We're just slightly off in the structuring of this ongoing presentation of offensive transcendence--by all rights our look at those folk with twelve appearances in the Top 600 all-time half-seasons should have been the twelfth in the series...but so it goes.
Here are four all-time greats that you would probably not link together ordinarily, but they make for a most satisfying quartet:
Each of these estimable batsmen crack the Top 100 for either 1st half/2nd half dominance on multiple occasions...
To be specific...Honus Wagner does it three times, landing in the Top 25 twice (in consecutive second halves for 1907 and 1908, a time frame when offensive levels were at historical lows).
Tris Speaker cracks the Top 100 six times, including three half-seasons later in his career where he cracks the .400 barrier (and, more significantly, the .500 barrier for OBP).
Jimmie Foxx lands in the Top 100 nine times, exceeding a .700 SLG six times, and actually hitting .400 for one half-season early on (when he was just 22 years old).
And Stan Musial evolves into a slugger after WWII, joining the Top 100 five times, lifting his SLG over .700 three times, and hitting over .400 in the first half of his greatest overall season in 1948. But it's hard to pick against that second half in 1949, with 59 XBH in 78 games.
There's a rolling historical continuity in this quartet's half-seasonal dominance that extends across more than half a century without overlapping in any single season. It's as if a torch of excellence was passed from one to the other and carried forward across time. Their combined half-season peaks total to nearly 5000 hits, nearly 1000 doubles (973 to be exact), over 300 triples, and 552 homers, with a collective batting average of .366. Put that into your pipe and smoke it...
