1) There are 11,364 players in history, through 2006, who had 500 or more plate appearances in a season.
2) Only 444 of those players (4%) finished the season with the exact hit total you would expect if you simply multiplied their career batting average times their season’s at bats. And many of those were players who only played one year in the majors.
3) Only one-third of regular players finish the season within five hits of their career batting average.
4) Less than two-thirds are within ten hits.
5) By decade the total number of players with 500 plate appearances is:
1870s—zero
1880s—296
1890s—649
1900s—736
1910s—807
1920s—791
1930s—813
1940s--753
1950s—732
1960s—962
1970s—1256
1980s—1181
1990s—1269
2000-2006—1119
6) Through 2006 there have been 3,166 players who hit .300 in 500 or more plate appearances—28% of all hitters.
7) There are more than twice as many .300 hitters as hitters with .400 on-base percentages.
8) There are almost twice as many .300 hitters as hitters with .500 slugging percentages.
9) Barry Bonds career divides in half like a peanut.
10) I am really sick of talking about Barry Bonds.
These were among the things I discovered when I set out to answer a simple question: What player had the most atypical season in baseball history? The straightforward general question, as always, divides into picayune smaller questions, which have answers which turn out to be not as interesting as I thought they would be.
The player who missed his career batting average by the widest margin was: Hugh Duffy in 1894. Different sources give different batting averages for Duffy in 1894, but his average, whatever it was, was astronomical. His career batting average was “only” .324, so when he hit .440 in 1894—which is the figure I’m using, but the conclusion won’t change if you use a different one—when he hit .440 in 1894, he overshot his career average by a whopping 62 hits.
The reason this list is less interesting than I thought it would be is that I was looking for players who had atypical seasons, and that’s not exactly what I found. What I found was a bunch of guys from the 1890s. Batting norms were extremely unstable in the 1890s—starting out very low in the early 1890s, shooting up to historic highs in the mid-1890s, after the pitching mound was moved back to its current distance, and then crashing again at the turn of the century, entering the dead ball era. Because of this, the seven most off-the-norm batting averages of all time were all posted between 1887 and 1901.
As I’ve written somewhere, or if I haven’t I will, I have come to believe that we made a mistake in re-labeling 19th century baseball as major league baseball. When I was young 19th century baseball was
1) almost entirely ignored,
2) little known and less understood, and
3) not considered to be major league baseball when it was referenced.
A line was drawn across baseball history. Post-1900 was “modern” baseball history, and 19th century baseball was like the edge of the ocean on medieval maps: Here Be Monsters. The first generation of serious baseball researchers, led by Lee Allen, erased that line. For many years I supported that decision. In recent years I have come to see it as a mistake. It was a wonderful thing that 19th century baseball was re-discovered, because it is extremely fascinating and we wouldn’t have major league baseball without it. We should have re-examined it, but we should not have re-labeled it, because, when you look at it, 19th century baseball really has almost none of the characteristics of “major league” baseball.
But it’s there, and I don’t want to push myself out on an island by treating this material different than everyone else, so. . .the seven most atypical seasons in major league history are all from 1887 to 1901. The most atypical batting performances since 1901 are:
1. Norm Cash, 1961. Cash in 1961 had 535 at bats, and Cash had a career batting average of .271. We thus would have expected him to have 145 hits. He actually had 193 hits--+48 hits.
2. Jesse Burkett, 1905, -47 hits.
3. George Sisler, 1922, +47 hits.
4. Darren Erstad, 2000, +47 hits.
5. Charlie Gehringer, 1941, -44 hits.
6. Cy Seymour, 1905, +43 hits.
7. Bill Sweeney, 1912, +43 hits.
8. Chuck Klein, 1930, +43 hits.
9. Heinie Zimmerman, 1912, +43 hits.
10. George Sisler, 1920, +42 hits.
What I really was looking for was the seasons like Cash’s and Erstad’s, and, since Erstad is still around, let’s talk him for a moment about him.
In theory, I should have banned Erstad from the list, since he is still active, and we don’t really know how far above his career norm his 2000 season will be, once his norms are fixed by retirement. But I decided not to exclude him from the list, because it seems extremely unlikely that Erstad will improve his career batting average from here on out. His career average entering this season was .286. There’s about a 99% chance his career average will wind up lower than that.
That means that Erstad, who is already within one hit of having the greatest hit discrepancy from his career norm since 1901, is very likely, once he retires, to move ahead of Cash, and to actually have the greatest hit discrepancy since 1901. Erstad’s 2000 season, when he had 240 hits, is among the greatest fluke seasons of all time.
There are really only three seasons on this list—Cash, Erstad, and Seymour—which represent the type of season I was trying to find, which is atypical seasons. The other things we find with this search are:
1) Seasons at the very beginning and very end of careers. Charlie Gehringer in 1941 and Jesse Burkett in 1905 weren’t having aberrant seasons; they were just finished. Al Kaline, 1954, turns up on several of these lists. He was 19; he just wasn’t really Al Kaline yet.
2) Players who had their best seasons in atypical years. 1930, of course, was an atypical season, and 1911-1912 was a little hiatus of the Dead Ball era. The cork-center baseball was introduced in 1911. For a year or two batting numbers jumped. But the practice of scratching or defacing the baseball, which really began in 1910, progressed rapidly after 1912, and dragged baseball back into the Dead Ball era.
3) Players whose level of ability actually changed because of injury, like George Sisler, who was a career .361 before his illness, .320 afterward.
4) Players who were early in their career or late in their career at a time when the game underwent a seismic shift in run production levels.
Those things are instructive, and interesting in their own way, but not exactly what I was looking for. Ed Delahanty, a career .346 hitter, hit just .243 in 1891, which is the great batting average under-achievement of all time. But the National League batting average jumped from .245 to .309 between 1892 and 1894, and the change in the league actually explains most of the change in Delahanty’s record.
Looking for “true aberrations”, rather than one of the four things listed above, here are a few:
Joe Torre, 1971 (+41 hits)
Luke Appling, 1936 (+41)
Bret Boone, 2001 (+41)
Miguel Dilone, 1980 (+40)
Mickey Vernon, 1946 (+39)
Andres Galarraga, 1993 (+39)
Carson Bigbee, 1922 (+39)
George Brett, 1980 (+38)
Adrian Beltre, 2004 (+38)
John Olerud, 1993 (+38)
Rod Carew, 1977 (+37)
Cito Gaston, 1970 (+36)
Wade Boggs, 1992 (-36)
Al Simmons, 1935 (-36)
Carlos Delgado, 2000 (+35)
Tommy Davis, 1962 (+35)
Alan Trammell, 1987 (+35)
George Scott, 1968 (-34)
There is no player in history who EXACTLY matched his career batting average in a season of 500 or more at bats—hundreds of players who matched it to three decimals, but no one who EXACTLY matched it, other than the one-year players. That was a surprise to me, also; I would have guessed that there would be some player who hit exactly .300 for both career and season, or .250, or who went exactly 2-for-each-7 or 3-for-each-11 or 4-for-each-15 or something, both for a season and a career.
While I was looking for most atypical batting averages (actually, most atypical hit totals), I also looked for seasons with atypical on base percentages, slugging percentages, OPS, and atypical home run totals. These lists tend to be dominated on both ends by Barry Bonds. Bonds has such an unusual career progression, with such extraordinary totals, that he tends to have seasons at the top and bottom of both lists. And. . .you know, everything’s been said about Barry Bonds, so I’m just going to skip that:
1) The greatest over-performance in on base percentage that wasn’t Bonds was Norm Cash in ’61 (+75 times on base).
2) The greatest under-performance ever was Hughie Jennings in 1892.
3) The greatest “legitimate under-performance”, not explained by age or seismic shifts, was probably Ozzie Smith in 1979 (-49 times on base).
4) The greatest slugging percentage over-achievement in a season was Duffy in 1894, again (+132 bases), followed by Luis Gonzalez in 2001 (+124 bases) and Brady Anderson in 1996 (+123).
5) Barry Bonds in 1989 was the only player ever who was 100 total bases BELOW his career norm (-106), although this could change (but probably won’t) when his career norms settle.
6) To figure the “OPS discrepancy” I multiplied the player’s OPS times his plate appearances.
7) The greatest discrepancy ever which isn’t Bonds or Duffy was Sammy Sosa in 2001 (+207).
8) The greatest under-achievement in OPS which wasn’t Bonds or the early 1890s was Mark McGwire in 1991 (-157 bases).
9) Barry Bonds’ 2001 home run rate is almost exactly twice his career norm.
10. The greatest home run over-production in a season that wasn’t Bonds was Gonzalez the same season (+33 homers), followed by Brady Anderson, Maris, Davey Johnson, Hack Wilson in ’30, Tilly Walker in ’22, Adrian Beltre in 2004, Sammy Sosa in 2001, Hank Greenberg in 1938, Jay Bell in 1999, and Carl Yastrzemski in 1967.
11. The greatest home run under-production in a season that wasn’t Bonds was Rafael Palmeiro in 1988 (-24), followed by several more steroid-era players. . .McGwire in ’91, Palmeiro again in ’89, Sosa in 1990, etc.
12. Two of the greatest home run under-producers of all time were teammates: Kirby Puckett and Gary Gaetti in 1984. Puckett hit no homers (-16), Gaetti hit only 5 (-19). Suggesting the possibility that the Twins’ two World Championships may have been aided by their team being among the first to discover. . well, I’d better not go there. Nor will I point out that Gaetti was bald and had acne and Puckett died young.
(About two years ago I wrote another article about this general subject, fluke seasons, but at the time I didn’t have anywhere to publish it, so it hasn’t been published, and I am now unable to find it. If I can find that one, I’ll publish it here as well. Thanks.)