A DIFFERENT 40-40 CLUB--DOUBLES & HOMERS

ONE of the abiding passions here at the BBB (note how the thug-uglies have even sullied our acronym with their puerile and parlous legislation) is to examine the frequency of events occurring in the game.

And so it is with this post, where we slam together two big hitting events to look at just how often hitters manage to combine doubles & homers at mega-robust levels.

How robust, you ask? Pretty darned robust, actually. You should take this opportunity right now to guess just how often a hitter has managed to hit 40+ doubles and 40+ homers in the same season.

WE start with the TimeGrid™ (because it's trademarked, natch!) so that you'll see how rare this feat actually is--and because the clustering of this feat will become dramatically apparent.

The total (38 over a span exceeding a century) is indeed rare, and as you can see it is particularly aligned with periods of high offense. Note the 55-year gap from 1940-1995 that is broken up only by the lone occurrence of a 40+ 2B/HR achievement in 1973. 

WHO was that masked man? As the long chart below will reveal, he turns out to be the oldest man to ever achieve this feat. (We'll tease you with a few more clues--he was 33 years old when he did so; he exceeded his total of 44 HRs two years earlier, in the first season that he was freed from playing his home games in a ballpark that seriously suppressed homers. And he achieved this feat in the season after a more fabled teammate had perished in an airplane crash.)

Have you got it yet? Count down twelve rows in our master chart of all 38 instances of 40+ 2B/HR and you will find the answer.  That's right--it's Willie Stargell, not quite yet known as "Pops."

EXPLORING the list will reveal that the kings of this particular 40/40 feat are two first basemen--Lou Gehrig and Albert Pujols (who each managed it three times).

Those who did it twice--Babe Ruth (1921, 1923); Chuck Klein (1929, 1930); Hank Greenberg (1937, 1940), Albert Belle (1995, 1998); Todd Helton (2004, 2005); and David Ortiz (2004, 2005).

The only players on this list not in the Hall of Fame are Pujols and Belle. The former will make it imminently, while the latter will almost surely be bypassed by whatever gaggle of Vets Committee flunkies who will be in charge of voting over the next half-century. 

The other players who seem certain to evade induction in Cooperstown have been proliferating on this list in recent years--there are nine of these, beginning with Hal Trosky in 1936. We already covered Belle, the only player on this list who appears on it twice and is odds-on to be shunned by the Hall; he's followed by Ellis Burks, Richard Hidalgo, Derrek Lee, Mark Teixeira, Alfonso (Don't Call Me Al) Soriano, Chris Davis and Josh Donaldson. (Miguel Cabrera will definitely get in, but things are more problematic for Nolan Arenado.)

We'd be remiss, however, if we failed to note that it is only Albert Belle who has managed to hit 50+ 2B and 50+ HR in the same season. That was 1995, which also happened to be a shortened season due to labor strife. Belle managed his singular feat in just 143 games...

We should also note that the only teammates to achieve a 40+ 2B/HR combo in the same season are David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez, who managed it in the Red Sox' curse-breaking season (2004). 

AND finally, a shout-out to a big, big name not on the list--Shohei Ohtani came close in 2024, hitting 54 HRs but stalling out at 38 2B. (He definitely won't do it in 2025--after 114 games, he's hit only 16 doubles.)

PRAISE (& SURPRISE) FOR THE "ZOMBIE RUNNER"...

 IT's not popular...

After all, no one is thrilled with the notion of "walking with a zombie."

BUT the designated runner rule that baseball implemented in 2020 has the backing of insiders, and isn't going away. 

It bothers purists and analysts alike, because it chips away at the game's laissez-faire underpinnings (on one hand) while (apparently) undermining the home-field advantage (on the other). 

And a majority of "analytic pundits" dislike it because it encourages one-run strategies, specifically the sacrifice bunt.

THUS the pejorative nickname--which is a shame, because baseball's Lords actually managed to create something tantalizing and strategic when they put this rule into play.

We will need a lot more data to accumulate before we will know everything about the impact of the "zombie runner." There are nuances in how the rule plays out that can't be quantified properly until we have at least 50,000 plate appearances in hand for extra-inning games played under its aegis. (Which part of the batting order is involved in the tenth inning is a variable that needs measurement--and that data doesn't seem to have been collected yet...and, sorry, but we aren't going to do it. Perhaps we can cajole the folks at Forman et soeur to do so at some point--but don't hold your breath.)

BUT we can measure a surprising trend in the general won-loss records of teams in 2025 who are employing the "lubricant" of the one-run strategy--the sacrifice bunt. 

At the All-Star break (roughly 60% of the way through the 2025 season), we find that 13 teams have made a sizable increase in their usage of the sacrifice bunt during extra innings (as measured by the statistic sacrifice hits per 100 PA, or SH/100).

As the chart (at left) shows, a comparison of the extra-inning won-loss records in 2025 for these 13 teams shows that their WPCT in such games has improved in excess of 100 points over their won-loss record in extra-inning games in the previous five seasons (2020-24).

The 13 teams in question had a .474 WPCT (369-409) in extra-inning games from 2020-24. Thus far in 2025, that WPCT has jumped to .579 (70-51).

Of course there could be random factors that are influencing these results, so we'll have to wait for (at least) the season's end to state with greater confidence that one-run strategies are having a greater impact on extra-inning success. But the fact that the teams employing the sacrifice bunt can be found across the game's quality spectrum is an encouraging sign.

Three of the 13 teams who've increased their use of the SH in extra-innings are under-performing their 2020-24 WPCT--the White Sox, the Mets and the Mariners. But, conversely, that means that upwards of 75% of the teams who've significantly increased their use of the SH in extra-innings games are doing better in such games.

WE don' t know if that margin of difference (.579 this year as opposed to .474 in the previous five seasons) will hold up, but its mere existence is a surprising (and pleasing) occurrence.

It leads to a more reckless, anti-purist impulse on our part: a possible limited expansion of the "zombie runner" rule to cut down a bit further on the number of pitchers appearing in a game and to introduce another strategic component into the game. Are you ready? Here goes:

--Beginning in the top of the eighth inning, whenever the game is tied at that point, the visiting team can call for the employment of the "zombie runner" for the balance of the game.  

Data indicates that about 13% of all games are tied going into the top of the eighth, so we will suggest that visiting managers be permitted to call for the "zombie runner" up to twelve times in a season.

Given that run scoring increases in innings where the "zombie runner" appears, the expansion of the strategy into earlier innings should cause a further decrease in extra-inning games. 

(Under this rule, the visiting team can also wait until the ninth inning and implement then--some of that will depend, of course, on which batters are available for which innings.)

IT's another strategic wrinkle that can add tension to games that are already as close as a game can get score-wise.

Would it become more popular this way? Hard to say--but we could go for it.  Of course, YMMV...

CAN WE GET "SLOPPY JOE" TO SHUT UP ABOUT SHUTOUTS?

IN two words: probably not. The one thing we know about Joe the P. is that when he gets the bit in his teeth, he will run with it for as long as he can.

It's true that shutouts are up thus far in 2025. And this is creating consternation in some quarters--specifically, that semi-elite niche of "veteran punditry" that fashions itself as a bulwark of "cutting-edge minutiae" that is all-too-often over-represented as being of oracular significance.

Such obsessive territoriality, as practiced with overly-energetic gusto by Joe (and, in a less egregious vein by Jayson Stark, avuncular avatar of the "it's never happened before, folks!" beat) is mostly a way to generate what we all have taken to calling ''content" (but with a diminishing sense of just how useful it actually is).

"Hold the pickle, Joe!"

SO how are these two handling the uptick in shutouts we mentioned? They are following an approach that has created an ongoing malaise in statistical analysis in the festering world of "baseball numberology" (and, yes, in case you were wondering, we are once again being sponsored by our long-time buddies at frightquotesrus.com). 

What is that malaise, exactly? It's the use of a counting stat to characterize a situation when a rate stat is actually needed to create proper historical context.

Joe the P. has, as a result, turned into one of his most maddening alter-egos--"Sloppy Joe"--as he milks this story even more shamelessly than we did ten years ago when we documented the diminuendo of the complete game. (Thankfully, that particular diminuendo got so dim that we could abandon it entirely...)

Now it's true that we might see the highest number of shutouts in history this season. (Also, the greatest number of 1-0 games--a subset that Joe has staked a claim to by following in the dubious "naming rights" approach pioneered by Bill James.) For Joe, such games are now called "Blylevens"--even though Walter Johnson actually participated in many more of them. That's the curly-Q approach that epitomizes the appropriative hubris of ''popular sabermetrics"--a brazen breeziness that dovetails into the clickbait world with a special brand of odious precision (but, as it turns out, is sloppy as hell).

Jayson Stark at least recognizes a nuance that has been left in the crockpot by Sloppy Joe: namely, that not all counting stats are equal. The 82 1-0 games in 1968 (and, yes, we're sticking with the term "1-0 game"...) occurred over a season span with about a thousand less games in a season than is the case now. That tells us that 82 such games in 2025 are a proportionately smaller percentage of total games played than was the case in 1968.

The same is true for shutouts in general. The 204 that we've seen thus far in 2025 represent 7.8% of all games; the 1-0 games are about 17.5% of all shutouts. We can generate such rate stats for these categories for all of the seasons in baseball history, and by doing so we can see where those rate stats reside in the data set. (Sloppy Joe could have done the same thing, of course, but the counting stat is what creates clickbait.)

WE can even do something that looks like actual analysis--and here is an example of that: a correlation between the percentage of shutouts in a season with the average runs per game (R/G) in the corresponding year.

Sloppy Joe suggested that the rate of shutouts in 2025 was at an all-time high: the diamond marker shown in red (OK, actually orange, the lighting is a bit dim in here, folks!)--the percentage of 7.8% mentioned above--gives the lie to such a claim. While that percentage is above the historical average for shutouts per total games (which is 6.5%), it is not close to the highest such yearly percentage in baseball history--a record set in 1908 (11.9%).

NOTE the diamond marker colored in yellow: that's the data point for 1968--the season of eternal trauma for those invested in defending the sabermetrics-to-analytics klatch from the nagging criticism that this twenty-year process has deformed the game on the field as it evolved into a runaway juggernaut. Any time anything starts to remotely look like what occurred in 1968, a barely-suppressed sense of hysteria starts to well up in these folk, who then start picking at the scab of the never-quite-healing wound that has continued to problematize the game for the past twenty years.

But let's look at that "red diamond" again, noting that it sits almost exactly in the center of our scatterplot. Is it both intriguing and harrowing that baseball is currently centered in its range of historical distribution with respect to R/G? Our expectations for run scoring have still not quite adjusted from what took place during the long "offensive explosion" (1993-2009), and the ping-pong effect that we saw during the initial phase of the "launch angle era" (2015-2021) seems to be subsiding into an ungainly phase of pitcher domination (as we predicted would be the case back in 2012). 

That red diamond (4.37 R/G, 7.8% ShO), representing 2025, shares one nearly identical data point with the previous year (4.39 R/G), but note that shutouts were a good bit lower in 2024 (6.6%). What the scatterplot suggests is that there is a random effect that comes into play in the middle ranges of R/G:  the distribution of such games can simply vary. While there is a generally linear correlation between R/G and ShO%, it is neither absolute nor monolithic in nature.

(And before we move on--what about that black diamond at the bottom of the scatterplot--representing the second-lowest percentage of shutouts in a season? What year is that, anyway? It's 1930...)

WE can see the variation at work more starkly (no pun intended...) when we look at how 1-0 games fluctuate as a subset of shutouts. The red diamond again represents 2025 (to date), with 18.6% of all shutouts being 1-0 games. That's merely above average relative to the historical average (17.5%). The pale green diamond represents 1968, where nearly a fourth of all shutouts were 1-0 games. The black diamond represents the ultimate extreme instance of this--30.4%--which happened in (that's right) 1908.

BUT this scatterplot also reveals another reason for the undercurrent of panic in Sloppy Joe's presentation of the counting stats. While this data has fluctuated up-and-down across time, the general direction it has moved is downward, a pattern that is particularly pronounced beginning in the late 1970s. Note also that the numbers have clustered at an all-time low for 1-0 games relative to shutouts in recent years. (Some of that might be traceable to the HR/G spikes we had in alternating seasons from 2017-21.)

We can see that clustering in the ''most/least" table (at right), which shows that four of the top ten years for the lowest percentage of 1-0 shutouts have occurred since 2017, with 2024 being the third lowest percentage in all of baseball history.

It's that pervasive recent decline in 1-0 games that has been turned around (thus far) in 2025, about a 40% jump from 2024. But 2025 doesn't have anything close to the highest rate of 1-0 games in history: in fact, it doesn't even have the highest rate in the 21st century (that belongs to 2014). 

AND it's really that sudden, unexpected uptick that has kerfuffled the feathers of Sloppy Joe, who's apparently decided he only knows from counting stats and erroneously inflated the situation by using those counting stats to overdramatize what is (at least partially) a random effect.

Others who've picked up on this in the media (that particular grapevine is thick and well-tended...) have asked for some kind of explanation as to why this is happening. But their attempts to do so (bad teams bloating the totals, the apparent deadening of the ball) did not bear fruit. The likely answers are: a) some of it is truly just a random effect; b) the continuing emphasis on hitting homers has created a strategic vacuum where teams in 1-0 games remain stubbornly reluctant to employ one-run strategies due to the lingering effect of the "launch angle hegemony," which causes extra games to fall into the 1-0 bracket. (Interestingly, though it's a small sample size, it appears that teams do attempt to steal at elevated levels in such games--but the success rate for SBs is lower than average.)

The situation is not without some interest, but Joe is employing sloppy methods to exaggerate its significance. While having him bound and gagged is tempting (especially as the Orange Menace goons attempt to normalize suppressive tactics ahead of an even more unseemly power grab...), we think there's at least some chance that this will self-regulate.

MOST important, though, is the maxim that a rate stat is more useful than a counting stat. Sloppy Joe needs to hold that thought instead of "holding the pickle"...

INTERLEAGUE STANDINGS AS OF 6/30/25

ONE of the oddest things about baseball in the 2020s is the simultaneous expansion of interleague play and the disappearance of data anatomizing the results of those games. We'll eventually reconstruct that data in total here (as time permits), but it is rather vexing to note that this subset of competition (now comprising almost a third of the overall schedule) continues to be given such short shrift. 

A key aspect of this will be evident in the interim 2025 results (shown below). The old model of interleague play was circumscribed in a way that did not create a random effect in the seasonal results--the games were played in monolithic chunks within the season. The new model creates a perpetually uneven distribution across the entire season. This will be evident in the data...

WE organized the data by league/division to show this randomness that insinuates itself even at the most granular level. For example: note that the NL West (near the bottom of the display) shows a massive range between the number of interleague games played by team in the division.

It's also important to capture the differences in distribution of games according to opponent quality, an area that has been almost completely ignored by fans, media, and analysts ever since the inception of interleague play. Our tripartite column structure summarizes individual team results by opponent quality (.500+, .499-, and overall) to show how opponent quality factors into this subset of game results.

IT shows a number of interesting things, of course--and you are invited to explore it all at your leisure. One of these that its noteworthy, however, can be seen in the interleague record of the San Diego Padres when broken out in this way. Among NL teams, the Padres have faced the most "good" opponents in the AL, and (as Jeff Angus would say if he were here...) have had their asses handed to them--a visual image that can be saved from pornographic associations only by substituting "donkeys" for "asses". Their current 3-15 record against good AL teams contributes mightily to the distance they find themselves behind the Los Angeles Dodgers (a nine-and-a-half game difference, which as of this writing constitutes the entire difference in the standing between the two clubs).

We leave you to examine this data in your own way, but let's close with a note about the uneven distribution of opponent quality between the leagues. So far AL teams have played far more games against good NL teams than vice-versa. They are playing better against such opponents than their NL counterparts have done against good AL teams (.458 WPCT to the NL's .423). But the distributions we see in the summary data at the bottom shows that there is a randomness skewing how these games are affecting the overall standings.

In the second half of the year there will be a great preponderance of AL teams playing bad NL opponents...what to watch for is a possible, even quite likely shift in the overall interleague results (bottom right of the figure) where the NL currently holds a slight advantage (184-180).

WE will revisit this data at the end of August to see if such is the case. Stay tuned...

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!