10+ HR MONTHS: 1940-1959

WE figured out how to make the data displaying the "10+ homers in a month" that occurred in the 1940-59 time frame less overwhelming for our presentation format--so let us praise the Lord and pass the historical ammunition already. 

However, let's start by reminding you what the overall "data arc" for these occurrences looks like (the TimeGrid™ chart at right), which may make it clear that we may not be able to successfully show the "divisional play" details without visual pain/strain.

We bring you 145 instances of "10+ homers in a month" for 1940-59; that total will rise to 194 for the 1960-79 frame, and will then nearly double in 1980-99, when the post-postmodern "homer happy" world arrives and seizes us by the throat. It will be messy, but let's not get ahead of ourselves: there is still plenty of time for us, in the words of our dear departed friend Michael Peake, "to drive off that bridge when we come to it."

SO let's just dive into the data and let it have control of our wayward steering wheel...

The 1940-49 row shows how "clustered slugging" disappeared from the game in during WWII, with literally no one hitting 10 homers in a month for both 1944 and 1945. The total number of such occurrences just managed to reach the same level that had occurred in the 1920s (though sixty percent of that total was supplied by one man--Babe Ruth).

Post-war 10+ homer months take their time to reassert themselves, but they are jump-started by the oft-forgotten longball exploits of Ralph Kiner, whose prolific slugging set the tone for much of what has followed suite ever since. (Though Aaron Judge is clearly more athletic that Kiner overall, he is the latest incarnation of the behemoth-like right-handed slugger who has come to be the iconic symbol of the game over the past seventy years.)

The other "ur-models" of this archetype (Hank Greenberg, Joe DiMaggio) each lost significant portions of their careers to WWII, thus likely losing several more instances of "10+ homer months" in the process. Of the two Greenberg was the more prolific, but he was also three years older, which suggests that their overall home run production in the lost years (1942-45) would likely have been similar (producing at least two more 10+ homer months for each of them over that time frame.

The "master chart" in our TimeGrid™ chart shows the consistent uptick of this phenomenon during 1950-59, but it also shows how the frequency level remained in alignment for what occurred in 1947, eroding a bit in the second half of the fifties, and only propelled to a new level by the game's first expansion in 1961.

BUT let's go ahead and look at the denizens of the "10+ homer month" list in the 1950-59 time frame. As you'll see, we solved our data presentation problem by breaking the list into two--first, those hitters who managed the "10+ homer feat" more than once during the time frame.

This is your "slugger class"--the higher-end homer hitters of the decade, whose power levels as a group peaked in the middle years (1954-56) before dissipating somewhat as the decade played out. The Dodgers' slugging core (Duke Snider, Gil Hodges) has its potency fatally undermined by the simultaneous onset of old age and the cross-country move to a ballpark that was on balance less conducive to slugging (particularly for a lefty masher like Snider.)

But as you'll now see, there's another level of slugger capable of a "home run cluster" now and then, the type of hitter that teams became particularly focused upon finding during the decade. These are the folk represented on the second fifties breakout (at left), reflective of that nascent shift in the hitter types which is just getting underway. It will go a bit dormant in the 1970s, but will start to re-emerge in the mid-1980s, spiking in 1987 (a year that resulted in a change in how the strike zone was called, which served to delay the onset of lusty homer hitting that would inundate the game in the mid-1990s). 

THESE guys are the type of hitter that will start to have multiple manifestations of "clustered homer hitting" (as manifested in the "10+ homer month") on a more frequent basis in the 1990s, leading us to a kind of "steady state" phenomenon in which an average of 30 such "10+ homer months) would occur over the ten-year period from 1995-2004. 

There was simultaneously a peak level of performance and a depth of second-tier power hitters during this time frame, with the result that these "10+ homer months" reached their peak in the 1995-99 time frame. The 1999 total of 42 such occurrences in that single year is still the record, despite the exponential increase in the number of players swinging for the fences in the most recent ten-year period (2015-24). 

JUST to mark a little time, and to facilitate similar future comparisons, here's a chart that shows in which actual month the "10+ homer months" occurred in 1950-59. 

Possibly you'll remember from an earlier post that the traditional mid-April start date for the season that persisted into the early 1970s had prevented anyone from hitting 10 homers in April. That fact is dramatically present in the "month-by-month chart. The distribution pattern of lower totals on the edges of the season, as captured by the progression here (0-16-30-29-22-7), remained relatively constant until it began to flatten out into the August-September time frame in the late 90s--which is still the case today.

AND now for the truly fun part of this data set, those folk who make the "10-homer in a month" roll call despite having yearly totals that are a good bit less robust than you'd expect for someone who'd hit double figures in a single month. 

As we get deeper into the 50s, the dominant offensive shape pattern (the player having the spectacular overall performance in a month, including a high batting average) seems to leach itself out of the data. In the 1940s, all three "unlikely" members of the list conform to type; in the 1950s, however, we see that eight of the ten hitters on the list have sub-.300 BAs, showing that the throughline to the age where some have proclaimed that "batting average is dead" really begins in that decade. 

Bob Speake is the poster child for this "unlikely" list in the same way that Vince Barton was for the 1930s: two guys who had a hot long-ball month before pitchers figured out how to neutralize them. It's possible that there will be someone who has an even tighter ratio of seasonal HR totals to his "10 in a month" month than Barton (just 16 lifetime homers--even Speake had 31!), but it seems at least as unlikely than the fact that both of them are on the list at all. (But, as Jayson Stark likes to say:"because--baseball!"). 

WE will leave you to guess who on the 1950s lists of "10 homers in a month" will turn out to have even more occurrences on the list than Willie Mays (nine in the 50s, 18 overall in his career). Look over that list, and make your guesses--we move on to the seductive sixties in short order...