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!