GETTING back on track for what we're tracking as we chase down the never-discussed, so-unknown-they're-not-even-dismissed-out-of-hand "most in a month" statistics...sometimes you just have to give in to your impulses, n'est-ce pas? (And let's face it: what these stats convey are legitimate micro-extremes, as opposed to the faux-phenomenology of a Sam Miller, currently in the mode of counting inchoate, involuted baseball "things" that actually become more ephemeral when counted...which is a project that's refreshing and harrowing all at once.)
What we count here won't change theories/explanations about how teams win, or zero in on which players are "the best," or produce one iota of predictive utility. We will, however, gain an understanding of the relative scarcity or plenitude of various peak performances, captured at a level where significant statistical separation is still visible.
At the end of all this, we'll provide a guide to the "frequency distribution" of all these "monthlies" we'll keep plucking from Forman et soeur. It may be useful, or it might prove to be as gauzily surreal as what Sam is doing. If we're lucky, it will be both...
SO remember that we found a total of 49 instances of 15+ home runs hit in a month. We're not going to find 15 triples hit in a month by any single individual, so we will leave that in abeyance and move on to doubles (which are at last glance are still more plentiful than home runs in the current game). The ratio of doubles-to-homers over the full ripeness of time in MLB since the introduction of the lively ball is about 1.8 to 1. (Of course, it's lower that that over the past fifteen years; but since we're looking at all of the incidences of "x number of events in a calendar month" and we look for those all the way back to 1901, we can use the 1.8 to 1 ratio to predict how many times someone has hit 15+ doubles in a month.)
As you can see (at right), the estimate is on the low side (by about 20%). The actual number of 15+ doubles in a month instances since 1901 is 114. Some of this is likely due to the clustering effect that's visible in the TimeGrid™: the "golden age" of doubles in the 1930s seems to have produced an outsized number of monthly peaks, possibly aided by the nature of the baseball schedule at that time, with its truncated April "balanced" by extra games in June, July and August. Still, it's interesting that we had a recent year (2023) with another uptick in "monthly peaks, something that didn't manifest in the odd-year offensive spikes that occurred in 2017, 2019 and 2021.
NOTE we haven't mentioned the actual record for most doubles in a month...if they are a good bit more plentiful than homers, does it stand to reason that the record-setting number will be significantly higher than the single-month record for homers (20, held by Sammy Sosa)?
It might stand to reason, but the actual results simply do no bear that out. The record for doubles in a month is, oddly, exactly the same as the record for homers in a month. As you peruse the partial list below (the 33 times hitters have hit 17+ 2Bs in a month...) you'll run across the record-holder...
That is correct: the record (20 doubles in a month) is held by Paul Waner in 1932, a record that has stood for more than ninety years. (Waner is also one of just four hitters with 17+ 2Bs in a month to have hit zero homers in the month where--for these hitters, at least--it was raining doubles. The other three? Joe Dugan, in 1920; Kiki Cuyler, in 1930; and George Kell, in 1950.
But, for now, note that 24 of these 33 "beyond peak" performances showcasing the pinnacle of monthly doubles feature batting averages higher than .350; the same number--which is just under 75% of the entries in the chart--also have OPS values in excess of 1.000. That's a heady level of performance for a collection of months where the 23 of the 33 stat lines include home run totals that are minuscule by our post-modern standards, ranging in that slice from 0 to 2....needless to say, that's a far cry from what we saw in our last examination of "peak" (15+ homers in a month).
It's here where those of us with a nostalgic desire for the "high batting average" period of the game that flourished most consistently from 1920-1941 can access that particular performance shape, which was still a vibrant memory in the early 1970s, when a gaggle of semi-shiftless college kids in St. Louis gathered round to create their own set of baseball myths--and were marked for life by its meaning--one that was inexorably eroding away even as we celebrated it. Such shapes live on only in these sub-seasonal snippets, and we celebrate the "throwback moments" that still occasionally occur, such as Freddie Freeman's stat line in May 2023, en route to his 59 doubles for the season--a number that, in the present day, is simultaneously wondrous and irrelevant...
Interesting, though, that despite the vast difference with respect to the sense/shape/aura of offense that doubles and homers embody, their supreme achievements, both in terms of the season as a whole and its monthly accumulations, would be so similar in nature (20 each for a month, high 60s/low 70s for a season). Feel free to ponder that as we get ready to go further down the rabbit hole with "monthlies"...
