TIME-GRID: GRAND SLAMS FOR EACH SEASON SINCE 1912...

IN honor of the 25th anniversary of Fernando Tatis Sr.'s singular night (his two grand slam homers in the same inning on April 23, 1999) we jinned up the "event finder" over at Forman et soeur to provide us with a Time-Grid™ chart like no other.

But first, a rough sense of the odds involved in Tatis Sr.'s epic inning (let's face it: with two grand slams, no one else has approached this apex of run production before or since). During the TV broadcast of this evening's Astros-Cubs game, Bob Costas brought up the odds of Tatis Sr's feat: he had it pegged at twelve million to one. (We await confirmation or correction for this estimate from long-time compatriot Brock Hanke...)

AND, as you might well suspect if you've been hanging out here for any significant amount of time, we have something else up our sleeve.

We went back into that "event finder," as noted earlier, and counted up the number of grand slam homers  in each year. That took a bit of time, as the tool doesn't have a summarizing feature: you have to eyeball the yearly totals to calculate the number of homers per season...

But we did it, and the results of all that eyeballing can be seen at left...

The color-coded yearly cells represent seasons in which the record for most grand slam homers in a season was set (and re-set). With homers scarce in the last decade of the Deadball Era, you can figure that grand slam homers would be even more scarce, and so they were.

But the pace picks up soon enough: the yearly total passes 40 in 1929, exceeds 50 in 1940, pulls its own version of Maris besting the Babe (that's sixty-one homers, in case you've forgotten) in 1950, then pushes past that to 78 slams in the year Maris actually bested the Babe. The totals declined in the sixties, dropping down to 37 in the "year of the pitcher" but nearly doubling with expansion the following year.

The boom year of 1970 upped the record to 88, and it stayed there for awhile, pushing past it when things got rather sluggery in the mid-1980s. It hit the 100 mark in 1987, dipped a bit in response to the downturn in offense when the strike zone was recalibrated in 1988, and got revved up when the Offensive Explosion kicked in, setting records in back-to-back seasons in the mid-nineties for the first time in the 1920s. 

The current record was set in 2000, and not even the "launch angle" gambit has managed to dislodge that season's total, though the sluggers in 2019 and 2021 came pretty close. The totals dropped down a bit in '22 and '23, and the early rate in '24 seems to be pretty much in line with those seasons.

THERE's another way to measure this, of course, and we're providing it at right. This is the "grand slams by team per season" variant, which adjusts for league size to see how the totals have evolved in a more contextual way.

Here you can see the ebb and flow of the grand slam frequency over time, as it builds up to an new peak (four per team per season) in the the Maris-Mantle year, then is cut more than half seven seasons later ("year of the pitcher," indeed). 

It rises back over three in the seventies, peaks again in 1987, subsides for awhile before setting its records in the mid-nineties, with the apex (5.9 grand slams per team per season) coming in 2000. It has never reached such heady heights again, though it's gotten back over five on two occasions, the homer-happy years of 2019 and 2021. 

SO there you have it--a "big data" glimpse at the bases-loaded homer. We're betting that you didn't think the yearly totals had gotten so high, though they've leveled off a good bit since the "homer heyday" period in the decade of the 2000s. 

But don't bother to bet on someone following in Fernando Tatis Sr.'s footsteps anytime soon. And don't figure on it happening again with one further wrinkle that most if not all have forgotten: Tatis Sr. hit both grand slams in that third inning twenty-five years ago against the same pitcher! Take a dive and take a bow simultaneously, Chan Ho Park--what a way to get in the record books for keeps...

MVPs' WORST MONTHS/1: THE 1930s

TIME for something entirely new, something suitably counter-intuitive--and insightfully confounding (which is, of course, the metier here at BBB).

What the f are we babbling about now? We are going to take institutional excellence, turn it upside down, and shake vigorously, providing you with the underside of the careers of the great (or, if not great, at least "anointed").

So what's here, in this series, are the dirty secrets of the hitters who won the Most Valuable Player Award.

We will show you the worst months of their careers--and, in some cases, more than one (because we don't want to be redundant--and especially not redundantly redundant!).

THE chart of the hitter MVPs in the 1930s (the Most Valuable Player award was officially instituted in 1931) follows here, which--hopefully--will clarify the verbiage above. But with this data, you'll soon see that it's best to look out below...

These are definitely some bad months, all right. The OPS values that you see in bold type will make that immediately obvious. What leaps out from the very first entry here--the worst monthly hitting line for 1931 NL MVP Frankie Frisch--is that the mighty can fall down and go boom almost simultaneously with the pinnacle of their success. It only two months into the year adjacent to his anointment as MVP for Frisch to do a Wile E. Coyote-like swan dive off a dusty butte.

How the mighty have fallen, indeed.

OF course, they don't always do it so quickly after reaching the heights. It took Chuck Klein six years to pancake, but when he did, he didn't mess around--the bloody syrup of that OPS is still trickling ominously eighty-six years later. As the series moves forward toward the present day, we'll find out if that number (.382) will hold up as the most downtrodden monthly performance ever by an MVP.

As we noted, you'll see more than one month's worth of lowlights for some folks here. Jimmie Foxx is here three times, due to the fact that he dominated the AL MVP race during the decade (winning in 1932, 1933 and 1938). What's eye-opening here is that Foxx's third-worst month (second to last row in the chart above) shows that he posted a .732 OPS in said month--September 1940, two years after the MVP award in question. Note that in the "sOPS+" column you'll see a "109" listed. That means that Foxx was better than league average in the third-worst monthly performance in his entire career. 

Mickey Cochrane gets two listings for his 1934 MVP award, the first for his worst--a part-time month at the outset of his career. The second is more unusual in that it's the first instance in which one of the months in the actual MVP season itself is close to the "top" of the list for "weakest monthly performance." His September totals for that year (1934) are the sixth worst of his career when broken out into monthly installments. We'll have to see how many more times an MVP winner manages to have such a low point in their MVP-winning season itself--but our guess is that it's not going to happen all that often.

THERE's a harrowing premonition of the tragedy that would befall Lou Gehrig in his slow start during April 1938--you get the sense that the terrible malady about to befall him the following year was somehow in its formative stages during this year (just a couple removed from his triumphant MVP season.)

It took four-to-six years for the likes of Joe Medwick, Charlie Gehringer, and Ernie Lombardi to hit their nadirs, with "the Schnozz" taking the deepest fall as measured by "sOPS+." On the positive side of the ledger, Gehringer and Medwick each had multiple months in their careers where their batting averages exceeded .400--including one such peak during their 1937 MVP seasons.

WHICH gave us the idea for our second display--a look at where in the scheme of the monthly performances the months of the actual MVP season reside. We're using Joe DiMaggio's 1939 MVP season as the template for this type of display (which you'll see more of in subsequent installments of this series). 

Here we show you JoeD's best month (July 1937, with it's mind-melting 1.487 OPS), followed by the ranked order of the months in 1939 (his first MVP season) as they proceed--not in monthly order, but by the ranked order out of all the monthly records in DiMag's career. 

So we can see that August 1939 was the third-best monthly performance of DiMaggio's entire career, capped by his astonishing total of 53 RBI in 31 games. April hardly counts because of the small sample size, but we include it here for context. (What you probably don't know is that JoeD missed almost the entire month of May that year due to injury, ultimately playing in only 120 games. And you may also not be aware of just how high-flying his batting average was for much of the year--he was well over .400 most of the time, and was still hitting .401 as late as September 10th.)

But it was September that cost him a chance to do what Ted Williams managed to do two years later. It was still a solid month (an OPS close to 1.000), but JoeD hit just .303, which caused his final season BA to land at .381--nothing to sneeze at, of course, just not quite as magical (and elusive) as .400. Note that there are 33 months in DiMaggio's career that are better than his record for September 1939--a mind-numbing concept in its own right.

And finally, his worst month--the final month of his rookie season--a subpar month to be sure, but not catastrophically so (his sOPS+ is 74, poor but not pathetic). 

THAT's the type of output we can glean from Forman et soeur, the baseball stat site that keeps on giving to us...and we'll keep giving it to you as well, when we continue this series intermittently throughout the 2024 season. Next up: the 1940s--stay tuned...

LEAGUE RUN-SCORING DIFFERENTIALS SINCE THE INVENTION OF THE DH...

THIS is the time of year when we focus intently on the first scraps of league offensive data, in the obsessive attempt to use tiny sample sizes to make semi-vast pronouncements about the overall health of the game--all prompted by the incursion of the "Statcast Age," which has brought about a strangely strangled shape for offensive statistics. (We admit our bias here, as we sift through the myriad data artifacts for fresh signs of doom; after all, our prognostication of a catastrophic outcome from the still ongoing "launch angle follies" is, like the Wichita Lineman, still on the line: a .225/.300/.390 disaster scenario is still a lingering possibility, if only to prove once and for all what fools these post-neo-sabes be.)

Thus hope for disaster always springs eternal in the spring, and this year is no exception, with a curiously wide divide between offensive production manifesting itself between the leagues. As of early morning (3am) on April 14th, the run-scoring differential between the leagues stood at nearly 17% (4.18 runs/game in the AL, 4.95 in the NL). The AL was hitting .233, with HRs/game actually under one (0.98), while the NL was at a much more robust .252, with 1.1 HRs/game (but with overall SLG still tamped down at levels similar to what was seen in the "pre-Statcast" interregnum prior to the "bombs away" year of 2017).

OF course this stuff always changes, and we all know by now to adjust for the fact that colder early spring weather can wreak havoc on hitters, particularly in the first half of April. But the run differential seemed quite high, and this prompted us to devise a way to map the comparative runs/game performance at a level just granular enough to capture some historical context. And so we did, and so here 'tis, with results that are not dispositive of doom, but laced with a flow and ebb that is unavoidably interesting.

The chart at left shows the run differential in "heat map" mode at monthly intervals (the numbered columns represent April through September...), measured from the AL R/G as compared with the NL. This data covers the twenty-first century, where (as you'll soon see) a remarkable turnaround in comparative run scoring levels occurred even before baseball instituted the odious "universal DH" rule.

Here you can see that up through 2015, the AL was consistently scoring about somewhere between five and six percent more runs per game than the NL. For reasons not yet identified, that changed dramatically the following year, when the differential plummeted from just under seven percent to just over one percent. (The lowest it had been in the twenty-first century previously had been in 2010, when the differential had plunged to just under three percent.)

This newly constricted difference persisted, even in the face of the HR explosion/oscillation that began in 2017. It finally turned negative in 2020, flipped back in 2021, but the institution of the universal DH seems to have tipped it back again: in 2022/2023, the NL was the most robust offensive league by just under 3%.

AND, as noted, the early returns in '24 register a startling difference, with AL down nearly 17%.

Of course, you can see the monthly fluctuations in the data, so what's happening now is clearly in an "ain't necessarily so" state. 2024 might imitate what happened eight years earlier, when the AL was down nearly 13% in April, only to roar back with a mirror-image reversal the following month. But we now have something to track, and we can monitor this differential as the season progresses, to see where it lands.

There are other related stats that can be measured monthly to provide more context for what may be going on since 2015...we'll pull some of that together when we revisit this topic early in June.

TO demonstrate what a sea-change this run differential data actually is, we've reconstructed the monthly data all the way back to 1970 (at right), right before the institution of the DH. In that data you'll see how the DH rule flipped run scoring from out of a significant deficit for the AL (though it didn't take total hold until the expansion year in 1977, which seems to have diluted pitching). From then on, the AL was firmly the higher-scoring league, as the profusion of hot orange in the "heat map" display demonstrates. 

Note, though, that aggregate double-digit differences disappear in 1997, and have not returned since. So there's an historical pattern there; the challenge for us is to determine what (if anything) its meaning may be. In the meantime, stay tuned...

AARON's 715TH & THE RUN-UP THE YEAR BEFORE...

ON this day exactly 50 years ago, Henry Aaron broke Babe Ruth's storied home run record, culminating a dogged, determined quest that was remarkable for its steely consistency. Aaron never hit 50 homers in a season, but he hit 30+ homers in a year fifteen times and benefitted from his team's move from Milwaukee to Atlanta, where a more congenial home ballpark helped to elevate his home run totals. 

But it was the year before--1973--that was arguably the most suspenseful and remarkable season in Aaron's career, coming after an off-year in which his continuing momentum toward the magic 714 came under a cloud of increasing age and injury. 

AND the 1973 season, with Aaron back in the outfield at age 39, began ominously when he hit just .125 in April. (He still had his home run stroke, though--five homers, but only eight hits for the entire month!) His slash line (.125/.300/.411) looked more like Joey Gallo than a man less than forty homers away from the all-time record.

It was clear that Aaron was swinging for the fences every time he was at the plate, and that approach kept things sharply up-and-down for the first half of the season. After a hot streak in early May, Hank hit just .205 from May 15 through June 17, adding eight more homers along the way. 

IN early July, the tide began to turn, aided by a rhythm of judicious off-days instituted by manager Eddie Mathews (Aaron's former slugging partner in Milwaukee). On July 21st, Hank hit his 700th homer, at home against the Phillies, and his seasonal SLG had reached .598. The home run watch in the national media was now on in earnest.

What followed, though, was a protracted plateau in which Hank hit just one homer over the next 22 games (seven of which he missed due to a nagging heal injury). He adjusted his swing in batting practice to take some pressure off his front foot.

THAT adjustment ushered in one of the greatest protracted hot streaks in Hank's career: from August 15th to the end of the season (September 30), Aaron hit .442 (4*-for-104), with 12 homers and a SLG of .857. This transcendent late-season surge rekindled the media frenzy as Hank hit career homer #710 on September 10th, with fifteen games left to go. The way he was hitting, it began to seem likely that he'd tie of break the record before the season concluded...

Which, of course, was not to be. Aaron hit #713 in the second-to-last game of the year. The next day he had three hits, but none were homers--the nation would have to wait until 1974 for him to set a new home run record. But his six-for-seven performance over those final two games improbably lifted his batting average over .300 for the season--a feat that had seemed literally impossible just a month earlier. 

AND there's another astonishing stat hidden in Aaron's 1973 season that we stumbled over while revisiting its details. It's definitely "inside baseball" even as we practice it now, but it's remarkable enough in the context of our expanded view of stat splits to warrant inclusion here. With so much discussion of "times through the batting order" vis-a-vis starting pitcher viability, it's interesting to note that managers should have considered switching pitchers whenever their starter was due to face Aaron for the third time in a game. 

At Forman et soeur you can look at stat splits such as these historically (at least as far back as they've got play-by-play data. And when you do that, you'll find that, as measured by OPS+, Aaron's 1973 performance against starting pitchers he faced for the third time in the game is the third best in baseball history. 

Here's the Top 25 all-time for players with 50+ PAs (above at right). Note that Hank slugged an even 1.000 in such situations in 1973, a feat matched by David Ortiz in 2004, and bested only by the very strange bedfellows of Ted Williams (twice) and the not-so-unsinkable Danny Santana (a fact which reminds us that this is definitely SSSS--small sample size stuff--that we're dealing with). 

Still--ten of the Top 25 on this list are in the Hall of Fame, with twelve slots taken up by them (Aaron and Williams are the only guys to be on the list twice)--and we can argue that Dick Allen and Don Mattingly and George Foster belong there as well, plus there are recent folks like Shohei Ohtani and Bryce Harper who might find their way to Cooperstown as well. 

All in all, this "inside the inside" stat seems highly appropriate in its intersection with Aaron's incredible 1973 season, one that's even more amazing when you break it down into its details. Here's to you, Hank, for memories that transcend mere lifetimes...