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...
