had two 10+ HR months in 1927, the year he hit sixty--but those two months (May and September) accounted for just under half of his seasonal total...

AT the bottom of the chart is where we'll find the hitters whom we'll be showcasing as the most unusual members of the "10+ homers in a month" fraternity. How are they unusual? Take a look at the chart and we think it will become immediately obvious to you...

Take a look at the "TotHR" column at the far right, and notice how many of these folk hit fewer than twenty homers in the season in which they had a 10+ HR month. Our first member of this list might not seem to really fit: the veteran Tillie Walker experienced a power surge at the tail end of his career, aided in 1922 by the decision by Philadelphia A's owner-manager Connie Mack to move the left field fences in. (Mack was not keen on Walker's relatively low batting average and benched the veteran the following year!)

The rest of our folk here (with one notable exception) are middling homer hitters who clustered their long-balls into a single month, which in many cases was accompanied by a month-long hot streak (George Harper in 1928 and Hank Leiber in 1939 being the most prominent examples). 

But the guy who sticks out on the list is Vince Barton, a young slugger that the Cubs brought up in mid-1931 in the wake of Hack Wilson's shocking collapse. Barton hit five homers in a week in early August, but struggled to keep his batting average over .200 throughout the month, hitting his 10th homer on August 29th to become this fraternity's most anomalous member. (Barton fizzled out in early 1932 and was sent back to the minors by the Cubs, never to return.)

PERHAPS we can consolidate the 1940s and 1950s into a similar presentation, as the war years (and the balata ball) caused homers (and, by extension, 10+ homer months...) to drop precipitously. Stay tuned...

10+-HOMER MONTHS: BY MONTH

JUST a quick post...to carry forward the 10+ HR month series a bit further...

Which month of the season has produced the most instances of 10+ homer months?

Give it a moment's thought before you take a guess... 

KEEP in mind that for a large portion of baseball history, the number of games played in April fell well behind the other months of the season. So you can eliminate April from the list.

(As a matter of fact, the very first instance of a 10-homer month in April didn't occur until 1969, whenFrank Robinson did it. There had already been 356 10-home months recorded before the very first 10-HR April occurred...)

It turns out that August is when the most 10+ HR months have occurred. The complete breakdown of 10+ HR months by month is shown at left.

We can see that the summer months (which tend to inflate home runs generally) are where 10+ HR months are likeliest to occur, with 811 of the 1289 occurring in either June, July or August.

Four of the first five September occurrences of 10+ HR months were achieved by Babe Ruth, in 1920, 1921, 1925--as he was recovering from his famous bellyache--and 1927, when the Bambino hit 17 HRs on his way to becoming the first player to hit sixty homers in a season.

The fifth 10+ HR September in the 1920s was performed by Rogers Hornsby, in 1922.

WE will delve much more deeply into this data shortly...stay tuned.

10+ HOMER MONTHS: THE OVERVIEW

OK, it's time to pick up on our earlier look at the 10+ homer months turned in by the late great Willie Mays and give you a sense of just how many times in baseball history a hitter has managed this feat.

After that, we'll spend time examining the leaders in 10+ homer months. (Mays' total of eighteen 10+ homer months is impressive, but it's not the record.)

SO let's dig in...the first thing we should establish is the current total of 10+ homer months--a figure that might be surprising to you. (Our TimeGrid™ chart can be seen at right.)

Did it occur to you that there might be more than a thousand of these in baseball history?

The three that occurred in June 2024 (Anthony Santander, 13; Shohei Ohtani, 12; Aaron Judge, 11) have brought that total up to 1289 instances.

The TimeGrid™ chart shows us that the first time anyone hit 10+ homers in a mother occurred in 1920. (Perhaps you can figure out who was the first to achieve that without our having to mention his name...)

WE can also see how the record for most 10+ homer months in a season has evolved over time, with what seemed like a big spike in 1930 holding the record at 15 in a season for more than thirty years--before being broken in the Maris-Mantle expansion year of 1961. 

That record held for another thirty-five years until it was broken in 1996, and again in 1998 and 1999--when the current record for the most 10-homer months in a season (42) was set. 

Since then, baseball sluggers have come close to breaking it, with 41 such instances in 2001, and again in 2019, baseball's most prolific home season ever. 

NEXT time we'll take a look at the 10+ homers in a month as they break out by calendar months, and we'll look at the higher levels of homers in a month...who, for instance hit the most homers in any single month? Who's had multiple 10+ homer months in the same year? Who hit the least number of homers in a season that included a 10+ homer month?

All this, and more...stay tuned!

OHTANI: INTIMATIONS OF MORTALITY AS THE 2ND HALF BEGINS

NO, we're not suggesting that anything sinister will be happening to Shohei Ohtani, the Dodgers' $700 million man. We are just looking at his monthly numbers and getting the impression that his hottest months might well be behind him. Take a look at the following data breakout and see what you think:

FIRST, the yearly log for Ohtani in June since his arrival in MLB (recall that he missed the month of June in 2018, his rookie year). We were discussing 10+ homer months a bit earlier (before we got swamped with work on another project)--as it turns out, Ohtani has had three such months in his career--and you're looking at all of them in the June data. June of '23 was truly a monster month for him, but June of '21 was not far behind. This June just past wasn't too shabby, but note that his OPS for the month was actually lower than his collective lifetime OPS for June...

SECOND, the monthly summaries, showing just how elevated his June performance is relative to all the other months. The June totals really do look Ruthian in nature: when we prorate out to 162 games--which should be close to his actual June games played number this time next year--his HR total projects to 66. That's actually a bit more than Ruthian...

BUT now for the more sobering part. Though he's had two solid months of July in recent years ('21 and "23, both with OPS values above 1.000), overall it's been an off-month for him, as shown in the averaged numbers for each month (the data at the bottom of the graphic). 

All of Ohtani's numbers for July, August and September are still quite solid--they're just not superhuman the way those June numbers are. At the very bottom of the data set we show you the averaged sum of his his numbers for the de facto second half of the season--and you can see that in the past he's lost 80 points of SLG on average in those months as compared to his first half performance. 

NOW, as we all know as we watch the Federalist Society fraudeurs continue their goose-stepping antics, anything can happen, even the unthinkable. So it's certainly possible that Ohtani will buck the trends on display here. That said, a clear pattern has emerged showing that Shohei tends to wear down as the season plays out. We figure 15-18 homers from here to the end of the '24 season and a .270 BA, with an OPS under .900. 

STILL quite good, of course--but, as we said at the top, mortal. 

We'll circle back on this at season's end to see how it turns out--stay tuned...

WILLIE MAYS R.I.P.--HIS EIGHTEEN 10+ HOMER MONTHS...

ALL of us of a certain age will remember with awe and infinite pleasure the opportunities we had to see the incandescent Willie Mays in the flesh--there really was no one else quite like him. Among so many other singular things about his career, no one else ever had the distance in years between 50+ home run seasons (though if Mark McGwire had hit one more homer in 1987, he'd hold the record). 

Willie, who passed away earlier today just a month and a half after his 93rd birthday, remains the model for the ideal player--a slugging, superb-fielding center fielder who could hit for a high batting average and steal 25+ bases a year. That feat--hitting .300+, hitting 25+ homers, and stealing 25+ bases in a single season--has only been done 58 times in baseball history. While Barry Bonds now holds the record for achieving those numbers the most often--six times--Mr. Mays (his godfather...) did so four years in a row (from 1957 to 1960). 

A long time ago at this blog we feted Mays on his eightieth birthday with a list of his OPS performances by month: you are invited to revisit that post here (but not until you finish this article). What we focus on here is Mays the slugger, and the chart we present to you to commemorate him is one that shows us all eighteen times that he hit ten or more homers in a month:

It's a chart filled with wonders, including the symmetry of the three 10-HR months in 1954 (Willie's first great year) and 1965 (arguably his last truly transcendent season). 

Arguments can rage over which of Willie's months were the greatest: he had six months in which his O{S exceeded 1.200. We say throw a blanket over September 1955, May 1958, September 1959, and May/August in 1965. 

That August 1965 was clearly his top HR month (17), but he'd actually slugged higher in September 1955 and May 1958. 

These are all wondrous feats, worthy of more detailed study in the game logs at Forman et soeur. It ought to be required reading in middle school, even for the girls.

Did anyone have more 10+ homer months? We'll answer that question a bit later on...stay tuned. 

RIP Willie--life will never be as sweet again as when we could watch you do everything transcendent on a baseball field...except pitch and be a one-man ground crew. May flights of giant angels sing thee to thy rest...

TOP BOPS FROM THE PAST TEN YEARS (2015-24)

WHAT we said we'd have for you today isn't quite ready...it needs some more background data and some time to establish some additional context--but it will be here soon.

In the meantime, we've grabbed the best performances of the past ten years by batting order position (BOP). As you'll see, there are 31 such high-flying BOPs, each registering an OPS of .950 or higher.

We've also identified the hitters who populated those batting order positions--which will doubtless clue you in on who's going to show up on the list more often than anyone else. (Cue the primordial comedy line from the late 1960s, already: "Here come de Judge!")

Of the 31 BOP seasons listed, four of them are from the now close-to-halfway-complete 2024 season. It will be interesting to see which of these will remain on the list: we suspect the two Yankee sluggers have the best bet, followed by the Dodgers' Shoheo Ohtani, with the Orioles' Gunnar Henderson least likely in our minds (and yours) due to his dearth of a track record.

Here's the full list:

BREAKING that down by BOP, that's ten of the top 31 from the #3 slot, ten from the #2 slot, six from the #4 slot, and five from the #1 slot, Seven of the slots have a SLG of .600 or higher, while twelve have a batting average of under .300. 

Fifteen of the BOPs have totaled 40 or more homers in a season, as befitting the "launch angle age" in which we live...

Note that there is an on-again, off-again pattern to these "peaks of BOP performance (Mal Waldron, eat your heart out...) that focuses on the odd years, as the chart at right indicates. (Odd years account for 21 of the top 31 BOP performances since 2015, when HRs first started sucking the air out of the room.)

MORE soon, stay tuned...