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"...
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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...
