7+ RBI GAMES: LEADERS, FEATURES, CREATURES...

WITH just 699 incidences, the 7+ RBI "club" is quite exclusive--consider that the current number of players who've appeared in MLB is just under 23,700. And when we prune the incidences down to the actual number of hitters with 7+-RBI games (531 unique individuals), we see that they comprise just over 2% of MLB's total player population.

So we should be mightily impressed by the following players who had five or more 7+-RBI games over the course of their careers, n'est-ce pas? (The answer is, unsurprisingly, "oui"...)

There are six of them--with one (as you'll see) who truly stands out. First, the three who had five "big RBI days"...

Each of these all-time sluggers managed to have two "big RBI games" in the same season--Jimmie Foxx bested Joe DiMaggio and Alex Rodriguez by pulling off this feat twice. All three had games with more than 7 RBI--A-Rod joined the ultra-rare "double figure" club with that 10-RBI game in 2005, while the man known as "The Beast" seemed to have it in for Cleveland, collecting two of his RBI splatter shows there (the latter of which was witnessed in person by my Dad at the age of fourteen: even late in life, he had a vivid memory of it, accurately recalling that Foxx hit for the cycle that day and had collected six of his RBI in the first two innings of the game).

DiMaggio also had a cycle as part of his "big RBI games"--it was the first of his five, including a second homer as part of a 5-for-5 day.

Note these "big RBI games" tend to be blowouts, or slugfests (sometimes both). Only one of the fifteen games shown above was close--that barnburner of a game (also in Cleveland) which went 18 innings, featured a very fraught seventh inning (13 runs scored between the two clubs), was won by the A's despite allowing the Indians 33 hits--29 of them (!!) surrendered over 17 innings by a beleaguered Eddie Rommel, with Foxx scoring the winning run. (We'll provide more specific data about "big RBI days" and the percentage of close games in the data set a bit later...)

NOW we are six--or, should we say, here are the two hitters with six "big RBI days"...

Perhaps you are surprised to see who is accompanying Teddy Ballgame? What makes Nelson Cruz's presence in this pantheon so notable is the fact that all six of his "big RBI days" occurred after the age of thirty--with half of them happening after age 35. Cruz's sixth 7+-RBI day, achieved a little more than three weeks after his 40th birthday (40-025), ranks fourth all-time in terms of age--only Stan Musial (40-214), Jason Giambi (40-131) and Reggie Jackson (40-123) were older.

Williams has the most unusual batting line in the "repeater" group--a game without a run scored--which, of course, means that he also didn't hit a home run in the game (a rare occurrence in "big RBI games": only 4% of them are homerless). But it turns out that not scoring a run in such games is the rarest "feat" of all--there are only four instances of that happening. (We know--not quite rare enough for Jayson Stark!) In his game against the Pale Hose, Williams doubled in two in the first, but was stranded; he doubled in two more with two out in the fourth; drew a bases-loaded walk in the sixth; and singled in two more in the seventh.

One of Cruz's games is quite rare as well--it's the one where he drove in all the runs scored by his team. That occurred in 2014, during his lone season in Baltimore, during the remarkable second half of his career (a true late bloomer, Cruz ranks fifth all-time in HRs hit from age 30 on). In the game on September 7, Cruz also bloomed late--his first RBIs in the game didn't occur until the sixth inning (a two-run homer). His bases loaded triple in the top of the ninth put the O's ahead, but Tampa tied it in the bottom of the ninth, setting the stage for Cruz's game-winning two-run homer in the eleventh.

Un(der)sung as Cruz might be, he is no match for the hitter with the greatest number of "big RBI days." That would be none other than Lou Gehrig, stepping out of the outsized shadow of Babe Ruth....

IT turns out that Gehrig was an equal opportunity "big RBI masher," victimizing all of his opposing AL teams at least once. He also holds the record for the most 7+-RBI games in a season with three (in 1930). 

(For the record, we should note that Babe Ruth, who scored a lot of the runs that Gehrig drove in, had four 7+-RBI games. That ties him with Ralph Kiner, Dave Kingman, Garret Anderson, and Jason Giambi.)

NOW let's look at a few very specialized subsets in the "big RBI game" data. First: how many times did a hitter drive in all seven runs scored by his team in the game? The answer is...seventeen.

We present them in chronological order, and (just for fun) we categorize them. (We will let you determine the rationales we used to link the performances together...)

Of the seventeen, twelve resulted in wins, a much lower WPCT (.705) than in the overall dataset (.950, as you may recall). One of the unique games in this subset belongs to Roberto Clemente, with four hits all for extra bases, and a loss to boot. Rondell White, the youngest player to appear on the list, also had four hits but balanced them between singles and XBH, a feat that the aggregate totals clearly indicate is highly anomalous in "big RBI games" (at least in the ones where all the RBI belong to one guy!). And Nelson Cruz is here, too, his 2014 game adding another rare artifact--a triple--into the building blocks of such performances.

Note that the runs scored total for these seventeen hitters exactly matches the number of HRs hit in the game, which makes perfect sense since these guys drove in all the runs for their team...

Two more related scenarios: are there hitters who drove in all eight of their team's runs? There are two: George Kelly in 1924 and Bob Johnson in 1938. And what about nine--anyone drive in all nine runs for his team in a game? The answer is yes--Mike Greenwell did it on September 2, 1996, for the Red Sox in Seattle, guiding Boston to a 9-8 win in ten innings.

ANOTHER intriguing sub-component spirals back into mind when we recall the "cycles" that were part of the ''big RBI days" for DiMaggio and Foxx. How many other times did batters hit for the cycle as part of their RBI avalanche?

So that's a total of eight, with all of these hitters being under the age of thirty when it happened for them. Some unusual (unlikely?) names here...

AND finally, let's look at all the one-run games in the data set,

You will see Greenwell's line here, along with some other fascinating performances--ranging from Granny Hamner's no-homer, no run scored game (oddly enough, happening within a month of the same ultra-rare type of "big RBI day" from Ted Williams that we saw earlier) to Pat Seerey's four-homer game the very next day!

LASTLY...remember we told you that close games in this data set are ultra-rare? The 22 games shown above represent just 3% of the total population. 

OK, OK, one very last thing. We told you who had the most "big RBI games" (Gehrig) but we didn't answer the question about the hitter with the lowest lifetime HRs who managed to break into the 7+ RBI club. The answer? Augie Bergamo, with five lifetime HRs. Use the links and look him up...

SOME "SUMMERY" DATA ABOUT 7+-RBI GAMES...

OUR pun is not necessarily your pun...but it is the beginning of summer, after all, which is really a race backward from the longest day of the year.

And so...we collate, taking care neither to spindle nor to mutilate, but always retaining the option to fold (as in "fold it five ways, and...")

EXCEPT we should fold it seven ways, given what we are talking about--the "under-data" for those 699 games where some King for a Day drove in at least seven runs.

Where to begin...you probably that teams with a hitter who drives in seven runs in a game are going to have a rather fine WPCT in those contests. What do you figure that WPCT actually is--.750? Or perhaps higher still--.800? .850??

THE answer is--higher than that, Walter. In the 699 games where a team has a hitter drive in 7 or more runs, those teams have won 662 times. That's a .947 WPCT.

Of course, we have a tiny sample size here when we consider how many games have been played in MLB history. Our ~700 games, when sliced out of the ~450,000 played in the relevant sample (1898-2026), work out to be less than 0.2% of all games played.

Boog in his "Why me, Lord" stance...

So you would not expect to find amongst those 37 games where teams have lost despite a 7+-RBI performance, a situation where the same player would have done so more than once.

BUT lo--and behold!--there is one instance of this in the annals of the anomalous (a good term, come to think of it, for the life work of Jayson Stark, n'est-ce pas?). And we will be even more surprised to discover that the player who managed to twice cluster his single-game RBI performance into "nose-bleed" territory only to have his team lose each game is someone who played for a team that went to the World Series in each of the seasons involved.

And who is that player, you ask? Why, none other than
John Wesley (Boog) Powell, that's who. On July 6, 1966, Powell drove in 7 runs for the Baltimore Orioles, who managed to lose the game 9-8 (to the then-Kansas City A's) anyway. The O's shook it off and ultimately shocked the baseball world by sweeping the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series three months later.

Then, on July 1, 1969, Boog drove in 7 runs again, this time with the Orioles playing the New York Yankees in Yankee Stadium. The Bronx Bombers (who at this time were not nearly so "bomber-y") still managed to win the game 10-9. The O's shook it off and ultimately shocked the baseball world by losing the World Series in five games to the other, even less "bomber-y" team from New York (the Miracle Mets) three-and-a-half months later...

NOW let's shift to what the title of this entry promised to cover..."summery"--er, summary--data about the nature of the 699 hitting performances in the 7+-RBI game database.  We'll do that with distributions of various performances features. Covered here are batting order position, number of hits, number of doubles/triples/homers, and total bases. We'll take each one separately--but you are responsible for visualizing your own "bell curves"...

First, batting order. It's not going to be surprising that two-thirds of these performances are located in the 3-4-5 slots of the batting order, is it? And we think you can visualize a very orthodox distribution curve for it. 

Enjoy the extra white space as we move on to hits. We had a theory that two-hit performances were a good bit more rare in days of yore--we count 32 of these before the first expansion in 1961, and 90 afterwords. But when we broke out the data for the 21st century occurrences, the percentage of 2-hit 7+-RBI games was steady at 17% of the overall total. So much for that idea...

Doubles and triples are not significant factors in these games (though no one will be surprised about triples being scarce). The two games in which hitters had three triples as part of a 7+-RBI game occurred in 1898 and 1900, respectively. The last time anyone hit two triples in a 7+-RBI performance was in 1952--and you will be surprised to discover who it was...

Homers are, of course, the quickest way to get runs on the board, and it won't shock anyone to discover that there have been 502 multiple-HR instances in 7+-RBI games. That's 72% of the total games...

As you'd expect, total bases has the widest distribution in the data set (which is what produces all that white space). The one that might throw you for a loop, though, is the one game where the hitter had just three total bases. That would be Pie Traynor, who collected three two-run singles and a sacrifice fly in June 1930 as his Pittsburgh Pirates defeated the Philadelphia Phillies, 19-12 (and yes, it was in the Baker Bowl). 

We're leaving the questions we asked in the first installment (most 7+-RBI games, fewest lifetime HRs for a member of the "7+-RBI club") for a bit later in the series, but we will reveal the identity of the last hitter who had two triples as part of a 7+-RBI day. 

It is none other than Ted Kluszewski...and we were surprised as well to discover that "Mister Muscles" was the answer. (Immaculate Grid, here we come!) But consider that the game in question occurred in Pittsburgh's Forbes Field, where the distance to the center field fence was over 450 feet. It's now seventy-four years and counting since it happened--and, given baseball's continuing direction, it's possible that it will never happen again. More soon...

7+-RBI GAMES: A CAPSULE HISTORY

LET's get down to it with "big RBI games"--defined as those where hitters have driven in at least seven runs in a game.

We told you last time that there are 699 of these accounted for at Forman et soeur--truth told, there are likely another 50 or so from the nineteenth century, particularly from the heavy-hitting 1890s (we only have data back to 1898). 

So all of this is, of course, subject to change. But let's proceed with what we've got.

FIRST, the TimeGrid™ that shows us when these 7+-RBI games occurred. Our color-coding in the decade/year grid tracks the record for most such games in a single year as it evolves.

We can have fun name-checking the hitters who contributed to the record-setting seasons in each case...

In 1911, there were five: Fred Merkle, Doc Gessler, Heinie Zimmerman, Roy Hartzell, and Frank LaPorte.

In 1923, there were six: Johnny Mokan, Cy Williams, Ross Youngs, Hack Miller, Irish Meusel, and Travis Jackson. (That's three members of the New York Giants, who won the NL pennant. For Meusel, it was the second time he'd done it--and he was the first hitter to do so when his team lost the game, breaking a 31-game winning streak for "big RBI guys.")

In 1929, there were eight (or, actually seven, since a certain Sultan of Swat did it twice): Charlie Gehringer, Travis Jackson, Babe Ruth (once in June and once in August), Lew Fonseca, Riggs Stephenson, Jim Bottomley, and Buddy Myer.

It should come as no surprise that 1930 bumped the record up to 11: Del Bissonette, Babe Herman, Lou Gehrig (three times during the year, so just nine names); Pie Traynor, Carl Reynolds, Glenn Wright, Harry Heilmann, Bill Terry, and Earl Averill.

Eleven instances held as the record for forty years, until the oddball season in 1970 upped the ante to 13 (twelve names): Brant Alyea (twice, the first and the last to do that year), Dick Allen, Willie Horton, Mike Epstein, Frank Robinson, John Bateman, Ron Santo, Jim Ray Hart, Ted Kubiak, Johnny Bench, Orlando Cepeda, and Donn Clendenon.

Bench and Cepeda did on the same day, which is a rare event (we'll get to that later). Kubiak is a strong candidate for the weakest hitter to have a 7+-RBI game, with his lifetime 73 OPS+. He might be in the running for the lowest seasonal RBI total for a hitter with a 7+-RBI game (41).

The 1970 record was tied in 1987. Here are the 13 hitters that season: Bo Jackson, George Brett, Andre Dawson, Keith Moreland, Pete O'Brien, Ellis Burks, Wade Boggs, Don Mattingly, Kevin Seitzer, John Kruk, Mickey Brantley, Todd Benzinger, and Dave Parker.

The offensive explosion of the 1990s threatened this record several times, and it was finally broken (with room to spare) in 2000, when there were 17 7+-RBI games (fifteen names, as Alex Rodriguez matched Brant Alyea's feat of being the first and last to do so; Jason Giambi also did it twice) The full list: A-Rod, Adam Kennedy, Ron Coomer, Jeffrey Hammonds, Henry Rodriguez, Mark McGwire, Brian Jordan, Giambi, Bobby Higginson, Bernie Williams, Ken Griffey Jr., Andy Tracy, Jeff Cirillo, Jeff Bagwell, and Charles Johnson .

This record was tied in the launch angle madness that was 2019. Here are the culprits: Christian Yelich, Josh Phegley, Trevor Story, David Bote, Matt Adams, Mike Trout, Josh Bell, Brandon Crawford, Didi Gregorius, Kyle Schwarber (natch!), Eduardo Escobar (natch!!), Yuli Gurriel, Yordan Alvarez, J.D. Martinez, Marcus Semien, Paul Goldschmidt, and Jose Ramirez.

We'll go deeper into this in our next installment...stay tuned.

WILLI! WILLI! WE'RE JUST ONE AWAY FROM THE 700TH 7+-RBI GAME...

YES, it's been awhile...we have been focused on more film writing, while looking to end the latest curse that has kept us from invading movie theaters for the past year and a half. (We've also weaned ourself off those silly Sumimoto sisters...)

Baseball still beckons, of course--and we''ll get back in the hunt for semi-cosmic meaning in the 2026 season soon--if only to explain how Fenway became a pitcher's park (at least for the first 12 weeks of the season, anyway). 

BUT let's have some fun with the semi-arcane--one of our favorite "side hustles" (are you listening, Sumimotos? They aren't surprised to discover how good we (still) look without much on--but we will spare you, dear reader...)

We come carrying tidings of joy for those who enjoy semi-marginal utility players (SMUPs...) as we update one of our favorite semi-arcane lists--those hitters who have driven in seven or more runs in a single game. One of our faves in the SMUP category in recent years is Willi Castro, a man who has played every position on the field except catcher.  He signed with the High-Mile Down-Lows (you know them--and not in the Biblical sense--as the Colorado Rockies) in the 2025-26 off-season and has been all over the diamond and the batting order for his new club this year.

Lately, it's been at or near the top of the batting order, and that's relevant to the feat he pulled off yesterday. Based on the current data available at Forman et soeur, Willi is the 699th batter to drive in seven or more runs in a game. He totaled four hits, two of them homers (one of them a grand slam) as the Rox rocked the A's 23-9 (in Las Vegas, but that is another story)...

It's the RBI total in a game when batting leadoff that's the really rare feat--Willi is just the 24th leadoff hitter to drive in seven or more runs in a game. It turns out that this was a virtually unheard-of occurrence in twentieth century baseball--it happened only 11 times (see TimeGrid™ chart at left). 

Since the 2000 season, however, we've had thirteen--an average of one every other season. (That is due largely to the fact that teams are batting sluggers in the #1 slot a lot more often than was the case in the last century--with the likes of Mookie Betts and Francisco Lindor batting leadoff.) Three such occurrences clustered within eighteen days of one another in 2018; there were three more in 2024, all featuring sluggery types: Shohei Ohtani, Kyle Schwarber, Ben Rice.

THERE is a lot more to share about 7+ RBI games, and we'll get to much more of it later in the week. (Yes, freed from the vagaries of French film noir and those sedulous Sumimoto sisters, we will be "doing time with baseball" until the walls close in again.) While you wait for that, you might think about who had the most 7+ RBI games in his career...and who had the fewest career HRs of all those who managed this feat (and, no, the answer is not Tony Cloninger!) Stay tuned...