WHO'S THE BEST NINTH INNING HITTER OF ALL TIME?

 DO you have a guess? Or do you already know the answer in your bones, based on that increasingly rare American commodity (common sense...)?

Ah, yes. We always hit a trough in this time of year, uncanny as it is (even after eighteen years). Our lifeline to the greatest ninth-inning hitter (who is still the greatest hitter of all...), the man who gave us our names, passed away on this day in 2007. There is something in the enduring afterlife of a seriously complex relationship that passed through DNA into the limbic system that organically takes us into a world more melancholy than the one described by Brian Wilson in his heartbreakingly beautiful, autobiographically-charged ballad, "'Til I Die." 

(As you know, Brian passed away a week ago, leaving behind a trove of tunes with a musical and emotional range beyond any & all of his fellow songwriters. Brian famously loved baseball: his favorite baseball player is #7 on the list of best ninth-inning hitters--which is incredibly serendipitous, since #7 happens to be his uniform number. Yes, that would be Mickey Mantle...)

IT turns out that there are three Yankees in the top 7 ninth-inning hitters. In between we have the battle between two left-handed hitters who are each being paid more than the GDP of 94 world nations. Right now Shohei Ohtani is #4, while Juan Soto is #6. (In between them is the only man we know of who hit over .400 in the ninth inning--Ty Cobb.)

That leaves two right-handed hitters left out of the three not-yet-named:  #2--Joe DiMaggio, whose .690 SLG in the ninth is still dwarfed by the lone man in front of him. #3? Hank Greenberg, who seemed to specialize more in ninth-inning doubles: his ratio of 2B to PA is the highest of all. 

But let's not ignore the last three in the top ten while we remind you that Dad saw all of these guys save for Ohtani and Soto--and one other slugger, whose presence here at #8 on the list will likely be surprising: Pete Alonso. He most certainly saw eventual teammates Ted Williams and Jimmie Foxx--Williams making the list despite a shockingly low batting average (.282). Who knew that the game's first scientific hitter went for the downs in the ninth?

SO that leaves only #1, and while he didn't really have a candy bar named after him like Reggie Jackson--who, somewhat shockingly, ranks #400 on the list(!!)--he's so far above everyone else that it is truly laughable to contemplate. He ranks #1 in HR (55), #1 in RBI (172), #1 in OBP (.489), #1 in SLG (.770!), #2 in hits (behind Cobb and Mel Ott, who's #12 on the list). 

Of course it's Babe Ruth! We neglected to include his rank in OPS, which is (duh!) #1...but look at the actual number: 1.259. (Well, yes, you could've added that up from what was provided above, but who has time for that when ICE is playing a pestilential form of paintball with America?) 

That's 131 points of OPS above Joe D., 202 ahead of Ohtani, and (using the abacus behind my back like Jimi Hendrix...) 463 points higher than Mr. October. 

HERE are the top 20 hitters in the ninth inning as ranked by OPS. Some surprises await in the 11-20 slot:

Our break line is at 1.000 OPS, which creates a population of just seven hitters, including Brian's Mickey, who walked the most in the ninth inning. But in the .950-.999 range we have some names that will raise eyebrows (possibly due to a semi-relaxed sample size, which searched for those with as few as 150 PAs in the ninth inning--hello, Yordan Alvarez...but it's impressive nonetheless, n'est-ce pas?).

AND Bill Terry (.370 in the ninth!) ...Roy Campanella...and two more Hall of Famers (Chuck Klein, at #11 just a fraction behind Foxx;  Larry Walker at #19). Possibly Joey Votto (#19) will join them (possibly). And a little shout-out to Dave Justice, definitely at his best in the late clinches (as Halle Berry might still admit if you caught her in a forgiving mood). 

But give it up for the two WTFs here: Larry Sheets and Chet Laabs. A couple of non-descripts who nevertheless stood tall in (what is usually) the final frame. 

WE'LL pick through some of the lower depths in this breakout and show you some shocking ninth-inning numbers in a subsequent post. Of course, not all ninth inning at-bats are charged with the drama of a game on the line but there's enough romance here to give this breakout some sizzle. Especially when it reinforces an assessment that nearly a century after the Bambino played, is often subject to quibbling. 

And thanks for the stories, Dad. The way you told them, it was just like being there with you... 

CATCHING UP WITH THE MONTHLIES: 7+ TRIPLES IN A MONTH

Would you believe?

YOU knew we would return to this...and you knew, sooner than later, that the subject (or is that the sub-subject?) would turn to triples.

But before we give you the data on most triples in a month, some context that might even prove relevant to what you'll shortly see. We saw that the record for most doubles in a month and the record for most homers in a month is the same: twenty. The seasonal record for both of these stats is a bit over three times as many as the record for a month: 20/67 for doubles, 20/73 for homers (or, 20/62 for folks who want to eliminate all of the hitters in the 1998-2001 time frame from consideration). 

We won't turn this into a diatribe against all that flat-earth stuff (even if we advertise ourselves as embodying "the lost art of the diatribe"). Instead, we invite you to work backwards with us--definitely not our usual modus operandi!! 

NOTE that the record for most triples in a season is 36, held by Maxwell Smart's boss: Owen "Chief" Wilson. (And if you got that joke, our condolences.) So if the ratio we've seen for doubles and homers holds true, what would that seasonal total "ratiocinate" down to for the most triples in a month?

Have you got the answer? It's 11. And it just so happens that the record for most triples in a month is 11. (It's not held by either the Chief or Maxwell Smart, either.)

The record-holder (or the culprit, depending on what mood you're in...) is Larry Doyle--"Laughing Larry" to his friends...and he must be laughing even now as he realizes (posthumously, of course!) that he holds the longest-standing record in baseball history. He set it in 1911, one season before Max's boss set the seasonal record. 

It was May 1911 to be exact--and it was doubly (er, make that triply) impressive because Doyle did it in a month where his team, the New York Giants, played only 24 games. (Many monthly records tend to cluster around months where extra games were played due to the uneven nature of the baseball schedule in "olden times.")

It wasn't even that great of a month for Doyle at the plate--not bad, mind you, but (as we'll see below), some of the also-ran contenders for most triples in a month were simply astonishing offensive performances--including three in which the batters hit over .500 for the month in question. 

AND, of course, you'll never have heard of those guys...just Shoeless Joe Jackson and Ty Cobb, that's all. They had those months back-to-back in 1912--yes, the year Max's boss hit 36 (and also managed to hit nine triples in a month, which rates a twelve-way tie for third place). Three hitters banged out 10 triples in a month--Mike Donlin in 1903, Joe Cassidy in 1904, and Amos Strunk in 1915. But let's honor the heavy hitters who posted stellar overall months when hitting at least seven triples...

THERE are several Hall of Famers on this list: Cobb, Rod Carew (the second-to-last hitter to hit 8 or more triples in a month), Edd Roush, Enos Slaughter, Al Simmons, Goose Goslin), but there are also a few folks who are considerably more obscure: Freddy Leach, Cy Seymour, Frank "Wildfire" Schulte, Al Wickland, Pete Reiser, Cozy Dolan and Carl Reynolds. 

As you can see from the numbers, however, they all raked in these high-triples months.

That was not quite the case for Larry Doyle--though his month wasn't exactly bad, it was just...a bit lesser. However, he's the record holder...and likely to stay that way for the rest of recorded time.

WE close with our TimeGrid™ chart (at left) which will confirm that the monthly triples record is an artifact of baseball's deep past. 86 of them (and 86 was Maxwell Smart's "agent number"...) occurred from 1901-1930, with just 25 more instances in the past ninety-five years.

THE last hitter with seven triples in a month? Jose Reyes, in 2011--exactly a century after Doyle set the record. The last hitter with eight triples in a month? Carl Crawford, in 2004. The last with nine in a month? Pie Traynor in 1931.

We are not quite sure how to compute the odds that we will see anyone hit seven triples in a month within not only our own lifetimes, but in the lifetimes of our generation's grand-kids. And, as Max would say, would you believe it even if you saw it with your own eyes? 

We think not...

WHO'S THE BEST 9TH INNING HITTER (ACTIVE PLAYER DIVISION)?

SPOILER alert: the answer to our question is not going to be particularly surprising.

But we thought this sub-category of hitter performance would be intrinsically interesting: it's part of the seemingly endless array of "splits" breakouts, but is one that's been systematically overlooked in favor of more specific "situational" notions.

While it's a bit nebulous compared to such other breakouts, the "ninth inning" has its own aura, a kind of romantic resonance that conjures up the game's more consciously structured narrative--it's the kind of thing that semi-fabled faux-phenomenoligst Sam Miller might swoon over (though there's probably too much data available to provide those "Husserlian goosebumps" he seems to covet most). 

It's that "last chance" thing that injects something at least akin to romance into the limbic systems of baseball fans--a longing for drama, for clutch performance, for the twist ending. And it makes some of us hope for empirical results within the data that create surprise and wonder (even if the odds of such occurring are even more remote than the prospects of a last-minute change of fortune).

SO we now present to you the hitters who hit well in baseball's "end state"--the active hitters, that is. (We'll return shortly with a similar list for those who are no longer playing.)

We've limited the list to those with at least 150 plate appearances in the ninth inning, with color coding that breaks at various OPS levels (.975, .900, .875, .850, .800). (The full list contains nearly 250 active players, though we're obviously not going to display it all.)

The two names at the very top--Shohei Ohtani and Juan Soto--are, as noted earlier, quite unsurprising (but impressive nonetheless). Pete Alonzo's presence in the topmost reaches of this ninth-inning pantheon might be more of an eyebrow-raiser, though. (As might also be the case for Christian Yelich, whose .323 batting average is noticeably more robust than his overall lifetime BA.) 

And what about Tyrone Taylor? (We suspect sample size will rear its head in his case...but you never really know, now, do you?)

The romance of the ninth inning injects a twinge of sorrow when we see the performance level of Anthony Rendon--the possessor of the highest ninth-inning BA of anyone still currently on (or at least adjacent to) a 40-man roster. 

WE can also see why the Dodgers would feel confident that they might create what was called "four o'clock lightning" in the Bronx during the late 1930s/early 1940s as Yankee hitters (led by guys named Joe DiMaggio, Charlie Keller and Tommy Henrich) would often turn around ballgames in their latter stages (with a good bit of it happening in the ninth inning). The elevated ninth-inning performances of Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman (#1, #8 and #9 on the list) suggest that a similar "late lightning" effect has descended upon Chavez Ravine.

(Though we should note that there's no current way to look at ninth inning performance in terms of home vs. away games--one of the lingering limitations in the data readily available at Forman et soeur, etc. Which is odd, because given the romance of the "ninth-inning turnaround" you'd think that its occurrence would be more definitely documented--how many times does the visiting team turn the game around in the ninth? (We know that it is quite rare--but since we track "walkoff wins," why don't we have the analogous quantification of the "visitor turnaround" inning?)

THE surprises in this "ninth inning data" are to be found far from the top performers. The more pedestrian performance of Aaron Judge, for example, raises at least one eyebrow. More shocking, though, is the discovery of big-name hitters who seem to crumble in the ninth inning, as shown below:

Cal Raleigh, currently tearing things up in the AL with a homer spree eclipsing even the mighty Judge, looks much more like his old self in the ninth. And it's surprising to see stalwarts like Nolan Arenado and José Ramirez down in this region, along with sluggery types such as Jorge Soler, Anthony Santander and Kyle Schwarber. 

YOU are now officially encouraged to ponder who will be at the top of an all-time "ninth inning hitter" list (for those who are more definitively retired than Anthony Rendon). That will be coming to you soon...

THE A's HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BY SIGNING TREVOR BAUER

IT is long past time to jettison the ongoing hypocrisy that has prevented the embattled Trevor Bauer from a chance at redemption. 

That has been made more manifest than ever with the recent decision by shyster commish Rob Manfred to reinstate the formerly "unholy eighteen" (with Pete Rose leading off, and Joe Jackson batting third) for Hall of Fame eligibility. 

The pyramid of "moral offense" that was baseball's ironclad perimeter has been breached. But what happened to Trevor Bauer has much more greyscale than baseball's (thankfully crumbling) black-and-white pseudo-pieties. If gambling is now an offense similar to the use of illegal substances, then it's clear that Bauer--who served his ban and was then ostracized from MLB, should long ago been given a chance to resume his career in American baseball.

It goes without saying that Bauer has rubbed many people the wrong way from the dawn of his baseball career: he created conditions that resulted in his ostracism. And the actions that created a firestorm of controversy over what now can more than credibly be seen as a sexual blackmail scheme continue to unfairly prevent him--virtually alone amongst all his peers--to resume his career.

(YES, there is the case of Julio Urias, a repeat offender of domestic violence. And, of course, Wander Franco, embroiled in a queasy-at-the-very-best transactional sexual "arrangement" that has all the fragrance of a leaking septic tank. Franco's legal fate is still TBD: he may well be looking to play baseball in prison. Urias, who pled no contest to charges brought against him, will come off the MLB restricted list next month: the jury is out as to whether anyone will give him a chance to redeem himself.)

It's now getting very late in the game for Bauer, who's 34 and may not have enough left in the tank to be the top-flight pitcher that he was in 2020-21. He's currently back in Japan, after a stint in Mexico last year. He's pitching well, and it's clear that there are teams with gaping holes in their pitching staffs who could easily give him a chance to redeem himself, both on the mound and in the clubhouse. 

One of those teams, ironically: the Dodgers, whose relentless skein of pitcher injuries in the recent years can be seen as a kind of payback for their shattering lack of empathy and rush to judgment regarding Bauer. (The monolithic, stuffed-with-money organizational behemoth is a troubling analogue to the plutocratic malaise currently enveloping an imperiled American democracy; while the Dodgers stop short of overt criminality, they embody an unseemly monopolistic approach to talent acquisition: it is no wonder that they have wrested away the "Evil Empire" monicker from the Yankees.)

IT would be wonderful if the Dodgers, persistently plagued by what is now approaching an entire roster's worth of pitchers residing on the injured list, would somehow be forced to turn to Bauer. But even we know better than to think it could ever come to that, as perversely appealing the notion is. No, the two 2025 teams who have absolutely nothing to lose by giving Bauer a chance are the Colorado Rockies (currently 12-50) and the FCG Athletics. (FCG is not a location: it's an abbreviation for "Floating Crap Game," which perfectly describes the slowly escalating, claustrophobically bizarre limbo of the former Oakland franchise, now ensconced in a minor-league park where their ballpark bunkmates, the Sacramento Solons, who--in another cruel irony--are the AAA affiliate of the San Francisco Giants, whose long-ago veto of the A's bid to build a stadium in San Jose was a key piece in the A's ever-exploding puzzle.)

Clearly the A's are a perfect psychological fit for Bauer, though they are highly unlikely to admit it. And, for those still wanting to punish Bauer further, assigning him to a team whose current ballpark is a living hell for pitchers should add some poisoned sprinkles to his ice cream cone of "forgiveness." 

AND it's also clear that Bauer would, in fact, willingly embrace such a scenario (we stop short of calling it a full-fledged "opportunity"). We suspect that he knows that whatever surfaces for him will be some form of a "stacked deck." That said, both parties have nothing to lose--and the A's current battle fatigue (given that in the last 30 games, they have matched the Rockies with a 6-24 record) should prompt them to try just about anything/anyone to stop the bleeding that oozes from the pitching mound whenever they play.

So, yes--Bauer the banned pariah resurfaces with baseball's vagabond team. It's a peculiarly American story, isn't it? But we know that A's owner John Fisher--the Coddled & Deluded One--would never stand for it. It would involve actually owning the travesty he has created (and what those directing things within the septic tank of baseball's uniquely "fragrant" form of plutocracy have callously enabled). 

WE hope that Bauer gets his chance--but we are not holding our breath. 

W(H)ITHER THE ROCKIES??

Note: the "C" here does not stand for "Colorado"--read on!

COULD the lowest of the low turn out to be the team that plays at the highest altitude?

That's what a larger & larger slice of the baseball media is surmising, as they unerringly zero in on the "catastrophe scenario" that has become legion in all aspects of American life--reaching its nadir last November, bringing us the punctuated disequilibrium of chaos on top of travesty.

Thus the Colorado Rockies--always the game's square peg--have become the latest franchise catastrophe in a roundelay that no longer insulates large markets from baseball's version of the "drunk tank." They've been bad for quite awhile, but in a low-key way: given that they seem to exist apart from everyone else, creating cartoon-like games in the thin air of their home park, it seems that everyone (including the Rox' owners) have just considered their foibles to be fait accompli.

BUT now they've gotten so bad--and the timing of their badness is in sync with a recent epidemic of catastrophic teams, all seemingly intent on eclipsing the gauntlet of ineptitude thrown down by the 1962 Mets--that they can no longer be ignored. As of June 2 in this catastrophic year of 2025, they've started the season by winning just nine times in fifty-nine games--the worst start of a season by anyone.

And the media is all over it, with the requisite allusions to the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, who won just 20 games in a year where 95% of their talent had been strip-mined away from them by something that we are witnessing in full force in 2025: massive, pandemic-level corruption.

But even the Spiders won 11 of their first 59 games. Of course 11-48 was the best part of their season...after that it was le deluge: the ravaged creepy crawly folk went 9-86 (!!!) the rest of the way. They finished with an inverse flourish, losing 40 of their last 41 games. (Those with a serious masochistic bent are directed to J. Thomas Hetrick's Misfits! for an exhaustive exhumation of this singular travesty. "Exhausting" might be the better adjective, however...)

It's so convenient: our wise guy only has to change one letter
in order to re-use this sign in 2025...

IN keeping with the malingering malaise that is cascading through America at this moment, though, it appears that a not-insignificant portion of the media is beginning to root for a kind of "Spiders redux" outcome for the Rockies. It's easier to get into this variant of "doomscrolling" when it kicks in at the start--none of this "collapse at the end" nonsense...if you're going to stink up the joint, fold early and stay folded, goddammit! Even though some folk were ready to invoke the star-crossed Spiders last year when the White Sox found themselves in a endless "flush cycle," the problem for the wise guy in the picture was that the Sox waited too long to metastasize--they'd already won too many games when they went into free-fall. 

SO here are the Rox (not the Sox...) doing it from the get-go and keeping the foot off the pedal as their opponents rip them apart. Some folks are going to be really annoyed if they emerge from their acute catastrophe phase and become merely bad. But that's what is likeliest to happen: unlike last year's catastrophe model, they cratered too early to wallow in decrepitude for an entire season. 

How do we know this? Admittedly, the data is not 100% foolproof, but it has had an unwavering pattern when ineptitude is the sole reason at play--remember, the Spiders' season in Hell was arsoned into inferno status by corruption. That's not in the picture for the Rox.

AT left, here are all the teams with 59-game collapses in the same forlorn region as Denver's high-flown low-lifes. It turns out 9-50 isn't the worst such skein, even leaving the Spiders out of it. The 1916 Philadelphia A's had the worst of it--four times, bottoming out at 4-55. Last year's "catastrophe model," the White Sox, went 8-51 from July 4 to mid-September and looked like a lock to get under those fabled Metsies--but they only got half the job done, losing one more than "Casey Stengel's follies" but winning one more as well. 

The 2021 D-backs also had a 9-50 stretch from May into July, but they won 52 games and wound up being merely bad. Same with the 2012 Astros. The pattern is the same for all the other teams in this same region of 59-game collapse: the 1969 Padres, the 1949 Senators, the 1932 Red Sox, the 1923 Boston Braves, and a troika of A's teams (1915, 1937, 2023). 

WHAT happens, as the "Outside Span" column demonstrates, is that all these teams have an inverse regression to the mean and become merely bad over the balance of the season. Taken as a group, and adjusting the end-of-year projection up to apportion 162 games to the reeling Rox, these teams went 39-64 in the remainder of the season. (As you can see, that's exactly the record that the 2023 A's posted after their eye-popping start that season.)

When we apply that aggregate to the Rox, and add it up, it suggest that they will finish the season with a 48-114 record. Granted, that is somewhat worse than merely bad, but neither is it an all-time record for futility.

TO give you the other side of the range--the worst "worst case scenario"--we point to the Rox' "Pythagorean Won-Loss Record" or "PWP" thus far in '25 (which is figured by a formula using their runs scored vs. their runs allowed). Right now, that works out to a .220 WPCT. If they can hold that pace from now to the end of the season, they'd finish with a record of 36-126, which would indeed be the worst since 1899.

There are twelve teams shown in the table above: ten of the eleven on it before the Rox joined them all cleared the 1962 Mets' .250 WPCT with relative ease. Last season's Sox pulled out of a mid-season free-fall (7-44 over July and August) to post a merely bad 10-15 record in September to partially evade a desiccated date with destiny. Chances are extremely high that the Rox will do the same over the balance of the 2025 season.

BUT, then again..."now batting third for the Rockies, Arthur Rimbaud"...

Stay tuned!