Babe Ruth sends his regrets regarding his coming-out party as the king of both halves of the baseball season--he's tied up right now. (Dontcha know that those bondage freaks come in the most unpredictable sizes...)
SO this time we're going to look at something more quirky than kinky: an arcane but fascinating (trust us!) sub-realm that Babe Ruth was born to inhabit, but somehow never did.
THIS chart agglomerates all of the seasons where one or more hitters had more walks than hits. (We cut off eligibility for this list via playing time: anyone with 300+ PAs and at least as many walks as hits is captured here, in the decade (column) and year.
If you've been here before and haven't yet thought better of it, you'll know that we've written a lot about "walkmen" during our checker(board)ed career. (We love guys who walk a lot.) Think of the folks represented in the numerical distribution above as the "uber walkmen" at the furthest reaches of the "work the count" spectrum. (The average walk percentage, or BBP as we abbreviate it, for the 93 player-seasons in this special little tribe of hitters is 21%, about two and a half times the historical average for MLB.)
Since we endeavor to avoid extra-lengthy posts, we won't provide a detailed accounting of the players on the list. But here are some highlights. The first of this type was William "Yank" Robinson, one of only two players to have BB≥H in four consecutive seasons, from 1888-1891. (We'll let you think about who the other player might be.) Changes in the game and the coming of the Deadball Era stopped "uber walkmen" in their tracks for about thirty years, save for Tony Smith (an obscure infielder with 500 lifetime PAs who is the only player with a lifetime record of BB≥H (95 walks, 90 hits) and the much better-known Jimmy Sheckard, who found "walk religion" at age 32 and who had BB≥H for the last three years of his career.
BB≥H guys might have remained this rare until the advent of the "four Eddies" (Stanky, Joost, Lake and Yost) in the 40s save for the Philadelphia A's Max Bishop, the record holder for most BB≥H seasons (six: 1926-27, 1929-30, 1932, 1934). Well-traveled Roy Cullenbine was the first "uber walkman" to emerge in the 40s, with more power than the folk who'd preceded him, with a career cut short by the prevailing gap in understanding of the value of OBP over BA. He was followed by the aforementioned foursome, who weren't particularly fearsome, merely pesky. (And there is a Johnny Pesky season to be found here, in 1952, a decade in which he is increasingly surrounded by folk with more power--Aaron Robinson, Wes Westrum, Earl Torgeson.)
The first "superstar uber walkman" appears in 1954, in the form of none other than Ted Williams. He's soon followed by Mickey Mantle, who has two such seasons--1962, when he's at the tail end of his peak, and 1968, at the tail end of his career. Another Hall of Famer, Harmon Killebrew, also has a BB≥H season in 1968, in what was a really down year for his BA.
But as baseball morphs itself toward a game favoring isolated power, the types of hitters who populate the BB≥H subgroup begins to shift toward a certain class of low-BA slugger, which leads to a veneration of that type of hitter whether he can draw a lot of walks or not. Hence in the 70s you see the list of names shift from folks like Dennis Menke and Wayne Garrett to Gene Tenace, Otto Velez, Ken Phelps, Rob Deer. The last of the former type of these "uber walkmen" to make an appearance is Lance Blankenship, who had a brief career as the "Max Bishop of the 90s" with the same franchise (only now on the opposite coast in Oakland).
"Superstar uber walkmen" became much more commonplace in the 70s and 80s (Willie McCovey, Jim Wynn, Jack Clark) and this continued into the 90s with Mark McGwire and Gary Sheffield. The ultimate "superstar uber walkman," of course, spread himself over the 2000s in a way that still produces malingnant memories for many folk: that would be Barry Bonds, who matches Bishop for the most BB≥H seasons (2001-04, 2006-07) and ties Yank Robinson with four consecutive seasons in this rarefied company.
Some lesser sluggery types (Adam Dunn, Jack Cust, Morgan Ensberg) accompanied Bonds as the 2000s kept on producing a semi-robust number of BB≥H seasons, but things have dissipated in the 2010s, as quants followed the lead of neo-sabes and continued the push toward ever-increasing ISO as the "one-stop shopping" model for run scoring.
That's troubling news, of course, but it's just another sign of the times. We do have four BB≥H seasons in the short span of our current decade, however, but these are not likely to lead to a new lifeline with respect to this ever-endangered species. There are still no low/mid power guys hitting .250 and walking 20% of the time: guys like Stanky and Ferris Fain seem to have gone the way of the dodo bird. Now we have Yasmani Grandal (close to the target sub-type in his '21 season, but too much ISO) and Joey Gallo (whose .160 BA creates a lot of backlash in a timeframe troubled by the decline in BA even as quants decry the need to measure it anymore).
Soto is clearly a greater talent that those two, of course; and he can always get more aggressive, since his next team, when paying for someone with a superstar reputation, is going to want to see higher BA and higher RBI totals that came out of Soto's 2022 season (still an excellent year, as measured by OPS+ and other "more advanced metrics"). So far in spring training this year, Soto is being more aggressive, and he's blistering the ball. We're all for that, as it will be better for the sub-species if he moves out of it for awhile, so that he might return to it for a number of years after he's 30. We still need superstars just as much as we need "uber walkmen"...
