2025 HALL OF FAME, or: AGAINST UNANIMITY

THE response to a lone voice in the wilderness reveals much about the tragedy inherent in human behavior.

Whistleblowers are shunned. Dissenters are shamed. Cassandras are ignored, pigeonholed. 

Or, as Jeremiah the bullfrog once said: "Prophets are not without dishonor, save in their own country."

As we contend with the forces of fascism in this nation, we hear false calls for unity on all sides. As it is in politics, so it is elsewhere--even in what Bill James so bitterly termed "the politics of glory."

THUS the reaction to that lone dissenter in the Hall of Fame voting results shows the latent fascism that is cresting everywhere, including in the carefully monitored world of baseball media, where a not-so-whispered call for unanimity was once again squelched. The anger manifested by the formerly reasonable Jayson Stark, the tight-lipped condescension (masked, as always, by a pretense of "understanding") from Joe (the Poser) Posnanski makes it clear that something more sinister is at the root of such exasperated contempt.

The vested interest in unanimity has become a hallmark of our increasingly fractured age, where tiny political majorities push opposing agendas with the fury and momentum of a unilateral mandate. This unyielding reality of thrust and parry has created both a fervor and an profound sense of exhaustion in everything--where all are trapped in a maelstrom of backlash. From this perfervid psychological state, they seek not to "agree to disagree," but to belittle or crush the opposition....to create unanimous fealty to something--anything (often something that just doesn't make sense).

ENTER Ichiro Suzuki, or: how erstwhile liberals can turn into hegemonic hagiographers and foment their own form of fascism.

Ichiro was a terrific respite from the more overwrought offensive explosion that shattered some sacrosanct baseball records in the late 90s. His single-minded singles hitting was a refreshing change of pace from all that--and when the steroids scandal hit (during the backlash from a semi-liberal Clinton administration), it was Ichiro who gave us an unexpected new record that flipped the script as we watched the bloated "shock and awe" of the Iraq war turn into so much mush. 

After riding the wave of the Seattle Mariners' 116-win 2001 to MVP and Rookie of the Year awards, Ichiro crashed through with 262 hits in 2004, allowing folks to conveniently ignore the fact that the M's won just a bit more than half as many games that year (63) as they did in 2001. From that point on, Ichiro was the M's only reliable story, and he pounded out 200 hits a season at a relentless clip, making it ten in a row in 2010 (a year in which Seattle won just 61 games).

But by then Suzuki had amassed a truly beautiful number of hits (2244) and it was clear that his particular phenomenon--so absent everywhere else in baseball--was highly eligible for coddling in order to cement his chances for Cooperstown. His lifetime BA in MLB was still a sprightly .331, a lone echo of a decaying vestige of such numbers created by more varied bat wizards such as Rod Carew, Wade Boggs and Tony Gwynn--all of whom had found their way into the Hall of Fame via the front-door guarantee of 3000 hits.

Ichiro and that 100% man...

AND so the race was on...soon to become more akin to a festering death watch. He was still spunky at 38, he still had most of his speed, but age was unraveling his springy singles swing. 2011 brought an end to his 200-hit skein; things got hinky enough in Seattle the next year that the M's management realized they couldn't subsidize his drive for 3000 hits any more: they shipped him to the Yankees, where he could be a media toy.

He hit .322 down the stretch in 2012, which prompted the Yankees to re-sign him, but disaster ensued as the Bombers choked themselves with ancient superstars for two cataclysmically creaky seasons, barely scraping over .500 in both 2013 and 2014. They decided that keeping Ichiro around in order to milk his 3000th hit was going to kill the cow; thus Suzuki was sent to where so many aging New Yorkers had always gone--Miami. 

Is there anything this man can't do? 

The Fish knew it was going to take two years to get Ichiro over the hump, but 2015 was a nightmare: Suzuki hit just .229, looking especially helpless in September (10-for-72, ,139). They swallowed hard, but kept the faith--and Ichiro responded with a carefully curated comeback season in 2016, riding a hot start to a .291 batting average--including a month-long stretch in May & June where he rekindled a vivid facsimile of his previous panache (32-for-83, .386). He recorded his 3000th hit on August 7th (sadly, in Coors Field, not in Miami).

There would be another 89 hits, all semi-superfluous--in 2017 he and the Fish would partner to give him another record to go with his single-season hits mark: Miami sent Suzuki up as a pinch-hitter 109 times, shattering the old single-season record held by Rusty Staub. The next year, serendipity in the form of injuries gave Ichiro a chance to briefly reconcile with the Mariners, and in 2019 MLB's internationalist impetus gave him a chance to return to Japan with the M's and take his final bow (the PR was better than the result: Suzuki went 0-for-5 in his swan song).

WHAT's clear about Ichiro is that as good as he was, he became an even bigger media star throughout this process. Getting to 3000 hits clearly ensured his enshrinement (only three of the 33 players to do so have so far evaded Cooperstown; one of those--Miguel Cabrera--will join the other thirty in 2030). 

But it's that unanimity thing that we were decrying above. And now a chart of those thirty-three 3000-hit guys is needed, to help us as we navigate a thicket of motives (and a nest of vipers).

As you can see, it's the same list twice--first sorted by the neo-sabe all-purpose dandruff shampoo: Wins Above Replacement. (Note, though, we use only the offensive portion of the method here, for two reasons: 1) we have innate & complete distrust of the defensive portion of this stat; 2) we are only discussing hitting here).

The first time (left side)we show the counting stat version--oWAR summed up and sorted in descending order. Do kindly note who is at the bottom of that chart.

The second time (right side) we show it as it should be seen--as a rate stat (oW/g means "oWAR per 162 games"). It's a more revealing measure, but putting them side-by-side produces its own revelations.

NOTE who is at the bottom of the list in both instances...

That's right. Those same folk who are so incensed at the lack of unanimity for Ichiro are generally skeptical about Lou Brock's bonafides to be in the Hall of Fame whatsoever.

(Of course--to steal a phrase from Nate Silver--there is more to Ichiro than this. But it's the hits thing--that shiny round number--which has sealed the deal and poured gasoline on a long-smoldering urge for unanimity. We'll explore some of the "more" further below.

All that said, it's clear that something amiss is afoot in the little world of baseball media. It began with overmoralizing and the boycott of steroids users for Hall of Fame induction, a stance which has festered in many ways and become egregiously tiresome. (So much so that we can read Joe the Poser whining about having to watch Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez become the latest victims of this ongoing pox against reason. Don't kvetch, Pose-man-ski--call it out for the sham that it is. But that will never be the approach taken by someone so expert at talking out of both sides of his mouth...)

Even Silver--that puckish pundit who was teleported into politics by a stroke of good fortune and now purportedly funneled and funded by the likes of those working hard to destroy what's left of democracy-- decided to weigh in on the Ichiro/Hall of Fame matter. (He was careful not to tip his hand regarding unanimity, however--he's learned over the year that speaking with a forked tongue pays better). What he did do is create a silly pseudo-system for measuring "greatness" that is one part math, one part Antonin Scalia, one part Chat GPT, and one set of spare parts cribbed together from the "C" and "D" positions in a "Four Square" court. 

His comment on Ichiro was mostly limited to "of course"--but he worked hard at distorting his system to comically maximize Suzuki's score, hedging his bets further by suggesting that we should include his Japanese League stats in our assessment. (The one good thing in Nate's noodlings was some actual pushback on the steroids ban, where he rightly suggested that such things should not be unilateral, and expressing mild dismay that his fellow neo-sabe media mavens were perpetuating it.)

Suzuki's "international record" of 4367 hits has been bandied about as another argument for unanimity. Ironically, Silver's attempt to transcend WAR in his analysis foundered here, as he tried to parse Ichiro's early years using that measure without verifying how he was adjusting the stats to do so. 

SO that's what we'll do right now (and then take things in an unexpected direction). Ichiro's best case for "unanimity" comes from combining those Japanese League stats with his peak years in MLB (2001-10). Can that pass muster? 

To do that, we must adjust his years in Japan so that they reflect as realistically as possible what adjustments he made when playing in America. We'll cut to the chase with the numbers and explain on the other side of the chart:

At the top we have his 2001-10 stats, then his actual numbers in Japan. The third line sums these as if these were achieved in MLB--the "idealized" portrait of Ichiro's career. (We'll let those adepts in the semi-arcane art of "similarity scores" find the players who most resemble that fictional statistical line--but we'll clue you in that such a match will be hard to find: Suzuki's elevated HR total in Japan makes this idealized version a bonafide anomaly.)

Via some formula tinkering, we halved Ichiro's JL homer total to reflect how he approached hitting in MLB. We added triples, reduced doubles, and pushed his slash lines down a bit more than 10%. The adjustment gives him a slightly lower BA but a bit more power (possibly befitting what would've been the case in the higher offense 1990s).

The best fit for the adjusted numbers in terms of a similar performer is actually an amalgam: Rod Carew for batting average, Lou Brock for the shape and quantity of extra base hits. This "idealized Ichiro" will gain some in oWAR and oW/162, moving in the direction of Carew and leaving Brock behind. (But that doesn't boost him into anything remotely resembling unanimity: the region between Carew and Brock in HOF voting history ranges from 80%-Brock--to 91%--Carew. Both went in on the first ballot.)

And then there are those later years, when Suzuki pushed toward "3,000 American." In a different time, in one less fraught with division, strife, and pent-up grievance needing some semi-adolescent form of relief, those last years would have likely taken most of the wind of the "unanimity sailboat." (Pose-man-ski addresses the inverse of this notion in his both-side-windering, misleadingly "objective" assessment of what he should have called the "anti-unanimity knights," who--rightly--hold that due to the long-term flaws of the Hall of Fame election system, some checks and balances should apply even to slam-dunk candidates.)

But this breed of BBWAA voter needs something else. They not only need to believe that they are so much smarter than those who came before them--smarter than so many of the old guard pilloried by them when they were the brash outsiders--that they (just as the "analytics" folks who followed in their wake) have pushed much too hard in the other direction, creating the "groupthink" that is astonishing and troubling to someone like Stark (even as he finds himself embracing it).

How do these now-established voters proceed? They know that they are, at least in some ways, culpable for the transmogrification of baseball into the distended shape that it now encompasses, and while they can't bring themselves to jettison their ardent (and often unholy) love for "The Three True Outcomes," they know that the game has become significantly diminished by its increasingly two-dimensional uniformity.

So, as a form of semi-pathetic expiation, and in parallel with a nation buffeted by division and craving something (anything) resembling unanimity--they seized upon Ichiro as a symbolic token of such. Even better with respect to their (not-so) latent guilt about their role in turning the game into a home-run derby version of 1968, Ichiro is a throwback to the anti-sabermetric approach to baseball that they've discovered that they miss but don't have a clue as how to resurrect. 

Thus they look for their expiation by bandwagoning him into a unanimous vote. The seed was planted when the membership actually achieved such a vote with Mariano Rivera--undeniably the greatest relief pitcher in baseball history. 

Hence the need to prop up Ichiro's case sabermetrically, as has been done in various ways ahead of the just-completed vote. The mild negatives we've covered above about Suzuki's MLB career simply did not appear in print during the run-up to the 2025 election...

This is more than groupthink (the euphemism employed by Stark and Joe the P). This is the nudge-nudge/wink-wink dynamic of a cadre of folks who banded together and, ironically enough, in some very strange (but predictable) ways, have turned into the people that they hated so many years ago.

As also seems to be the case in much larger, darker matters, within entire segments of America.

If this is not exactly fascism, it's an embryonic form of it, built from anger, exhaustion, grievance and lingering guilt. And it's manifesting here, as elsewhere, from folks who now have skin in the game and want to control the vertical and the horizontal (and probably the diagonal as well). Being eighty to ninety-one percent right is no longer satisfying to them: they crave unanimity. (The call-outs regarding the lone Ichiro holdout that have surfaced in the wake of the voting results have gone beyond annoyance and contempt; they've become much more combative.)

NOW for something of an unexpected direction. In modern baseball (let's call it since the flurry of expansion in the early and late 1960s) there have never been enough high-BA players. They were on the wane before BA was "exposed" as a wrong-headed approach to the game. With the exception of the offensive explosion, which raised the overall average of offense vis-a-vis isolated power much more than it did batting average, such hitters have been exceptionally scarce. Even fewer have done it year in and year out: they can counted literally on one hand--Carew, Boggs, Gwynn. (Luis Arraez is a pale throwback to those guys; Ichiro fits in somewhere in between that due to a greater variability in maintaining a high BA and his late start in MLB.)

Opinions differ as to whether Ichiro went for 3000 for his legacy or because he'd studied the history of the game and concluded that his own personal "politics of glory" demanded it. His degraded performance level over his last years is something that would have been mercilessly harped upon in other, lesser players. His style of hitting may have prevented a good bit of this, however--and once he retired, there was a greater level of nostalgia for it due to the "launch angle" explosion.

It should be noted, though, that some such players manage to defy the odds of aging. Take a look at the difference in late-career performance between Suzuki and Gwynn:

Gwynn's data is highlighted in yellow. Note the similar slash lines for the early-mid parts of each career; Ichiro actually has more HR power than Tony. (But note also that Tony still has a somewhat higher OPS+ value in this comparison.)

But things change dramatically when the eras shift. One might initially conclude that the uptick in offense (and maybe a juiced ball, eh?) just carried Gwynn along to better numbers, but look again. Look at those OPS+ values for the late-career data: Tony gains ground relative to the league, while Ichiro pretty much collapses. 

It's possible that Gwynn's strong finish helped to elevate his vote total when he arrived on the HOF ballot in 2007--he received 98% of the vote. With data like this, it's a real stretch to conclude that Ichiro is a better candidate--but that's what the current BBWAA cabal has done. No one railed about the injustice of Gwynn not being inducted unanimously back then. (Nor did anyone get tweaked about Cal Ripken, who came even closer than Tony--99%--in the same year.)

Ichiro almost certainly doesn't care at all about his vote percentage. Even the people grousing about it say it doesn't matter (even though they are grousing about it). What they need to do is take their thumb off the scale, to dial back the groupthink and put this into perspective. But this episode (and their increasingly urgent push for Andruw Jones--we'll spare you a recap of that...) shows that they are simply incapable of doing so. 

Steve Buckley at The Athletic does a clever feint around the "reveal yourself" demands that have been surfacing. He reminds us that there should be room for more "informal" votes, less freighted by the need for an ascendant faction of the voter population to flex its muscles. There are tribute votes for players who have no realistic chance to be inducted. There are various attempts--some valid, some misguided (paging Jay Jaffe...)--to "influence" vote for players who would fall off the ballot. (In Jaffe's case, there are mixed motives: he was pushing Phangraf's "pitch framing" and making a dubious attempt to "innovate." His ploy failed.)

Buckley had it right--the tribute vote is something that transcends all of this scurrilous skullduggery, arm-twisting, bandwagoning, nocturnal-emission proselytizing. It seems to be an endangered species in this little world's embrace of "designer fascism." The man who would be folksier-than-thou, Joe the P, who loves to digress into such tribute territory at the drop of a hat (or the sacrifice of a pawn on his chessboard...), whiffed in a major-league way in 2025...after waxing folksy-eloquent about a popular favorite in sabe-ish circles, playing (of course) the hometown chauvinist card--the man in question was part of the Royals' slightly improbable World Series win in 2015--and reminding us that the same fella in the very next year then helped a team win its first Fall Classic in more than a century. 

This player also pioneered the "post-postmodern" appearance of the "star utility" player, bursting onto the scene with a fabulous, MVP-adjacent season in 2009. He had a heck of a career over thirteen seasons: he even compiled a quite respectable WAR total! 

Of course, it wasn't enough to get him into a "bandwagon" mode, or probably even a Jaffe-goes-tilt-at-windmills thang, but we can guarantee you that Ben Zobrist would have really appreciated receiving a few stray votes. And if anyone was perfectly set up to deliver one to him, it was Joe the P.

Who whiffed on it. And now, forevermore, ol' Joe will have to live with the fact that it wouldn't have mattered one whit if he'd left off a check mark alongside Ichiro's name, but it would have meant the world to Zobi won-Zenobi to have received at least one Hall of Fame vote. But Joe (and the rest of what that nasty old Tom Pynchon once called "the whole sick crew"...) just up and left Ben by the side of the road...

CONGRATS to Ichiro, C.C. Sabathia, and especially to Billy the Kid--who wasn't too proud to cry when he got the news. And remember--dissent is a good thing.

IN A WORLD OF DOUBLING DOWN, WE TRIPLE UP...

ON Xmas Day in a time of incipient woe, we look for the miracle massé shot on the pool table of life, the distraction setting aside all the infractions against humanity that are on their way via anti-Santa's sulfurous sleigh.

And whenever things are that way, you know which way we're gonna go with it--we're going to go with the impossible wish-fulfillment hidden within our careening "National Pastime" that animates the vestiges of our long-ago sugar plum visions. We look to the game's deep past, we celebrate its youthful anarchy and its freedom from the elephantine torpor of the long ball and the blights upon its soul that have come to cripple it. 

To cut to the chase: we go back to triples--that eternally endangered "long hit" that once gave the game its perfect seam of speed and power, but now is a quaint afterthought, with a record season-performance that's more out of reach than DiMag's 56-game streak. It's a mighty mark held by an anomalous non-entity: the game (and life itself) needs more of that, needs more connection between its gods and its ordinary people so that the scales of life can be more equitably (and humanely) balanced. 

Yes, yes: pass the pipe dream and let me smoke it. But take a long puff on it while we revisit the extraordinary ordinary folk who were able to hit a basketful of triples when the fruit was still on the trees, and ripeness had not turned into rot. Perhaps there is still time to follow Mark Twain's advice and "dream better dreams"...

SO on the with the show-and-tell already--we're gathering up all the player-seasons where at least fifteen  (15) triples are displayed in the batter's hitting line. 

And there's no better way to show than in our patented TimeGrid™ chart (at right). Proving again that even a sad tale can be strangely exhilarating when told well..

Thus you now know that there are 552 instances where players have hit 15 or more triples in a season. And if you have a lightning-like, abacus-configured mind, you've already discerned that 505 of those player-seasons occurred between 1882 (the first year where 15+ triples were hit) and 1949. (That's an average of about seven-and-a-half such seasons per year.)

And you also know that only 47 such instances have occurred since 1950. (The curse of depraved deprivation, indeed: that works out to less than seven-tenths of an instance per year...)

OF course, when you look at the specific pattern in the data, you can figure out what happened. Both the style of play and the shape of the new ballparks that began to arrive in the 50s and 60s shifted things in ways that continue to plague the game, shifting its priorities ahead of the Sargasso Sea of neo-sabermetrics and its "velocity/launch angle" Armageddon (all puns most definitely intended).

But let's celebrate those "men of yore" who hit all those triples back in the day when ballparks were still attuned to the game's pastoral proclivities (now in approximately their ninetieth year on life support). 

A few of these men are in the Hall of Fame--can you name them all? It's probably not surprising to discover that those with the most 15+ triples seasons overall (Roger Connor, Dan Brouthers, Joe Kelley, Jake Beckley, Ed Delahanty) are amongst the enshrinees. Abundant triples were but one part of their accomplishments.

But we also see an abundance of folks--some exalted, some more ordinary--who had a knack for the nineteenth-century game's version of the "long hit" (and, in a few instances, not much of a knack for anything else). We're thinking of folks like Bill Kuehne and Frank Fennelly, players who'll never be given even a first thought as a Hall of Famer but who were able to partake of what the game was making possible in its anarchic infancy. 

Buck Ewing is the only catcher to have four 15+ triple seasons, and while it's not the main reason he's in the HOF, it's a fitting footnote. And such a note might give a nudge to the (apparently non-existent) "nineteenth-century veterans' committee" to put Ed McKean into the Hall where he belongs (but not before Pete Browning and Bob Caruthers!)

Yes, great players and great names (Oyster Burns!)--of course, "Big Sam" Thompson and "Wee Willie" Keeler are already in the Hall--they have eye-popping numbers that are now waved away by the isolated power fetishists known as neo-sabes. Bid McPhee also made it, the only nineteenth-century player to be inducted in the twenty-first century: it's time to rectify that.

BUT let's shift forward, into the "depraved deprivation" period (as if we could escape it...). There are 36 players since 1950 who've managed to hit 15+ triples in a season--how many can you name off the top of your head (or even on the top of your head, for that matter)?!

Aw c'mon, we're talking just three dozen guys...hmm, radio silence has never been so, well, silent...

Possibly you can think of some really speedy guys who might have done it more than once--as in 47 instances, 36 players? Would it help if we told you that two of them have names with repeating initials? No? OK, what if we give you the damn initials--CC and WW? (No, not C.C. Sabathia!!)

So that's Carl Crawford (three years in a row from 2004-06) and Bill James' old fave Willie Wilson (four times--1980, 1982, 1985, 1987). But there's one more guy with four who matches Wilson--is there a ray of hope that someone out there will pick up on that shameless clue we just gave you?

Right--it's Jose Reyes (2005, 2006, 2008, 2011), with that last one being one of three that occurred in the same year--gasp! As the chart above shows, it's the first time that this had happened since 1984, when the fearsome foursome of Dave Collins, Lloyd Moseby, Juan Samuel and Ryne Sandberg did in the same season. (Roll over, George Orwell...)

Samuel is one of three players who managed to "repeat the feat", doing it again in 1987. The other two are a "strange bedfellows" duo from the seventies: Garry Templeton (1977, 1979) and Jim Rice (1977, 1978). Templeton and Rice, along with Rod Carew, made up a troika of triples gods in 1977; Templeton, along with George Brett (20 triples!) and Paul Molitor, were a trio in 1979. (In 1977, it had been thirty-three years since there'd been at least three hitters with 15+ triples in the same year--in that war year of 1944, there were five who did so: Johnny Barrett (19), Bob Elliott (16), Johnny Lindell (16), Snuffy Stirnweiss (16) and Phil Cavarretta (15).

That 20+ triples thang does tend to capture people's attention: Jimmy Rollins' 20 three-baggers in 2007 might have been a part of why he was named MVP that year. (It didn't do the trick for Curtis Granderson, who hit 23 the same year, the most since Dale Mitchell in 1949. Not sure what got into Mitchell that year: he hit 23 more triples over the final seven years of his career.) The other players since 1950 to hit 20+ triples in a season--in addition to Brett, Rollins, and Granderson--are: Willie Mays (20, 1957), Willie Wilson (21, 1985), Lance Johnson (21, 1996) and Cristian Guzman (20, 2000).

How about the unlikeliest fellas to hit 15+ triples? We can take a crude measure of that by looking at the stolen base totals for all of those on the list. Two guys stand out, having each stolen only two bases in their 15+ triples seasons: Pete Runnels (1954) and Gino Cimoli (1962). Aside from our own decade, the 60s are the lowest of all for 15+ triple seasons: in addition to Cimoli, the only other player to do so is Johnny Callison (1965). 

AND "depraved deprivation" has reached its zenith (or its nadir, depending on your perspective) in our own time. The lowest twelve-year run in MLB history for 15+ triple seasons is in place right here, right now. From 2013 to 2024, there has only been one such season turned in--a malevolent monument to the version of baseball brought to us by the architects of analytics. 

Any guesses as to who that mystery man is? Here's a clue (yes, characteristically oblique!): he had the same number of walks (15) as triples (15) that year. A year, in fact, that matches that matched number of triples and walks...

So that's 15 triples and 15 walks in '15. Given the nature of how things changed in the years after that rookie season, he hit only seven triples over the next four years, while hitting 93 HRs in those seasons (2016-19). In 2021 he was a hero in the NLCS, hitting three homers (and, yes, a triple, too). In 2024, a return to the team he helped win an unexpected World Series in '21 didn't prevent him from having what looks to be a catastrophic, career-ending campaign...

As Syd Barrett said to his befuddled Pink Floyd bandmates: have you got it yet? 

Let's surely hope that Eddie Rosario is not the last man in the history of MLB to hit 15+ triples in a season. No offense to him, really, but that would be a blight on the game if it were to be so. (We might just have to force him into indentured servitude as one of anti-Santa's elves.)

Final irony, and it'll remain intact if no one gives Eddie the Elf any more MLB playing time: he hit more triples in 2015 than he did over the rest of his career (nine more seasons!). 

BUT there's hope on the horizon: in 2024, two players--Corbin Carroll and Jerran Duran--each hit 14 triples to lead their respective leagues. 

Remember, it's always darkest before the dawn. With tenacity and luck, we might yet escape our doubled-down world and triple up. Let's dislodge those who were born on third and make triples safe for the world again...3-ball in the corner pocket!!

OF DICK AND DEV: AN ANTI-CLIMACTIC SENSE OF AN ENDING

LET us begin with two endings: the final steps of a Kafkaesque journey to posthumous redemption, and the sudden, all-too-anonymous conclusion of a brilliant but sadly squandered life. Much treachery and tragedy intervened in the events leading to these sobering anti-climaxes, some (if not most) of it self-inflicted: but these two men--the "notorious" Dick Allen and the "flamboyant" Brock Hanke--spent too many years of their lives diminished by a particularly virulent form of insiderism that continues to plague the world of baseball. 

Thus shall it ever be so. Here we write often about the opening up of vistas that few if any (want to) see, perspectives that began half a century ago when a cynical-yet-idealistic seventeen-year-old went to college and bonded with a draft-dodging denizen of the hippie demimonde with prodigious and protean skills who reeked of endlessly provocative opinions. 

That was Hanke (pronounced "hank-y"), who anointed me into his loopy world when I professed affection and support for an embattled slugger who didn't want to be called "Richie." 

DURING the balance of the 1970s, our allegiance to a pre-Bill James "sabermetric" approach to baseball deepened, eventually leading us into a variable association with Bill's 1980s efforts to create a blanketed play-by-play capability (Project Scoresheet). It would also lead to Hanke's (temporary) anointment as the successor to Bill's Baseball Abstract (until Bill pulled the rug out from under him).

All through that period, as we developed our own mythical world (assorted tales of the San Antonio Trotters, a form of "sabermetric wish fulfillment" blown up from our days of wrangling in intramural softball), one axis of our foundational beliefs was in the conjoined greatness and martyrdom of Dick Allen, whose career took a series of dramatic and confounding turns until it came to a sudden, anti-climactic end in 1977. (As we rewrote the landscape of baseball via the Trotters in those days, we naturally found a way to include Dick on that team, which had progressed from rag-tag to dynastic in the intervening years: as a prestige platoon player, "Big Dick"--as Hanke liked to call him--upped his lifetime HR total much closer to 400 before "officially" retiring at the end of the decade.)

The liaison with Bill James started then (it was actually yours truly who discovered him first, being one of a few hundred who purchased his self-published 1978 edition), but it was Hanke and his applied math background that confirmed the essential efficacy of Bill's early work, which led to our years of producing baseball annuals in the 1990s, which were subverted by what has now become more of a plague on the game than a means to its transformation. The true scandal of "sabermetrics" is how it has undermined baseball even as it purports to anatomize it, and how it became an instrument of an ever-more invidious form of insiderism.

SUCH behavior was first exposed by Bill James in his cynical, overblown Politics of Glory, which unceremoniously combined new numerical formulations with callous muckracking, skewering baseball's Hall of Fame in ways both rightful and reprehensible. In an age (mid-1990s) when new statistical measures (OPS, OPS+) were opening eyes to the hidden accomplishments of hitters long shunned by Cooperstown, James took out a contract on Dick Allen and shot him down with a series of pronouncements that deserved a libel suit. 

Even though some of James' long-time allies/colleagues took up against him, the damage done to Allen's chances for statistical reconsideration (and enshrinement in the Hall of Fame) was epochal.

James' behavior became the template for a new flavor of "sabermetrics" which would fire hot for a decade until generational change permitted the "outsiders" to become "insiders." (James himself helped spawn this movement when he took a job with the Boston Red Sox, being the first of many to make the world safe for sabermetrics, but not necessarily vice-versa.)

Prior to that, Bill's second edition of his Historical Baseball Abstract (2001) employed his Win Shares method (moving "beyond" the Wins Above Replacement method he'd created in the 1980s, a tool that Hanke inserted into his 1989 Baseball Abstract, unwittingly setting in motion a process that would turn the measure into a lightning rod for insiderist "culture wars" that continue to persist). The results of the Win Shares method produced some inconvenient truths--one of which was that, according to James' own measures, Dick Allen (even with his relatively short, injury-riddled career) had cleared the bar for induction into the Hall of Fame.

James' response to this was to hint that Allen's "psychological problems" had caused him to squander a level of talent equal to that of the game's greatest players (oddly, limited to other African-Americans such as Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson), which apparently constituted grounds for ongoing skepticism about his suitability for Cooperstown. When pressed further, James noted that Allen's eventual admission was "inevitable" and that he'd simply look the other way regarding whatever the "insiders" did. 

Meanwhile, the Wins Above Replacement method managed to target Dick as well: its distorted defensive calculations produced a penalty that was virtually unique, dropping his "overall" score into a range where ruby-throated "sabermetric" chirpers could make unctuous ululations reiterating his "marginal" status for induction. 

All of this kept in play a lingering uncertainty that prevented the "new numbers" (per Jayson Stark, in a rare disingenuous moment) from crashing through to give "Crash" (Allen's nickname, given to him due to the sound of what happened when his 42-ounce bat met the baseball) the needed cred to make it through baseball's ultimate insider kluge, the umpteen-times-shuffled-off-to-Buffalo "Veterans Committee."

Dick became philosophical about his ongoing banishment, beginning with his autobiography (appropriately enough, entitled Crash!)--over the years, he did what he could to mend fences, knowing that whatever outcome would ensue was out of his hands. He was gracious, grateful and moving when the Baseball Reliquary inducted him into its Shrine of the Eternals (who, a few years later, would create one of their typical "strange bedfellows" situations by inducting Bill James!)

Meanwhile, in response to the media shift and his own incipient health issues, Brock Hanke absented himself from the "real world" cauldron of baseball opinion, opting for an association with the Hall of Merit, a cadre of individualist systematizers who devised their own (and more convenient) rules of induction for an alternate baseball Hall of Fame. At my request, he made a half-hearted attempt to get that intriguing group to run a parallel experiment using the more draconian inductions standards imposed on the brick-and-mortar Hall of Fame (75% of the total vote). In two words: they declined.

AND likely you know the rest of Dick's story: missing induction via that ever-shifting committee in 2015 by one vote, then succumbing to cancer in December 2020 as another incarnation of insiders decided not to vote because COVID made it "too cumbersome" to operate in true insider fashion. And then, another stinging one-vote miss in 2021.

In 2022, Brock Hanke received some sobering news about his physical condition: he'd developed a weakness in his pulmonary system that would become more pronounced over time. Work he had done to address the problems in the Wins Above Replacement method--a project he'd fretted over for years--was again shelved without seeing the light of day. (This had been a lingering pattern for him over time as the escalating signals of his ultimate health issue affected his ability to physically function, an occurrence that seemed to make him gun-shy with respect to the increasingly "inside" world of advanced baseball statistics.) My attempts to engage him on such matters and to advocate that he make his findings public were not successful.

With a caretaker living with him in his suburban St. Louis home, he still sounded reasonably alert in February of 2024--the last time we were to speak. His stamina was clearly reduced: he begged off the call shortly after being reminded about my homage to his fictional self's Hall of Fame-level career that I'd reconstructed from our long-ago forays into what is now called "fan fiction." (Perhaps unsurprisingly, those texts had turned into another critique of Wins Above Replacement.) All in all, however, there was little indication of any imminent change in his condition.

Becoming involved in my efforts to wrap up that long-running French film noir project (occasionally referenced here), my opportunity to reach out to him was curtailed, and the summer passed into fall. After returning from the first of two "final finale" screening series in San Francisco in mid-October, it seemed to be a good time to reestablish contact. An email went unreturned (not an especially concerning event: Hanke was a notoriously poor correspondent). But then the attempts at reaching him by phone produced the troubling fact that his long-time land line at his home had been disconnected.

An initial search of the Internet did not produce an obituary, but a more specified query revealed that Brock Hanke (known to me always as "Dev"--his 1970s nickname) passed away on the thirty-first of May. A subsequent search produced a sound file from a sports radio show from just two days before his death where he'd made an appearance, where he definitely sounded diminished. (Few people were as verbally articulate as he was, and here he sounded--to use an "analog analogy"--like a 45rpm record being played at 33.)  And yet it's clear from the audio transcript that during his on-air chat time, Dev had little or no sense that he was about to pass away...

SO both men--Richard Anthony Allen and Brock Jay Hanke--did not survive long enough to see "Big Dick" finally crash through into the bubble-world of the hallowed. We put aside our lingering sense that perhaps the blemish of Allen's unjust absence from the Hall might still be an appropriate symbol for the hollowness at the center of its "hallowed halls," and we celebrate for his family, his friends, for those who resolutely championed him for so long, and for that long arc of justice (to reframe the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.) that finally bent toward mercy, forgiveness, vindication--and redemption. 

And yet it is a bittersweet, anti-climactic ending for both men--and for countless others like Hanke, who'd advocated and hoped and prayed for some form of intervention that would have brought the events of Sunday, December 8th, 2024 to us so much sooner, when so many more folks could share in the moment, when its potential for a form of healing bliss was so much more palpable. 

Many will remember Dick Allen, and that is all to the good. But few if any will remember Brock Hanke, and while some of that is on him, it is sobering to contemplate how so much talent can have so little tangible to show for it. Let's hope that wherever his essence might be at this moment, he is finding enjoyment in Allen's belated vindication. Farewell, my friend!

YANKEE POST-MORTEM: BIG INNINGS IN THE WORLD SERIES

THAT Game Five really was a strange game, indeed...the Yankees did a bizarre volte-face after looking as though they were serious about getting back to LA.

The Dodgers' surreal five-run rally got us thinking...how many 5+-run innings have occurred in the Worls Series. To answer that question, we dug into Forman et soeur's online data resources...

Here's the TimeGrid™ chart for that (at right):

IN all the craziness of that Dodger fifth inning, we might easily forget that the Yankees also had a five-run inning (the night before in Game Four--in the eighth inning to break that game open). 

All in all, we 've had 105 5+-run innings in World Series history. which have occurred in 69 of the 120 World Series that have taken place since 1903.

Now for some of the details in the chart, working backwards in time:

In 2023, the Texas Rangers had two 5+-innings in the same game en route to winning the World Series.

In 1993, the Phillies and Blue Jays had 5+ run innings in the same game (Game 4, a 15-14 slugfest won by Toronto). The Phils actually had three such innings in that Series, but still managed to lose.

In 1987 the Twins had two and the Cards had one, but none in the same game--Minnesota won the Series in the first instance of the home team winning all of the games played.

In 1979, the Orioles had three such innings and the Pirates none, but the O's still lost the series in seven games.

In 1975, the Red Sox did it twice while the Big Red Machine had no such big inning, but the Reds still won the Series.

In 1968, the Tigers only did it once...but it was a ten-run inning, tying the record most runs in a World Series inning (make your guesses now as to the identity of the team that did it first).

In 1961, the Yankees had two such innings in the same game en route to a 13-5 win (and a Series win) over the Reds.

In 1960, the Yankees had three such innings, in the three games where they routed the Pirates (Games 2, 3, 6), but the Pirates had one of their own in G7 and won the game and the Series on Maz's homer.

In 1956, the Yankees and the Dodgers had such innings in the same game (Game 2, won by the Yanks, 13-8; Game 5 was Larsen's perfect game).

In 1952, the Yankees had two such innings, but they actually lost one of the games in which they did it (though they did win the Series).

In 1942, the Cardinals and the Yankees had 5-run innings in the same game; it was won by the Cards 9-6 en route to a surprising Series win over the Bombers in five games.

In 1936, the Yankees had three such innings against the Giants, two of them in a game where they set the record for the most runs scored in a World Series game (18). They won the Series in six games.

In 1929, the Cubs and the A's had 5+ run innings in the same game (Game 4); the Cubs got five in the sixth to take an 8-0 lead, but the A's scored ten (10!) in the seventh in the biggest World Series comeback ever.

In 1923, the Yankees had two such innings and finally won their first World Series against the Giants (after having lost to them in 1921 and 1922).

In 1912, the Giants had two such innings (Games 6 and 7), but there was a tie game in the Series that year and they lost Game 8 to the Red Sox (who won their first title...there would be three more that decade before the Curse of the Bambino would set in).

In 1908, the Cubs had two such innings, beating the Tigers for the second straight time in the Series (Detroit would lose again in 1909, becoming the only team to lose three World Series in a row).

One last fact: World Series teams who've scored 5+ runs in an inning almost always win (no big surprise there!), but there have been seven losing teams who've done so in the Series: the Cubs in '29, the Yankees in 1942, 1953, and 1956, the Mets in 2000...

--And the Phillies in 1993, who managed to lose two games in the same series (!!) in which they scored 5+ runs in an inning. 

So the '24 Yanks are, after all is said and done, just a slightly anomalous underachiever. As was the 2024 World Series itself--looking as though it might be more interesting, then turning into mush with the two MVPs unable to replicate (via slump and injury) their regular-season dominance. So it goes...

WORLD SERIES: QUANTIFYING THE YANKEES' UPHILL BATTLE

The Dodgers' makeshift "Big Two" (Jack Flaherty and Yoshinobu Yamamoto) did well enough in tandem...and bolstered by continuing home run heroics, those Boys in Blue leave Dodger Stadium up 2-0 as the 2024 World Series--the first pitting baseball's two most storied franchises since 1981--moves to the Bronx tonight.

And that puts the Yankees into a sizable hole. The question that needs asking/answering is: just how sizable is it, and what does past history tell us about teams that go 0-2 on the road at the outset of the Fall Classic? (That's outset, not onset--though the onset of gopheritis certainly put a pox on the left arms of Nestor Cortes and Carlos Rodon...)

AS always, we go pig-for-truffle to bring you the whole data--the tree and the roots, the leaves, the bark, even the woof and warp if you don't rein us in. And as always, we'll flip the script and invert our presentation by showing what happens from the perspective of those home teams who barrel out of the gate at 2-0 in hopes of riding the rail all the way to the finish line. 

This takes us all the way back to 1907, when the Chicago Cubs first throttled their opponents twice at home (those luckless Detroit Tigers, still the only team in baseball history to lose three World Series in a row). 

As you'll see, it took the fifteenth time this this happened for a team that went 0-2 on the road to start a World Series (the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers) to actually prevail at the end. Oddly, that occurrence set off a little chain of counterintuitive repetitions: four more consecutive instances of defying the norm (1956 to 1971), followed by a series of stutter-steps into the mid-80s, before finally settling back into a "groove of orthodoxy" in 1987 in which we are still enmeshed.

THAT's sixteen straight times where the team going 2-0 at home goes on to win the Series, with the majority of them (11) resulting in sweeps (aka "the big 4-0") or a five-game romp (4-1).

All in all, teams that take advantage of the home field advantage in the World Series wind up winning those series in more than 80% of the cases.

AND that is what the Yankees find themselves up against as they take the field tonight, with Aaron Judge still reeling in the kryptonite of the post-season, and the unheralded Clarke Schmidt taking the mound for a team that needs Judge (and the bottom part of its batting order) to show something resembling a pulse before it's time for the body bag.

Of course, the Dodgers have blown 2-0 home advantages before (think 1956 and 1978), but they pulled their own Houdini act in this regard in 1981, the last time these teams met. If the Yankees could somehow get things in gear to do so in 2024, that would make three consecutive times that the teams have traded such counterintuitive outcomes between themselves--a record that Jayson Stark (aka baseball's "Mr. Unique) would clasp to his bosom with devilish glee.

A World Series with real drama is what we want, of course--because obviously we are starved for it in real life. (Insert your favorite rude noise here.) But seriously, a seventh game is the only type of Armageddon that we can sit back and enjoy, and we really need that given the specter of doom that has encircled the land of the free (for now...) and the home of the formerly brave (looking at you, Jeff "Bozo" Bezos) at this late date in latter-day tomfoolery. 

SO...root for that seventh game already. It may be all we get in this uniquely felonious fall...

OHTANI'S OTHER "50-50"...

WE are still in the final throes of wrapping up the French noir book, but the light in the tunnel is getting brighter and brighter.

Of course, we can't compete with Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani, whose dual 50+ homer totals in 2024 have made them the thirteenth instance of two or more players to hit 50+ HRs in the same season in all of MLB history.

BUT there's a better lede for this story, and we're not going to bury it any longer. In the midst of Ohtani's historic 50-50 season, there is actually another "50-50" that was achieved when the Dodgers' $700 million man put the slug on the hapless Marlins a few nights ago.

What the heck are we talking about? Well, it turns out that when Ohtani hit #50, he became the fiftieth player to hit 50 or more homers in a season. (As you likely know, he's now up to 53--though he still trails Judge for the MLB lead.)

Now that's what one can call a nifty coincidence. 

And that calls for a Time-Grid™ chart, now, doesn't it? 

Let's take a look at when those fifty 50+ HR seasons have occurred...

That was Babe Ruth all by himself in the 1920s, with Hack Wilson in 1930, Jimmie Foxx in 1932, and the first duo (Foxx and Hank Greenberg) in 1938.

Nine years later, Johnny Mize and Ralph Kiner became duo #2, followed by Kiner again in 1949.

Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle did it in back-to-back seasons (1955 and 1956), then Mantle and Roger Maris teamed up to set a new "duo HR record" in 1961 (with 115 between them). Willie joined Mickey and Kiner and Foxx in the "double 50" club in 1965.

Then, a twelve-year gap until George Foster joins in 1977, and a thirteen-year gap until Cecil Fielder does it in 1990. (That's right, the 80s are the only decade in the live ball era in which no one hit 50+ HR in a season.)

But things changed a bit in 1995, when Albert Belle kicked off the biggest five-year total of 50+ HR seasons  to date (11 from 1995 to 1999). The unlikely duo of Brady Anderson and Mark McGwire cracked the half-century HR barrier in '96 (with McGwire doing it with the least number of PAs in season--just 548), followed in '97 with McGwire (58) and Ken Griffey, Jr. (56, the first of two back-to-back 56-HR seasons).

THEN...1998. Four hitters with 50+ in a year, two over sixty (McGwire with 70, Sammy Sosa with 66), with Griffey and Greg Vaughn cracking the 50 barrier. 1999--a rerun of the great homer races, McGwire becoming the first man to have four consecutive 50+ HR seasons; Sosa would match him in 2001).

Sammy would go it alone in 2000, but in 2001 three new sluggers would join him: Barry Bonds, with 73; Luis Gonzalez, with 57, and Alex Rodriguez (52, the first of three 50+ seasons he'd achieve). 1998-2002 would produce thirteen 50+ HR seasons, the highest five-year total in baseball history. A-Rod and Jim Thome were the duo in 2002 to set that record...

Andruw Jones would join the club in 2005, with the lowest BA, OBP, SLG, OPS, and OPS+ of anyone with 50+ homers in a season. (Jose Bautista would get under Andruw's .263 BA five years later, but not is OPS.) Ryan Howard and David Ortiz hit 58 and 54 respectively in 2006; A-Rod would be joined by Prince Fielder in 2007; Prince is the youngest hitter to slug 50+ HRs in a season (age 23), and the only son to follow his father (Cecil) onto the list.

Chris Davis hit 53 in 2013 and then rapidly turned into a pumpkin; Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton would headline the first big "launch angle season" (2017) with 52 and 59 HRs respectively. Pete Alonso was the only 50+ HR hitter in a bigger year for taters (2019).

Judge reasserted himself with a vengeance in 2022, setting a new AL record for HRs (62). A magical season in Atlanta got Matt Olson across the 50-HR barrier in '23, and that brings us back to Judge and Ohtani, the toasts of the coasts and a duo that we want to see collide in the World Series in spite of ourselves. 

Judge now has three 50+ HR seasons, trailing Ruth, McGwire and Sosa (who all have four). Will he keep up the pace in the next several years and make the record his own? Stay tuned...

THE WHITE SOX & THE WORLD OF 10+ GAME LOSING STREAKS

HERE is a belated look at the hapless Chicago White Sox and their season in Hell, even as we grapple with the final throes of our wrought-from-hell volume on forgotten French film noir. (Yes, we've been absent for a reason...)

Our way into this sad tale is through the lens of their epic 21-game losing streak, a downward spiral that began with their loss in the second game of a doubleheader against the Minnesota Twins on July 10th. They would not win again until August 6th.

During those twenty-one losses over twenty-six days, the Pale-to-the-point-of-invisibility Hose scored a total of 49 runs, while their pitchers allowed 136. 

There was a premonition that they'd be just this bad: a previous 14-game losing streak, from May 22nd through June 6th, which is a new record for most number of games lost in two same-season losing streaks: 35 (surpassing the performance of the 1916 Philadelphia A's, with 32 (20 + 12) during their 36-117 season (which is the lowest winning percentage for a team in a full season--the other record that the White Sox are chasing...or is that the other way around?)

BUT back to losing streaks in general. As usual, we seek the data no one else provides. First, how many 10+ game losing streaks have occurred in baseball since 1901? That covers a lot of teams over an even greater number of seasons. Our patented TimeGrid™ chart (at right) has the answer, also showing the year-by-year (or, perhaps, blow-by-blow...) results.

That's a total of 395 losing streaks of ten or more games--and when we look across at the decade summaries, we see that these numbers have remained fairly constant over time. What that really means, though, is that there are proportionately fewer long losing streaks during recent seasons, despite the higher raw numbers in the 1990s and 2000s: remember that in these decades there are nearly twice as many teams as was the case in the 1930s. (On the other hand, 2021 set a record with nine 10+ game losing streaks, eclipsing a mark that had held up since 1909.)

Our color-coding here might be a bit confusing: the years with six or more 10+ game losing streaks are shown in various shades of orange, but you'll note some years where the data is shaded in dark blue--these are baseball's expansion years. We wanted to see if those seasons produced more long losing streaks, and the answer is yes: years with first-year teams average a bit more than five per season, as opposed to just a little more than three per season overall. 

What do such losing streaks mean in terms of seasonal performance? That data is not readily available without some cumbersome compilation, but when we eyeballed the full list of 395, we found only one team on the list that managed to make it into the World Series. (We'll withhold the name of that team until the conclusion of the post...)

BUT there is a more rarefied area of futility available to us within this data: that would be the teams who manage to lose fifteen or more consecutive games. How many such streaks have there been? 

At left are all 33 of those extended mini-seasons in Hell. We present them in reverse chronological order so that the forlorn White Sox can be on top of something...

What emerges sharply at the outset is that these are all really bad teams: only four of them exceeded a .400 WPT in the season they had their 15+ game "siesta." 

Also emerging is the fact that virtually all of these teams had execrable pitching while they were in extended winless mode. This will be highly evident when you examine the ERA column for these teams, which shows only nine of the 33 teams posting sub-5.00 ERAs during their "clustered swan dives."

2021 was the first season since 1927 to have two such long losing streaks in a single year. But more notable--in fact, incredibly remarkable--is the fact that those two 2021 "long losers" were quick to rebound from their dismal seasons: the Diamondbacks went to the World Series in 2023, while in the same year the Baltimore Orioles won 101 games. (No such luck for the teams who joined hands in futility during 1906, 1909, and 1927--mostly teams from Boston, by the way.)

Note that our seasonal record for the 2024 White Sox is out of date--we researched this a couple of weeks ago, intending to post it earlier, but...French noir intervened. Their current record is 31-105 (still, somehow, one game better than those 1916 A's, who were 30-106 at the same point in their dismal year).

Just think: these White Sox missed by just one loss during their May-June swoon from being the only team to appear twice on this list in the same year. Of course, there's still time: the Im-paled Hose have yet another losing streak in the works--they are up to eight in a row with their 5-1 loss to the Mets tonight, and there's a chance that they will become only the fourth team to have three 10+ game losing streaks in the same season. (With two more losses in a row, they would join the 1909 Boston Braves, the 1961 Washington Senators, and the 1962 New York Mets.)

NOW, finally: what team lost 10+ games in a season and still made it to the World Series? The 1951 "miracle" New York Giants, that's who. Leo Durocher's boys lost eleven in a row from April 19th to April 29th that year, but still managed to play catch-up with the Brooklyn Dodgers in a playoff series that might still be lodged in your memory banks. Leo the Lip always insisted he was a singular presence in the game: with this factoid, he's definitely got some bragging rights...

[UPDATE 9/1: The White Sox have joined the ranks of "seasonal three-peat 10+ losing streak teams" with their loss today to the Mets. They are now 31-107; to escape sliding under the '62 Mets, they'll need to go 10-14 the rest of the way...stay tuned.]

10+ HR MONTHS: THE 1980s

WE are once again swamped with other projects--for those interested, our long-running French noir series in San Francisco wraps up this fall, and there is an incredible amount of work involved in that: a 33-film, two-part series, plus a long-gestating book on the subject (covering the 155 rare films that we've screened in the twelve festivals since its inception in 2014). 

We keep hoping that the workload for all that will be brought under control, and there is some light at the end of the tunnel, but it's still a dim light--thus we'll be working in this material in the in-between times. Thanks for your patience...

SO--on to the 1980s, the calm before the storm of the offensive explosion. In a decade that had slightly fewer 10+ HR months than the 1970s, there were some rumblings of the future uptick in both homers and run scoring levels that would transform this list into something beyond most folks' abilities at memorization. Two months--September 1985 and May 1987--give us a dim sense of what will become a flood tide of similar monthly totals in the decades that follow...

Some will remember the big homer year of 1987, which prompted an order from MLB to its umpiring crew to reset the parameters of the strike zone, the effect of which can be seen both in the overall HR/G totals in 1987 and 1988, but also in the dramatic delta in 10+ HR months (from nineteen to just two).

Despite the downturn at the tail end of the decade, the number of 10+ HR months were a good bit more plentiful in the second half (49 in 1985-89 as opposed to 29 in 1980-84). Though he's not on the repeater list (at left), Mark McGwire made a big splash in 1987 (his rookie year) with 15 homers in May en route to 49 for the season. 

And yes, we forgot the color-coding for this one: for ease of reference, there were only four instances in which a hitter had two 10+ HR months in the same year during the 80s: Mike Schmidt in 1980 (on his way to his single-season career high of 48; Don Mattingly in 1985 (a power surge in August & September that got him to 35 for the year, a seasonal total he never surpassed); George Bell and Dale Murphy in 1987 (both men achieving their single-season high water marks in HRs. with 47 and 44 respectively). 

Those totals will be drastically different in the next decade...

Here is the list of all the hitters who had one 10+ HR month in 1980-89 (at right.) The colorization for the year in which they achieved this is, alas, also missing (c'est la guerre). 

Some names on this list are likely to have been misplaced in your memories: for starters, Ben Oglivie (actually hit 40+ HRs in a season, though it was 1980, not the season in which he had his 10+ HR month). Next we submit for your perusal the "blink and you missed his career" phenomenon also known as Dave Hostetler, sort of an 1980s version of Vince Barton, who hit 10 HRs in his first full month in 1982, but wound up with just 22 for the season, winding up with a lifetime total of 37 HRs.

Then we have have Jim Presley, who never hit 30 in a season (his top total of 28 came the year before his 10+ HR month, and he actually started what became a precipitous decline in 1987, the year so many others were giving us a preview of the "launch angle" era). Keith Moreland, a solid hitter and multi-position player for the Cubs from 1982-87, rode the '87 homer wave to his highest single-season total (27) at age 33. (Turns out that Keith enjoyed a power surge at Wrigley Field, hitting 67 of his exactly 100 homers from 1982-87 at home; he was traded to the Padres in the 1987-88 offseason and promptly stopped hitting the long ball.)

People also tend to forget just how good a hitter Cecil Cooper was, especially at his peak (his first seven seasons with the Milwaukee Brewers, from 1977 to 1983). Cecil hit .300 or higher in all seven years, led the league in RBI twice and drove in 100+ four times, and had a 137 OPS+ with 156 HRs, including two 30+ HR seasons. (His 10+ homer month came in one of those 30+ seasons--1983.) 

Buddy Bell hit 201 lifetime HRs, but never more than 20 in a single season; that year was 1986--exactly 20 (which included his 10+ HR month--August). 

Lee Mazzilli looked like a possible star for the Mets up through his age 25 season (1980, also the year he had his 10+ HR month--July, when he hit 11). But he tailed off sharply in August/September, and played his way into a trade by 1982. (The one-time "Flushing Meadows Heartthrob" would return to the Mets in time for their World Series win in 1986, however--but as a backup.)

Since the 1990s listing will be bursting at the seams with 10+ HR months (213, almost three times as many as the eighties...) we will toss in an item that would ordinarily be included in our discussion of that decade. One item we've been tracking in the data is the incidence of 10+ HR months where batters hit less than. 300--we provided an overview of that pattern previously, which indicated that the percentage of such instances had remained quite constant until the 21st century (around one in three, a percentage that shifted upward notably in the 2010s and is continuing to accelerate). 

In keeping with the decay of batting average (we don't quite agree that "batting average is dead," as Russell Carleton suggests, though analytics departments have delivered a series of body blows to it in the past decade thanks to the "launch angle age" becoming a overweening "strategy" for the game) we are also tracking the 10+ HR months where hitters have a batting average which is less than .250. 

That has not happened as often as one might think, because a "clustered performance" such as this one still tends to reflect an excellent overall hitting month--but the data suggest that Carleton's notion of front offices being increasingly willing to ignore low BAs in exchange for homers is accurate. The TimeGrid™ chart (at right) shows that 50% of the 10+ HR months with a < .250 BA have occurred since 2010. 

The lowest batting average for a 10+ HR month was first fashioned by our old friend Vince Barton (Cubs, 1931) with a BA of .224. It was matched exactly by pioneering low-average slugger Pat Seerey in 1948. Hank Bauer managed to get below that figure in 1956 when he hit .211 with 10 HRs in May 1956. It wouldn't be until 1994 when Matt Williams would get under Bauer's BA with a 10+ homer month accompanied by a .208 BA--followed swiftly by Cecil Fielder "seeing him and lowering him" down to .204. In 2001, someone had the fist sub-.200 BA 10+ homer month: we'll let you guess as to who that might be. 

And, as the chart suggests, even that is not the current record for the lowest BA accompanying a 10+ HR month: that record was set in 2022, and we'll let you guess who that is, too. Stay tuned...

10+ HR MONTHS: 1960-79

IT has always been Brock Hanke's thesis that the "Lords of Baseball" dampened the home run for roughly twenty years after Roger Maris exceeded Babe Ruth's fabled total of sixty...and, if not literally true, it certainly seems figuratively true. 

Our survey of "10+ HR months" tends to bear that out, even with the peregrinations within the data for the two decades shown at right (a strike zone expansion in 1963 undone six years later; the unprecedented and never-repeated four team expansion in 1969; the adoption of the designated hitter in 1973; another "half-round" of expansion in 1977).

Clearly the decline in offense during the so-called "second deadball era" that still haunts the scurrilous scribes today as the ghost of that era's ghoulishly dessicated batting average comes to visit them in the dead of night...but note that the corrections implemented to course-correct the decline in power that came to a head in 1968 produced only the briefest burst in the two years after baseball's biggest-ever expansion. It wasn't until 1977 that the game began to leave  its power drought behind once and for all. 

BUT we're here to celebrate and catalogue the folk who continued the semi-honorable pursuit of doggedly swinging from the heels, and whose efforts would from time to time produce monthly homer totals in double figures. Such an occurrence has become rampant in the last thirty years or so, which makes these forays into the past more poignant (and less crowded).

Let's look at the top producers of 10+ homer months in the 1960s (at left). As always, what first leaps out of the list (save for the fellow at the top: we'll return to him shortly...) is how rare it was for Henry Aaron to hit ten or more homes in a single month--we'll do a deep dive on Hammerin' Hank's monthly totals and make it part of a special post later on in the series. 

What also leaps out here, if your eyes are drawn to the trickeries in our color-coding mechanism, is the fact that Roger Maris became the second player in baseball history to have five 10+ homer months in the same season--no wonder the Lords wanted to do something to quell such blasphemy! But, of course, our yearly log demonstrates the measures they took in 1963 did not manage to detract from the relentless, clockwork-like power probings of the man Fritz Peterson called "The Fat Kid"--Harmon Killebrew. 

Given the offensive deprivations put into place during that "second deadball" era, it's possible to consider Killebrew's 10+ homer month achievement (sixteen in the 1960s, twenty overall in his career) as being every bit as impressive as Ruth's lifetime total of twenty-five. Let's do him the favor of displaying his full 10+ homer handiwork (below).

What's  alsonotable about Killebrew's achievement--as we'll find out in greater detail later on--is that he pioneered the phenomenon of the 10+ homer month accompanied by a persistently sub-.300 BA. Thirteen of his twenty 10+ homer months include that feature, which had first become a bug immediately after WWII, when it happened seven times in 1947. Over baseball history, the percentage of sub-.300 BA 10+ homer months is still lingering around one in three (34%), but the "sons of Harmon" have taken over in recent years and have pushed that percentage well over 50%--paging Kyle Schwarber and the 10+ HR month in which he hit .168 (!!). 

BUT let's not get ahead of ourselves. Here are the "also-rans" (or, if you prefer, the "one-hit wonders" of the 10+ homer klatsch during the 1960s (at right). As might be evident to those who've perused the earlier versions of this list, the instances of truly "unlikely" hitters who make their appearances on these list are declining in number. Some of these folk actually have more than one 10-homer month to their credit--they just happened to have them in months occurring in an adjacent decade (Ted Williams: 40s, 50s; Eddie Mathews and Ernie Banks: 50s; Dick Allen and Billy Williams: 70s).

There are still a few anomalies here, however: guys like Chuck Essegian, known almost exclusively due to his pinch-hit homer spree in the 1959 World Series, or Chuck Hinton, who (like Essegian) got a late start in his major league career. There's also Gene Oliver, famed mostly for being the nemesis of Sandy Koufax, who finally received steady playing time in mid-1965 and bagged a 10-homer month in the midst of that. And--last but not least--the unbelievable Felix Mantilla, who parlayed a fortuitous trade to a congenial home ballpark (Fenway) into an unexpected power surge. (Mantilla, nicknamed "Felix the Cat" due to his slight 160-lb. frame, hit more than a third of his lifetime HRs in Fenway, where he accumulated less than 20% of his total plate appearances.)

LET's move on to the 1970s, where it will immediately become clear how the Lords were able to leach out the power levels from the game as it was played in the sixties (even with the enlarged strike zone). 

Note first that the leader in the decade (Mike Schmidt, who'll have more 10+ HR months in the 80s) has only six instances, as opposed to Killebrew's sixteen. No one comes close to approaching Maris' five 10+ HR months in a single year, not even George Foster, who probably caused some defibrillating moments in the cold hearts of those "Lords of the Game" when he hit 52 homers in 1977. The youthful Johnny Bench, who looked like he might be a truly prolific slugger early in his career, was quickly ground down by the seventies trend for "iron man" catchers. And Reggie Jackson, who'd electrified folks in 1969 with his first-half homer surge (including two 10+ homer months), never followed with a similarly prolonged stretch of homer hitting as his career continued to play out. There are fifteen hitters on this list, but only nine new names, as opposed to twenty and fourteen respectively on the 1960s "multiple 10+" list.

And here are the one-timers in the 1970s--many of whom, as you'll see, are there by virtue of the homer surge that occurred during the first half of the 1970 season. 

That's a total of nine 10+ homer/month one-timers (try repeating that phrase rapidly...) in '70, though the Giants' two Willies (Mays and McCovey) had been previously prominent on the 60s list. But such an overall surge certainly boosted the chances of hitters like Bob Bailey, Rusty Staub, Tommie Agee, Tommy Harper, Tony Conigliaro and Tony Perez. 

The big drought on this list occurs in 1974-76, when only two players--John Mayberry and Richie Hebner--manage to hit 10+ homers in a month. Hebner, a guy who hit 203 lifetime HRs but only had one 20+ season over his career, is the unlikeliest guy to have a 10+ homer month in the season in which he did it (1975), a year when he hit a total number of just 15. 

The unlikeliest of all on this list, however, has got to be Mike Hargrove, known mostly for his skill at drawing walks and for the colorful nickname "The Human Rain Delay"--earned for his propensity to jump in and out of the batter's box at every opportunity (a "pioneering" behavior that came to infect baseball more generally in the years that followed, leading slowly but inexorably to the present-day pitch clock). Hargrove hit just 80 lifetime homers, 18 of which came in 1977, including ten in August (five in a six-game stretch) and sixteen in the second half of the season.

And we'd be remiss not to mention our old fave Sixto Lezcano, whose 1979 season was a gem--164 OPS+, 28 HR, 101 RBI, .321 BA, capped by a 10-homer month in August--making it appear that he was poised for greatness. It didn't quite happen, but it was fun while it lasted (a statement applicable to many activities that remain all too associated with some form of "feckless youth"). It's nice to have him on the list, and it's a nice place to stop (for now). Stay tuned...