ONE of the abiding passions here at the BBB (note how the thug-uglies have even sullied our acronym with their puerile and parlous legislation) is to examine the frequency of events occurring in the game.
And so it is with this post, where we slam together two big hitting events to look at just how often hitters manage to combine doubles & homers at mega-robust levels.
How robust, you ask? Pretty darned robust, actually. You should take this opportunity right now to guess just how often a hitter has managed to hit 40+ doubles and 40+ homers in the same season.
The total (38 over a span exceeding a century) is indeed rare, and as you can see it is particularly aligned with periods of high offense. Note the 55-year gap from 1940-1995 that is broken up only by the lone occurrence of a 40+ 2B/HR achievement in 1973.
WHO was that masked man? As the long chart below will reveal, he turns out to be the oldest man to ever achieve this feat. (We'll tease you with a few more clues--he was 33 years old when he did so; he exceeded his total of 44 HRs two years earlier, in the first season that he was freed from playing his home games in a ballpark that seriously suppressed homers. And he achieved this feat in the season after a more fabled teammate had perished in an airplane crash.)
EXPLORING the list will reveal that the kings of this particular 40/40 feat are two first basemen--Lou Gehrig and Albert Pujols (who each managed it three times).
Those who did it twice--Babe Ruth (1921, 1923); Chuck Klein (1929, 1930); Hank Greenberg (1937, 1940), Albert Belle (1995, 1998); Todd Helton (2004, 2005); and David Ortiz (2004, 2005).
The only players on this list not in the Hall of Fame are Pujols and Belle. The former will make it imminently, while the latter will almost surely be bypassed by whatever gaggle of Vets Committee flunkies who will be in charge of voting over the next half-century.
The other players who seem certain to evade induction in Cooperstown have been proliferating on this list in recent years--there are nine of these, beginning with Hal Trosky in 1936. We already covered Belle, the only player on this list who appears on it twice and is odds-on to be shunned by the Hall; he's followed by Ellis Burks, Richard Hidalgo, Derrek Lee, Mark Teixeira, Alfonso (Don't Call Me Al) Soriano, Chris Davis and Josh Donaldson. (Miguel Cabrera will definitely get in, but things are more problematic for Nolan Arenado.)
We'd be remiss, however, if we failed to note that it is only Albert Belle who has managed to hit 50+ 2B and 50+ HR in the same season. That was 1995, which also happened to be a shortened season due to labor strife. Belle managed his singular feat in just 143 games...
We should also note that the only teammates to achieve a 40+ 2B/HR combo in the same season are David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez, who managed it in the Red Sox' curse-breaking season (2004).
AND finally, a shout-out to a big, big name not on the list--Shohei Ohtani came close in 2024, hitting 54 HRs but stalling out at 38 2B. (He definitely won't do it in 2025--after 114 games, he's hit only 16 doubles.)
