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).
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).
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).
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.
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...
