WE expand your horizons...or perhaps we'll just be expanding the amount of data you'll be seeing: we'll let you decide.
The first "monthlies" we've showed you focused on the rarefied achievements: 49 instances of 15+ homers in a month; 114 occurrences of 15 doubles in a month. But we told you we'd be expanding from that, eventually providing a tabular guide to the frequency distributions of each event level.
So to start that off, we will tell you (rather that show you just yet) that there are 1307 instances of 10+ homers-in-a-month--from Babe Ruth in 1920 to Aaron Judge, Cal Raleigh and Eugenio Suarez in 2025.
That's a lot of 10+ HR months, actually, and we'll show you the TimeGrid™ chart for that in a subsequent post. Right now, however, we want you to focus on the ratio between 15+ HR months (just 49, remember) and 10+ homer months (1307). That's just under 27 times as many 10+ HR homer months: if we use that "multiplier" to extrapolate how many 10+ double months there are compared to 15+ double months, we get a total of just a few more than 3000 instances since 1901.
As always, this display provides its version of the essential offensive history of the game, from the descent into the Deadball Era, the sharp uptick in all kinds of hitting with the one-two punch of the lively ball and Babe Ruth, followed by the "golden age of doubles." Then: doubles decay as homers and strikeouts begin their inevitable incursion on the overall balance of the game, with an offensive explosion in the nineties that ushers in a renaissance for the double, which sustains itself for fifteen years until we enter our present "sine-wave" era, where the two-base hit became a careening pinball in an entropic game where the angle of the pinball machine kept shifting until it was tilted both vertically and horizontally at the same time, narrowing the range for the double as the ability to hit for batting average continued to decay.
The 2020s might just see a drop in "10 doubles a month" incidences that is almost as dramatic as what occurred in the 1940s, which led to a half-century drought. At the moment, doubles per game in the AL is at a level (1.5 per game) that's the lowest it's been since 1989.
When we make that adjustment, we see that the "incidence uptick" during the offensive explosion--while still a serious uplift from a very long fallow period--actually pales in comparison to what happened between 1925-1940.
The "heat map" approach in the TimeGrid™ provides us with an easy visual clue regarding whether we're in a "drought" period for doubles. We're not quite there yet, but when 2025 is in the books, there's a good chance that we will be...
Hitting 10 doubles in a month might not sound like much of an accomplishment, given that it's happened nearly four thousand times. But remember that such a pace, if sustained over a season, would result in 60 doubles for the year. Hitting that many doubles in a season has happened only six times--five of them in the 1930s. It hasn't happened since 1936--three 21st century hitters have come close: 59 for Todd Helton (2000) and Freddie Freeman (2023); 58 for Nick Castellanos (2019)--but those look like anomalies in a time frame when doubles are clearly in decline.
LET's close with two quizzes. 1) Just who are those six hitters with 60+ 2Bs in a season, anyway? If you read assiduously here, you'll know that the name of the record holder (Earl Webb, with 67 in 1931), because we mention him occasionally (he and Owen "Chief" Wilson, the triples record holder, are the two great unknowns in the so-called "marquee records"). But who are the other five? We mentioned one of them--Paul Waner (63 in 1932)--in our last post. But would you have guessed that Hank Greenberg (63 in 1934) was one of them? Possibly only Gracie Allen knows (or at least used to know...) that her husband George Burns hit 64 doubles in 1926 to briefly hold the record ("so that's where he was all those months!" she exclaimed).
That leaves the two hitters who did it in the same season (1936)--Charlie Gehringer (60) and Joe Medwick (64), apparently creating a "curse of the double" which foiled both Freeman and Helton (how many times did each of them get thrown out at second trying to stretch a single into a double?).
And so that's just what we've done with this one (at right). Your mission (if you choose to accept it...) is to figure out just what this time sequence of numbers is actually describing.
We realize that such a quiz is 99.9% hopeless without a clue, so we will take pity on you and provide one. And we'll be uncharacteristically succinct when we do so--it's a rate stat.
(Oh, and yes it's a month stat, as you can see.)
The heat map pattern here is similar to the 10-doubles-per-month, except the total number of incidences is a great deal lower, and the uptick in recent years is not so strong.
We'll tease this one again in the series, and overlay some other info into the TimeGrid™ to give you a fighting chance...stay tuned!
