Where we were:

The champions thus far are

Ruth 1929-1932 (4 years)

Foxx 1933-1935 (3 years)

Gehrig 1936-7 (2 years)

Mize 1938-1940 (4 years)

Williams 1941-1942 (2 years)

Keller 1943 (1 year)

Musial 1944 (1 year) 

Ott 1945 (1 year)

Cavarretta 1946 (1 year)

Williams 1947-49 (3 years)

Musial 1950-4 (5 years)

Mathews 1955 (1 year)

Mantle 1956-7 (2 years)

Can Mantle make it three straight years?

Well, as long as he can add to his years leading all of MLB in OPS+, no one’s dislodging the crown from his blond head, not even Ted Williams putting together at the age of 39 another strong year. No reason to compute a 1956-58 rankings, as Mantle must be on the top, so let’s move on to 1959, when Mantle had an off-season, and see if that gives us a new champion:

Mantle’s off-season, which cost him a significant salary cut, puts him only 31 OPS+ point behind the new MLB leader (Aaron and Mantle nearly traded OPS+es and places in the ranking for 1958 and 1959.)  His off-season brings him down to 1050, and Aaron’s on-year brings him up to 1016. Willie Mays, with two third-place finishes and one fourth-, ranks third in the three-year rankings with 971. I’ll make a small chart to sum that up, but that’s basically it.

Williams, by the way, had a long falling off in 1959—he got up to plate only 331 times, so doesn’t qualify, but even if he had, he only OPS+ed at a 114 rate) In purely verbal terms, we’d say that by 1959, people were not thinking of the 40 year old Williams as the greatest hitter in the game anymore. "Used to be" sure, but by this time, the folks who thought Mantle was the greatest had it right.

Mantle had been at the stratospheric level that only Ruth, Gehrig, and Williams had been able to maintain up until now, OPS+es above 200 for several years running, but now in 1959 and then in 1960, he comes back to the join the rest of the pack:

It is sort of interesting here that the top five slots all fall within a very narrow range, 160-169, virtually a five-way tie for the lead, which means no one will make a very large advance. Let’s look at the three-year rankings as of the winter of 1960:

Now we’ve also got a tight-knit group, and Aaron has edged ahead of Mantle. Does this 8-point OPS+ lead over three seasons amount to a knockout of the current champ? I wouldn’t say a knockout, but rather a close decision in Aaron’s favor.  Mantle has finished first, sixth and third in the past three years, and that’s not quite good enough to hold onto his title. Hank Aaron is the new champion.

Some stray observations: this is the first three-year group in quite a while (since 1946) whose leader is under the 1000 OPS+ mark, though that’s just a round-number sort of thing since several years the leader was not far over 1000 OPS+. This is the first grouping, but far from the last, I suspect, with four of the top six being African-Americans. One of them, Ernie Banks, has come off two straight MVP seasons, but not strongly enough to break into the top five OPS+ers at any point, and as we know, he will fall off from his peak by the mid-sixties. I still expect Mantle to win a few more OPS+ crowns,  and win back his title. 1961 is coming and he tops that chart by a goodly margin:

By 1961, Banks has fallen off the charts, and Mantle is back over 200 again.         

He also tops the three-year chart, breaking 1000 comfortably there, giving him a KO of Aaron in 12 rounds.

Impressive newcomers from 1961 like Cash and Gentile don’t qualify with only one or two full prior seasons, while other newcomers like, Colavito and Cepeda don’t quite crack the upper echelon of contenders. Killebrew and Maris make the three-year rankings for the first times.