HR/G IN AUGUST '25: WHILE WE WERE SLEEPING...

DON'T look now, but...

HR/G veered upward sharply in August of this YOC (that's "Year of Chaos." in case you were wondering),  with taters launching at a rate of just over 1.28 per team per game. 

That's the thirteenth highest monthly HR/G average in major league history.

THE chart at right displays the HR/G since the "crazy year" (2019, when things just went haywire for the entire season). The pattern in 2025 is similar to what occurred in 2023--HR/G crescendoing in August at a level just under the most tatery April in baseball history (that would be April 2019).

(BTW, the data in the two rightmost columns represents the STDEV for HR/G in each season when we compare the monthly values. You can see the deviation ranges from four to nine percent from year to year.)

The escalation pattern for the past 5-7 seasons can be seen in the data at the bottom, where we included 2019-20 (top line) but decided to exclude them (bottom line) for contrast. When we do that, the June-August HR/G averages for the past five years flatten out, and the values for the edges of the season (April, September) decline.

 But as can be seen, there are all sorts of odd anomalies that pop up--note that HR/G in September actually increased over the August average in 2021-22, and took a steeper-than-usual drop last season.

WE don't see this as particularly alarming: it's just a variant of the usual pattern, delayed a bit due to smaller-than-usual jump from June to July that what we'd seen in 2023-24. 

Another reason why we aren't particularly perturbed about it is that runs/game did not spike at a level commensurate with the HR/G uptick.

We were simply lulled to sleep by what was a sluggish July, where the run scoring uptick also lagged behind the HR/G rise.

(Note that the STDEV between monthly R/G levels is a bit less than half what we've seen for HR/G.)

The other reason we aren't too concerned about the August HR spike is that the R/G level it produced (4.71) ranks only 182nd all time (out of 703 total months from 1901 to the present). The 2019 R/G averages in June through August are all in the Top 100, but still far off the pace set when hitters were more attuned to putting the ball in play and not so copiously swinging from the heels.

SO--whither September? We should expect a falloff, but the exact amount is hard to predict. Nationwide hot weather didn't spike until the middle of August this year, and it appears we'll have a warmer-than-average first half of September...so one might want to expect something more like 2023 than last year. =

Stay tuned...

THE BREWERS' "TWELVE-WEEK SCALD" IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT

YES, it's kind of a big deal. (Quoting the Raven--or those raven-haired temptresses that AI has made bewilderingly interchangeable...)

Bailey, Spencer, Kookie and Roscoe--what a rotation!

Those Milwaukee Brewers, bucking to be a viable "anti-sabermetric" alternative to the overlords of nattering numerological nuance, have just completed a 69-game stretch (hey, there's no eliding the entrendres here!) in which they won in just under 77% of the time (giving us a perfect excuse to festoon this entry with a image of Louis Quinn, the talky "tout" of that smirky "martini noir" TV series that was not set in Wisconsin). 

This has naturally attracted a lot of attention, particularly from the "phenomenological" wing of post-neo-sabermetrics (coughSamMillercough) who leer over the "old-style" apparatus of winning when it happens to coincide with a hot streak of rare and epic proportions. What follows from that is an effort to apportion the "luck" (which wriggles provocatively in the manner of those "AI babes") that we can see undulating in sabermetrics' "sanity check"--the Pythagorean winning percentage.

IT looks like Sam has found a way to apportion all of the trace elements which have coalesced into an unusually long, hot summer for the Brew Crew into a semi-convincing argument--but we look at what happened to the 2023 Atlanta Braves and wonder if all of that phenomenological virtuosity is simply a cadenza for cadenza's sake. 

To put the Brewers' gaudy 53-16 stretch in proper perspective, we need to look at all the teams who have equaled or surpassed it in baseball history. And, as always, we're the only ones who do that (as others fiddle while Rome burns). 

First, the generic context: how rare is such a feat? The TimeGrid™ chart (at left) tells us.

And, yes, it's plenty rare--only twenty times (not counting duplications*) in baseball history. 

THE question that then arises is what type of team has such an incredible hot streak? Is it a random kind of thing, where a team that previously was merely good, or possibly even mediocre (or worse) had some kind of miraculous turnaround? (And you might fix your eyes on that "1" in the slot representing 1914 for an example of such a team, the "Miracle Braves" who went from last place in July to the pinnacle of baseball success in October.)

But when we look at the full list of the twenty teams to meet or exceed the Brewers' .768 WPCT over 69 games, it becomes clear that most of these teams were much better overall than those Miracle Braves. That list shows that the Braves have one of the lowest full-season WPCTs of all the teams with this type of "twelve-week scald"...

ALMOST all of the other teams on the list have a much higher WPCT than the Braves (the exceptions: the 2013 Los Angeles Dodgers and the 2022 New York Yankees). Like the miracle team of 1914, the 2025 Brewers were under .500 when they began their extended "scald"--if we extrapolate their W-L record at the end of the scald out to 162 games, we'd see that they'd finish 103-59. That still places them deep in the lower echelon of overall quality amongst the teams who've flown so high for twelve weeks.

And there's no guarantee, of course, that they'll even do that well, as even a basic look at their stats will verify. We're not going to "go phenomenological," of course--we leave that to those who aspire to be more baroquely overwrought. What's clear from a look at the personnel on the Brewers' roster is that they have a solid but unspectacular group of offensive performers buttressed by the short-term transformation of Andrew Vaughn, whose performance in the past four weeks has given them superstar-level performance that has boosted their run-scoring ability to accelerate their success (29-4 in the last thirty-three games of the scald, as opposed to 27-9 in the first thirty-six). 

On the pitching side, the Brew Crew is getting a hot year from Freddy Peralta, and has been boosted further by the advent of Jacob Misiorowski and the triumphant return of Brandon Woodruff. But Quinn Priester is clearly not as good as his won-loss record (11-2). The no-name Brewer bullpen has improved over the course of the season, particularly the middle relievers. 

FLIP all of that into a prognosticative blender (now on sale at your nearest Target...) and we figure a cool-down, though one not as lukewarm as the Brewers were during of 2025's first third. A 20-16 finish over the final six weeks would bring them in at 99 wins, which would validate some portion of the outsized veneration they are receiving as the game's most recent "Mudville success story." 

What we may find, however, is that in 2026 the team will encounter an elevated level of adversity that they were able to elude for much of 2025, and like other teams that blossomed in unexpected ways (our long-ago favored 1969 Mets), were unable to sustain the lofty levels they touched. Teams that looked indestructible and downright monolithic in one year can crumble the next (1970 Reds, 2023 Braves). Some will regroup, others will not. It could be instructive for the reader to examine the list of "twelve-week scald" teams and see how many of them remained near to their overall season performance in subsequent years. 

AND note also how few of these teams wound up winning the World Series in the cool autumn aftermath of their scalds...

--

*There are many iterations of these high-flying spans that accrue from a search in the Forman et coeur database--we've removed all but the final manifestation of the "scald" for purposes of providing the essential lists of teams. (There's also a list that can be compile for such spans that extend from one season to the next, but that's a whole other story...)

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...