An odd concept, the Triple Crown.   It’s kind of like a Grand Slam with a leg missing.  Does a triple crown mean that you led the league in triples? 

            Tennis has a grand slam, meaning that you win four titles.  Golf has that, too.  Nobody ever wins it.   Horse racing has a Triple Crown.  Baseball has one true Triple Crown, for leading the league in Home Runs, RBI and Batting Average, and then people make up other ones, triple crowns for pitchers and such.   Hat tricks. . .a hat trick is three, also.   Why?   Why doesn’t Denny’s have a Hat Trick breakfast?   “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,” wrote Shakespeare, “but just imagine if you had three of them?”

            The Triple Crown, like the Triple Double or the Batter’s Cycle, is a concept so arbitrary it can almost be called capricious.   What about leading the league in Runs Scored, RBI, and OPS?   Wouldn’t that be just as good?  What about leading in Hits, Walks and Homers, or Batting, On Base Percentage and Slugging?   Wouldn’t that be just as legitimate a three-pronged accomplishment?   Maybe it just needs a cool name.   The Golden Fork.    Barry Bonds was the last man to win the historic Golden Fork, leading the National League in Batting, On Base Percentage and Slugging Percentage in 2004 and also in 2002.   Other than Bonds, however, no player has won the magic Golden Fork since Todd Helton in 2000.   Or how about The Magic Troika?

             There are thirteen or fourteen Triple Crowns in baseball history, depending on whether you recognize Jimmie Foxx as the batting champion in 1932.  We haven’t had one since 1967, however, and at one point I assumed that the reason for this was expansion.   When you increase the number of players competing for each “crown”, you make it more difficult to win all three.

            Research, however. . .nasty habit, research. . .research proved that this was untrue.   This was ten years ago, maybe fifteen.  I remember that Frank Thomas was young, so it may have been thirty years ago.   Anyway, in order to demonstrate that the reason for the disappearance of Triple Crown winners was expansion, I set out to demonstrate that the number of players leading their own team in all three categories was the same as it has always been.  If you take two teams, three teams, four teams, eight teams, you still get the same number of players leading in all categories.   It’s just a lot harder to lead fourteen teams than it is eight.

            Unfortunately, this turned out on examination to be entirely untrue; it’s not the same as it has always been, at all.   John Dewan has some new data on this, for a Stat of the Week, but the percentage of teams which had one player leading them in all three categories nose-dived between the early 1950s and the mid-1980s.  

            Since the mid-1980s this number has gone back up.  It’s not back where it was in the early fifties, but it’s pretty close.   I would explain why this happened, why this number went down and then why it went back up, but. . .don’t have a clue.   Somebody would have to explain it to me first.  

            I have been playing around with Triple Crown data here for several days.   I started with the batting records of all players in baseball history, and then I eliminated those who

            a)  played before 1900, or

            b)  had less then 450 plate appearances.

            I sorted the remaining players by decade, so that all of the players from the 1930s, let’s say, were “competing” for the Triple Crown with all of the other players from the 1930s.    I then started re-arranging players into competing “leagues” of players, to see how often one player would win the Triple Crown.  

            I did this for several days, and there is a whole lot of stuff I didn’t learn by doing this.  However, I did emerge from this gigantic waste of time with a few definite conclusions.   I will put a few of these in question-and-answer form, to create the illusion that this was stuff that somebody actually wanted to know, rather than just stuff that floated to the top while I was messing around with the data.  Here goes:

            1)  What was the greatest Triple Crown Season of all Time? 

            Beyond any question, the greatest Triple Crown Season since 1900, in terms of its probability of leading the league in all three categories, given the norms of the era, was by Nap Lajoie in 1901.   Lajoie’s .426 batting average was the highest of that decade and, depending on your source and qualifications, may have been the highest ever.   His 125 RBI were the highest total of the 1900-1909 era with one exception (Honus Wagner drove in 126, also in 1901.)  His 14 home runs were exceeded by only two players in the years 1900-1909 (Sam Crawford in 1900 and Socks Seybold in 1902.)  

            Lajoie’s season had an 72 to 89% probability of winning the triple crown, given the standards of his era—72 to 89%, depending on what assumptions you use about how many players will be competing for the championship and what the group of years is that represents Lajoie’s peer group.  Probably no other season in baseball history is over 50%.   Certainly no other season is close to Lajoie in 1901.

            Second on the list is Mickey Mantle in 1956.   Mantle hit .353 with 52 homers, 130 RBI.   Those are impressive numbers.   Given the standards of that era, those are the second most-impressive Triple Crown numbers since 1900.

            However, it was still probably less than 50% likely that, given those numbers, Mantle would win the Triple Crown.   52 homers. . .no problem; that was the most homers any player hit in that decade, so that number in that era has a 100% chance of leading the league.

            130 RBI, on the other hand. . .not so much.  There were nine players in the years 1950-1959 who drove in more than 130 runs.   If history wasn’t a sample or one. . .if we could re-run the season and Mantle had the same numbers but everybody else was scrambled. . .there’s a very good chance that his 130 RBI would not lead the league.

            And even if he did, somebody else might edge him out in batting average.   Billy Goodman hit .354 in 1950.  Harvey Kuenn hit .353 in 1959—a higher .353 than Mantle’s .353.   Hank Aaron hit .355, and Musial did, too, and Ted Williams hit .388.   One of these players could have done it head to head with Mantle.

            2)  Who had the greatest Triple Crown Numbers but didn’t win it?

            Stan Musial, 1948.   The four greatest Triple Crown Seasons of all time, given the norms of the era, are Lajoie, Mantle, Hornsby in 1922, and Musial in 1948.   The first three won.   Musial missed by one home run.  

            3)  What was the weakest Triple Crown Season that did win?

            By far, the weakest of the “actual” Triple Crown seasons was Chuck Klein in 1933.   Klein led the National League with 28 homers and with 120 RBI—a long odds accomplishment.

            It is the assumption of my studies that what happened did not have to happen; it could have happened some other way.   That’s kind of an arbitrary assumption, of course; only you know how you feel about fate.   But 28 home runs would have finished third in the National League in 1932, fourth in 1934.   It was a pitcher’s year in the NL, and, more to the point, a year in which most of the big hitters had injuries or bad years.   Klein found a little crease there where 28 homers and 120 RBI would lead the NL, and he slid into it.

            Setting actual history aside, Klein was much more likely to have won the Triple Crown in 1929, 1930 or 1932 than he was in 1933.   Frank Robinson was much more likely to have won in 1962 than in ’66.  There is a flaw in the assumptions of my research; there is always a flaw in the assumptions of research, because the real world is always more complicated than the research.   Anyway, I have assumed that the standards of offensive production are constant throughout each decade.  Using that assumption, Frank Robinson in 1966 (49 homers, 122 RBI, .316) clearly has much less chance of winning a Triple Crown than Mickey Mantle in 1961 (54 homers, 128 RBI, .317), since all of Mantle’s numbers are higher.

            But, of course, 1961 was not 1966.   They re-defined the strike zone in 1963, with very poor results, and for a few years the major leagues were hit-challenged and run-impaired.   Still, winning a batting title with a .316 average was a kind of a fluke.   He wouldn’t have led the league with that batting average in 1965 or 1967.  The Pittsburgh Pirates that same year had four outfielders who hit .315 or better, but they were in the other league.   The normal batting champions of that era, Tony Oliva and Carl Yastrzemski, had down years.   Robby was in the right place at the right time.

            Robinson, on the other hand, was much more likely to win a Triple Crown in 1962 than he was in 1966.   In 1962 he hit .342 with 39 homers, 136 RBI—not leading in any of the three categories (as Mantle didn’t in 1961).  But 136 RBI in the 1960s. . .that would normally be a league-leading figure.   .342 is a batting average that would very often be a league-leading total.   Leading the league in home runs with 39 is uncommon, but not nearly as uncommon as leading the league in batting average at .316. 

            These are the top 40 Triple Crown Seasons of all time, by my math (actual triple crown seasons marked with an asterisk): 

             There are five other actual Triple Crown seasons—Yastrzemski, 1967 (54th on my list of likely Triple Crown seasons), Frank Robinson, 1966 (80th), Joe Medwick, 1937 (91st), Ted Williams, 1947 (116th), and Chuck Klein, 1933 (239th). 

            Of the fourteen Triple Crowns (counting Foxx in ’32), twelve were won in leagues with eight teams, while the other two were won in leagues with ten teams.  One of the central questions I was trying to study, then, is “exactly how much of this difference was caused by the expansion?” 

            Players in the eight-team leagues competed for the Triple Crown in a context of 64 eligible spots (8 X 8), which normally produced about 50 eligible combatants.   Modern players compete in 14-team and 16-team leagues with 126 or 128 eligible spots (14 X 9 or 16 X 8), and about 100 eligible hitters.   I thus studied this issue by sorting batting records into groups of 50 and groups of 100, seeing how often one player would lead all 50 or all 100 in all three Silver Trident categories. 

            I sorted all seasons in baseball history, by decade, into 50- and 100-player groups, and repeated this experiment 100 times.   Using 50-player groups, I got 646 Triple Crowns.   Using 100-player groups, I got 237.   This would suggest that doubling the number of players in each group reduces the number of Triple Crowns by something more than 50%--63%, actually. 

            We can’t help but notice, however, that even using 50-player groups, I got far fewer Triple Crowns (per test) than actual history.   I got six triple crowns per trial, in major league history, using the 50-player grouping.  There are actually fourteen, and would be more than that if we had stayed with eight-team teams.   The reason for this discrepancy may be the flawed assumption I talked about before—the assumption that batting norms are constant throughout the decade—or it may be something else, some other flaw in my assumptions.   That’s why I have the wide ranges in my estimates. . .I’m not really on solid ground here.  

            In any case, there are a couple of other things that are pretty clear.   One is, Triple Crowns disappeared from history post-1970 for some reason other than expansion.   In the 1980s, there simply are no Triple Crown-type seasons.   In re-sorting 1980s seasons 100 times into 100-player groups—creating something more than 1500 100-player groups (since there are about 15 100-player groups from the 1980s in each trial), I got NO Triple Crown seasons from the 1980s.   Doing the same thing with 50-player groups, I got only three Triple Crown seasons from the 1980s.  

There simply aren’t any players in the 1980s who have Triple Crown numbers. The best Triple Crown season from the 1980s was by Don Mattingly in 1985—35 homers, 145 RBI, .324.   The 145 RBI was the highest total from the 1980s, so that’s a sure winner.    But one’s chance of leading a league in home runs with 35, in the 1980s, was around 8%, and a .324 batting average is around 3%.   Altogether, that’s about a one-in-four-hundred shot at a Triple Crown—from the best Triple Crown season of the decade. 

Our instinct in this situation is to try to explain this by some change in the game. . .something happened in the nature of the game which made “Triple Crown type” hitters more scarce in that generation.   But let me point out that there is an equally reasonable explanation which has nothing at all to do with the nature of baseball in 1980s.   “Triple Crown type” hitters are very rare.   There are only maybe 50 players in baseball history who routinely put up big numbers in all three categories. 

When you take 50 players and you sprinkle them across baseball history, you’re not going to get an even distribution.   You’re going to get random clusters—Mays, Mantle, Robinson and Aaron all born 1931-1934, and then nobody born 1954-1963.   That just happens.   So it is possible that there is nothing going on here except a random clustering of talent. 

Whatever, the Triple Crown-type numbers began to re-appear in the 1990s, often in Colorado, and have continued to pop up throughout the current decade.   As it happens, no one HAS won the Triple Crown in this decade—but there have been numerous people who could have.   Albert Pujols, if healthy, is a legitimate Triple Crown threat every year, as much as Mays or Aaron.   Todd Helton was, and Manny Ramirez was.  Vladimir, Carlos Delgado, Bonds and Larry Walker all had very legitimate shots at the Triple Crown.  

My guess is that we will see another Triple Crown winner in the next ten years.   The historical trend lines are heading in that direction.   That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, as, as I said, the historical trend lines may be simply a result of a random clustering of talent.   It’s difficult, and it hasn’t happened for a long time, but it has not become impossible for some player to win the Triple Crown.