TAKING IT DOWN A NOTCH: 3-HR GAMES & THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST

NOW that's a headline...makes us think we're back in the salad days when we were the blog sponsored by fright-quotes-r-us.com, a company that was run out of business in 2015 when a certain orange-o-tang came down that blasted escalator, sending the entire "mediot" world into a never-ending orgy of "headlines from hell"...and what's a poor mom-and-pop disinformation service to do?

So we've seen that the four-homer-in-a-game club is quite exclusive (but not quite mutually, as is the case in our world of post-reason bran(d) serial non-sequiturs (now a staple of the "long form narrative" diet). But what about three-homers-in-a-game? Just how rare are they? If you've sidestepped the upfront throes of our standard opening salvo of punishment, it's possible that you noticed a clue in that headline...

Aw, well--as Joe Schultz would say (surely you know that, right?)...well, what the shitfuck, we'll just give it all to you in one fell swoop, since grumpiness is rising as fast as attention span is falling...for those of you who actually remember what "the number of the beast" is, you'll see that 3-homer games are not quite there yet, but there's a good chance that it will happen this year. 

(Sadly, it's not likely to do so before the other "number of the beast"--61446--but, as John Lennon noted: "tomorrow never knows"...)

SO that number is probably quite a bit larger than you'd thought it would be, given how there are less than twenty 4-homer games. (We will confess only to the crime of thinking the same thing.) The last thirty years (344 occurrences) have more than doubled the number of 3-HR games that occurred in the seventy-five years since Ken Williams first did it (in the twentieth century, at least). And the pace of the 2020s--assuming there is actually baseball in the last year of the decade--is still (there's that word again...) "escalating."

We're thinking you'd like us to shift gears and put more of a human face on this data--after all, things are inhuman enough already. 

And we do want to be accommodating, especially in this year of woe. But there are so many human faces involved with a number as, well, numerous as this...however, we have an idea that might suffice.

Perhaps you'd like to know which players had the most 3-HR games in their careers. That would bring in those faces (though we're not going to show any of 'em, mind you) but at a more manageable level. So just as we do so, try to guess how many hitters have managed to have two or more 3-HR games. 

As you can see, that list is pretty long and we had to start it a bit earlier in this blog essay that we'd have preferred to do (casualties of war, and all that...) but we think you'll enjoy the cavalcade of names. 

Notice that we remain devilishly playful and have listed the players for each quantity of 3-HR games alphabetically by first name--a chummy way to be lazy.  And we did note some interesting features within the data (who doesn't love data with quirks...except, of course, for the stuff that the current "dog(e)s of war" are making up as they go along).

ARE you surprised to see that it's Mookie Betts, of all people, who is giving Slammin' Sammy Sosa a run for his money (and, apparently, the rest of yours too...) for the top slot in 3-HR games? We love guys who've earned asterisks and other strange markings next to their names; Mookie and Sammy are those type of guys, being the only hitter to have two 3-HR games in two different years and the only hitter to have three 3-HR games in the same year respectively. 

But of all those "marked men" who, like us, await the name of the hitter who'll be the 666th entry on this list, the one that stands out is the one who had the greatest distance between his three-homers-in-a-game feats. And that would be the one and only Reggie Jackson, who first hit three in a game on July 2, 1969, but didn't do it again in the regular season until September 18, 1986--a span of 17 years (equal to Casper Gutman's fatuous quest for the Maltese Falcon).

Of course, there is the little matter of that 3-HR game in the 1977 World Series--but you split hairs your way and we'll do it our way...

SO we'll quickly pivot to the fact that Reggie's 1986 three-homer feat does not make him the oldest hitter to do so in baseball history. He only ranks third all-time on the list when we sort it that way. When we look at the ten oldest players to have a 3-HR game, there are definitely some fabled names--and a few names and facts that you might find astonishing.

First, the tenth-oldest is also the eleventh-oldest: the remarkable Nelson Cruz had two 3-HR games within nine days of each other in 2019, at the age of 39 years and change (OK, 24 days & 33 days). As you can imagine, no one else has done anything remotely like that in baseball history.

The next two are also surprising. Late-blooming slugger Steve Finley, who had four such 3-HR games in his career, had his last in 2004 at age 39-47 (39 years, 47 days). Aging Negro League refugee Bob Thurman is eighth with his 3-HR game on August 18, 1956 (age: 39-97).

From there, the list gets more predictable: Frank Thomas, 2007 (39-113); Dave Winfield, 1991 (39-192); Alex Rodriguez, 2014 (39-363). Yes, that's just two days before his fortieth birthday.

So who's next? How about Babe Ruth--that fabled three-homer game in Forbes Field on May 25, 1935, age 40-108...that last shot possibly the longest of his entire career. 

Then it's Reggie, at 40-123. #2 is Jason Giambi, reveling in his late-career "Rocky Mountain high," but actually having his advanced-age 3-HR spree in Philadelphia. His age: 40-131.

AND it's a delightful surprise (especially for our recently-departed partner-in-crime Brock Hanke, who might have known this fact but never mentioned it to us...) to discover that the oldest hitter to ever have a 3-HR game is none other than Stan Musial. Stan the Man caught a bit of a break and found himself in the Polo Grounds against the Mets on July 8, 1962...and despite his age (41-229) and a nagging 0-for-17 slump, he took it to Jay Hook twice and added a third round-tripper (sounds a wee bit psychedelic, n'est-ce pas?) against Willard (Don't Call Me Willie) Hunter. 

So, yes, big names do big things at the end of their career--and it's similar at the other end of the spectrum: we'll just name the three youngest 3-HR guys: Al Kaline (20-119), Eddie Mathews (20-350), and Mel Ott (21-182). 

WE'LL get back to you when the 3-HR list collides with the "number of the beast." Until then, sleep with one eye open..

A NEW MEMBER IN THE 4-HOMER CLUB...

AH, rarity...it keeps us from becoming too jaded for our own good. (Maybe...)

But it is refreshing to know that some events really are still rare. Such as the four-homer night that Eugenio Suarez had yesterday. It was just the seventeenth time since 1901 that the feat was accomplished. (It happened twice in the 1890s as well: we wave through the gauze at Bobby Lowe and Ed Delahanty.)

Suarez had hit three homers in a game twice previously: in 2020 while with the Reds, and again last season in his first year with the Diamondbacks. (And we'll let you guess for awhile longer about how many times hitters have hit three homers in a game...)

The launch angle era hasn't produced an uptick in 4-homer games; the last time it happened was in 2017 (J.D. Martinez, also for the D-backs, against the Dodgers). As feats go, it's tricky: that last time up seems to be an especially difficult one to navigate. Suarez has seen his BA drop through the floor in this decade: he had a lifetime average of .265 through 2019, but that's dipped to just .228 since 2020. His power has remained steady, however, and that has kept him gainfully employed thus far this decade. (That's due in part to a long-term contract he signed shortly after he joined the Reds; he's a free agent this offseason.)

Suarez' feat comes with several anomalies, but before we go there let's take a look at who else is on the list:

Some very big names here--Gehrig, Klein, Hodges, Colavito, Mays, Schmidt, Delgado, J.D. Martinez.

And other solid if lesser sluggers: Adcock, Horner, Green, Josh Hamilton.

And then there are the rest: Seerey, Whiten, Cameron and Gennett.

Suarez probably belongs in that second group: after all, he has nearly 300 lifetime homers (the exact number, as of this writing: 286). If we look at these hitters by the most number of homers they hit in a season, he's close to the top of the heap: only Gehrig and Mays have hit as many or more. (Suarez slammed 49 HRs with the Reds in 2019.)

Finally, the data above shows that he's in rarer company still: 

1) He's just the second hitter to hit four homers in a game since 1901 to do so when his team lost the game (the other one: Horner, in 1986).

2) And he's the oldest player to do so, at 33 years, 282 days--more than two years older than Chuck Klein.

Something else that pops out from the data details: no 4-HR game guy has managed to steal a base in that same game. (Of course, only six of the seventeen players shown here were actually parked at first base during their 4-HR games: two via walks, and four via singles.)

SO now we sit back and wait to see if someone else can duplicate this feat in 2025...if so, it would be only the third time that two hitters have hit four homers in a game during the same season. Stay tuned...

THE TORPEDO KERFUFFLE...

CAN baseball provide enough of a distraction in 2025 to make folks forget about the short-porch fascism surrounding us? Our previous prelude to the current age of total prevarication brought us a strange form of iambic lunacy as sluggers and chuckers waged a Tik-Tok war centered around "launch angle" (presaging a series of real-life wars that managed to push the "war over WAR" into the background). 

The HR/G values have ping-ponged over the last ten years in a surreal fashion, as a rift zone opened across the game, with the long ball emulating the horrendous dumbed-down momentum of American politics and culture in its omnivorous overreach. And the 2025 baseball season has begun in a harrowing emulation of the "flooded zone" malevolence we see in Washington DC, a kind of kudzu of ketamine-stoked aberrance. Where the fascist pols have their Executive Orders, baseball has its torpedo bats.

AND it's the former Evil Empire (the New York Yankees) who've thrust themselves into the "muskrat love" role of insurgent with its long-ball barrage--fifteen home runs in three games, paralleling the bureaucratic blitzkrieg that currently plagues the nation. Those new-fangled bats are the latest in the wars of technology that rage like wildfires in the heaving hinges between Europe and Asia, and their explosive entry onto the scene might wind up dominating the discourse about the game in 2025. 

Will HR/G move back in the direction of 2019--the most absurd season in the history of baseball? Of course, it's too soon to tell, but we can at least put the early-season bombings in the Bronx into historical perspective while we wait for the additional shoes to drop...

THAT three-game barrage is the place to start. As an opening-season salvo, it created an astonishment that riffed through the media with the headlong force of a pandemic. It was instantly proclaimed a record--and it was, at least for the first three games of a season. But as is so often the case with such things, there was little to no follow-through to determine just how record-setting that fifteen-HRs-in-three-games thing really was. 

And that's (of course) where we come in, taking the call on the red phone while we were distracting ourselves with the saucy teases at OnlyFans (another ledger entry in the "any port in a storm" department...) and springing into action faster than Signalgate can make a pancake-makeup President into a torpid human torpedo to provide hard data to a nation still reeling from the unelected consequences of its November calamity.

FIRST, what the Bronxsters did over the past weekend is not an all-time MLB record for the most HRs hit by a team in three consecutive games. The chart (at right) tells us that the record actually belongs to another Yankee team, set in 2020, the pooped-up "pandemic season" that was the grimly appropriate followup to the folly of 2019 (aka "Launch Angle Hell"). The record is actually nineteen (19!).

Those three days in September 2020 seem to have passed without anyone acknowledging this prodigious post-lapsarian feat. But now at least we can see that while what happened this past weekend is rare (only the seventeenth time that it's happened in baseball history) it was not a singular bomb-dropping moment a la the Enola Gay (and let's hope that the hockey pucks handling the Pentagon web site will see fit to restore the image of that fateful airplane that reminds us of the peril still casting a shadow over us: if we are going to purge anything, let's purge homophobic stupidity once and for all, shall we?)

The chart shows that fourteen of the seventeen incidences of "bombs away" cluster-tatering have occurred since the advent of the offensive explosion--which crossed a threshold in HR/G values. Those have managed to remain even as the other aspects of the explosion have withered away...

WHEN we look at the nine homers hit by the Yanks on Saturday March 30, we should keep in mind that the temperature that day was unseasonably high (78 degrees at game time) and that there was a wind blowing out to CF at 15mph. We might figure that several of the HRs hit there on that day were aided by the wind, and that on a normal early spring day, four or five of them might have stayed in the ballpark. While that will immediately be seen as overly speculative by the very folks who will likely spend much of the 2025 season identifying all the HRs hit with torpedo bats, we're going to run with it for purposes of illustrating just how prevalent three-game stretches in which a team hits ten or more homers have become in baseball since the 1990s.

The TimeGrid™ table (above left) makes clear just how common such occurrences have become; the heat-map coding displays how it slowly evolved, hitting an unexpected peak in 1987 (the first "year of the homer") and gaining momentum in the 1990s and 2000s. There was a bit of a lull from 2007-2014, but things heated up once the dotard descended that damned escalator, leading inexorably to 2019, baseball's year of ultimate absurdity.

2021-2024 has the oscillating ("iambic," as the late Brock Hanke would say) pattern as the "post-launch angle war" continues, with interchangeable roles: sometimes the hitters are the Israelis, sometimes they're the Palestinians; sometimes the pitchers are the Russians, sometimes they're the Ukranians. (As Ray Davies noted back in 1970, it's a mixed-up world and we await the first slugger on the baseball diamond named Lola.)

AND just to show you how prevalent the 10+ HR in three consecutive game thang has become in our Phangraf-infested age, here are the franchise totals for such events. Surprisingly, the Bronx Bombers are currently second on the list: but they're just one behind the Braves and it will be quite a disappearing horsehide race between them (if, of course, you're into such things.

Please note that grand total at the bottom of the chart: a team hitting 10+ homers over three consecutive games is, at this point in baseball history, decidedly not a rare event. Granted, 1183 incidences is only about one-fifth as many sexual liaisons as the prolific French crime novelist Georges Simenon claimed to have had over his lifetime, but it's still a considerable number and we should note that their escalation over the past thirty or so years can properly described as markedly promiscuous...

OF course those who lust for precedent-shattering still have hope on this April Fool's Day for something the world has never seen before (which is definitely not to see the White House invader without his Mop'n'Glow complexion--cue dance of the horror emojis). The two-game HR total for the Bronx Bombers, whose next game occurs in a few hours, is currently at 13. Thus if the torpedo men (and Aaron Judge, who's doing it with his usual "toothpick") can roll a "seven" tonight, they'd eclipse their 2020 record with 20 homers for three consecutive games (#s 2-3-4 of the already cacaphonous 2025 season). 

As our last chart (at left) shows, these Yanks are already in a ten-team tie for the most HRs hit in two consecutive games. And so the record-chasers have an additional cheap thrill potentially available to them tonight: if the law firm of Volpe, Wells, Chisholm and Goldschmidt (torpedo lawyers one and all...) can launch just five homers tonight, that will set a new record for most HRs by a team (14) in two consecutive games. They would break the record that their 1939 brethren set in a single day across a doubleheader en route to a fourth consecutive World Series win (a year in which the priapic Simenon apparently had 583.7 sexual encounters, if we take his yearly average and adjust for "park effects"). 

SO...hope (or something somewhat grotesquely similar) springs eternal as we enter "the cruelest month," at least for those who need to sustain the overweening over-indulgence in tater-tot baseball. Will the Yankees scratch that itch? Or will the Diamondbacks' Corbin Burnes, with his "U-boat slider," put a stop to this madness? Even if he does, it will probably be only a temporary respite from a game still vulnerable to "launch angle's" siren song...as we are contractually obligated to say at this point: stay tuned...

POSTSCRIPT: The Yankees hit three more homers tonight in New York, bringing their total in Games 2-3-4 to sixteen, making that trio of games into the  eighteenth member of the 15+ homer-in-three-games "family." Arizona rallied for five runs in the eighth inning behind a grand slam from Eugenio Suarez to hand the Bombers their first defeat of the season (final score 7-5). With Saturday's nine-homer game out of the current sequence, it will take something extraordinary to bring this issue back to the forefront, but we'll be watching the HR/G averages as they evolve over the course of 2025...