More Interesting Statistical Combinations

Inspired by Barry Bonds’ historic 2004 season, we’ll look at the individual seasons for which a player had more walks than hits (minimum 100 at-bats). The top of the list ordered by maximum difference of (walks minus hits) looks like this:

 

 

Primary Targets

After looking at players with exceptionally high walk totals, let’s now look at another kind of feat involving walks: having been hit by pitches more than having walked in a season. What follows is a table of player seasons (100 at-bats minimum) achieving this with a differential of at least three: The list is dominated by players of the 1800s and the early years of the 20th century, led by Hughie Jennings in 1896 with a mind-blowing differential of 32 more HBP than walks. Of course, most seasons are ones with very low walk totals for the player in question. An exception is Hughie Jennings’ 1897 season with 42 walks but even more hit-by-pitches. Jennings makes the list three times. These guys sure had a painful way of making up for their meager walk totals!

 

Player	Year	AB	BB	HBP	HBP-BB
Hughie Jennings	1896	521	19	51	32
Boileryard Clarke	1898	285	4	15	11
John Reilly	1884	448	5	14	9
Jay Faatz	1888	470	12	21	9
Art Fletcher	1915	562	6	14	8
Whitey Alperman	1906	441	6	14	8
Hughie Jennings	1895	529	24	32	8
Dan McGann	1901	423	16	23	7
Sal Fasano	1998	216	10	16	6
John Warner	1901	291	3	8	5
Felix Escalona	2002	157	3	7	4
Whitey Alperman	1909	420	2	6	4
Hughie Jennings	1897	439	42	46	4
Finners Quinlan	1915	114	4	8	4
Jay Faatz	1884	112	1	4	3
Shawon Dunston	1999	243	2	5	3
Jack O’Neill	1905	172	8	11	3
Ollie O’Mara	1918	450	7	10	3
Mike Kinkade	2003	162	13	16	3
Vance Wilson	2002	163	5	8	3
Deacon Phillippe	1900	105	1	4	3
Barney Pelty	1904	118	0	3	3

 

Once again, we have Barry Bonds heading the list. In 2001, on his way to breaking the single-season home run record, almost 47% of his hits were home runs while only 31% were singles. The differential (HR1B) of 24 is by far the biggest in history. Next up is Mark McGwire with four (!) seasons of his own with a differential of between four and nine. Obviously, all seasons are post-1950 with a predominance of the 1990s/2000s era. This indicates an increasing trend of all or nothing swings at the plate, at least for sluggers like McGwire.

But even then, hitting more home runs than singles is very hard to achieve over a full season. Bonds and McGwire are the only ones who did it in what amounts to the equivalent of at least half a season. Some list entries with low at-bat totals are pitcher seasons like Don Drysdale’s 1958 and Milt Pappas’ 1962 campaigns.

Another example of an anomalous hit spectrum is players who hit more triples than doubles. This happened about 750 times in MLB history (100 at-bats minimum). Following is a table of all player seasons with a differential (triples/doubles) of at least seven:

 

Player	Year	AB	H	2B	3B	3B-2B	SB
Harry Davis	1897	429	131	10	28	18	21
Chief Wilson	1912	583	175	19	36	17	16
Duff Cooley	1895	563	191	9	20	11	27
Bill Kuehne	1885	411	93	9	19	10	0
Hughie Jennings	1899	224	67	3	12	9	18
Heinie Reitz	1894	446	135	22	31	9	18
Deion Sanders	1992	303	92	6	14	8	26
Edd Roush	1916	341	91	7	15	8	19
Tommy Leach	1902	514	143	14	22	8	25
Dale Mitchell	1949	640	203	16	23	7	10
Jake Daubert	1922	610	205	15	22	7	14
Les Mann	1915	470	144	12	19	7	18
Braggo Roth	1915	384	103	10	17	7	26
Joe Cassidy	1904	581	140	12	19	7	17
Dave Brian	1903	464	107	8	15	7	21
Perry Werden	1893	500	138	22	29	7	11
Scott Stratton	1892	219	56	2	9	7	9
Joe Visner	1890	521	139	15	22	7	18
Dick Johnston	1887	507	131	13	20	7	52
John Kerins	1885	456	111	9	16	7	0

 

The list is dominated by seasons from the early stages of professional ball up to and including the Deadball Era. Deion Sanders’ 1992 season is the only one in the last half-century. Noticeable is the rather high number of at-bats, i.e., these players achieved the feat of tripling more often than doubling typically in a full season’s worth of plate appearances.

I suspect a number of reasons being responsible for the predominance of the Deadball Era on this list, including bigger parks, worse field conditions than today, smaller fielder’s gloves, and various others. Possibly one would expect players with more triples than doubles to be very fast and therefore to also steal a lot of bases, too.

However, as the number of stolen bases is also displayed in the table, this seems not to be the case. SB totals are moderate for most player seasons, Dick Johnston’s 1887 campaign with 52 SB being the exception. The two entries with zero stolen bases (Kuehne and Kerins) are due to the fact that no stolen base records were kept for the league at that time.

Looking at total seasons with more triples than doubles for each player (not shown as a table), we have Sam Crawford and Tommy Leach with five seasons each and Bill Kuehne, George Van Haltren, Silver King, John Hummel, and Adonis Terry with four each as well as 16 players with three each. Therefore, hitting more triples than doubles in a season is not a total fluke but, at least to some extent, a persistent skill of a few dozen players, mainly from the 19th century.

So far, we’ve looked at a reverse differential of hit types two positions apart in the hit spectrum 1B–2B–HR–3B, i.e., more home runs than singles (positions 3 and 1) and more triples than doubles (positions 4 and 2). Of course, reverse differentials for adjacent positions, e.g., more home runs than doubles, are typically more common than for greater positional differences.

So what has yet to be considered is the only possible reverse differential of three positions, i.e., hitting more triples than singles. This never happened in 100+ at-bats, but it happened once in MLB history in 50+ at-bats. In 1991, pitcher Charlie Leibrandt posted this line:

 

Year	AB	H	1B	3B	3B-1B
1991	70	3	0	1	1

 

Of course, this is just a fluctuation because of the extremely small numbers involved (no singles, one triple). So basically hitting more triples than singles in any meaningful number of at-bats has never happened so far. If we lower our minimum requirement for at-bats even more (to 25 AB minimum), we have two players who hit at least two more triples than singles in a season. Obviously, these small numbers of at-bats render the accomplishments statistically completely meaningless; there’s no persistent capability involved.

 

Player	Year	AB	H	1B	3B	3B-1B
Ron Fairly	1960	37	4	0	3	3
Mike O’Neill	1907	29	2	0	2	2

 

Before leaving the topic of hit spectrums, we will look at totals for relationships between the different types of hits. In the analyzed data set, there are 32,661 player seasons with at least 100 at-bats. The following table shows for the six possible combinations of hit types (single vs. double, single vs. triple, double vs. home run) and the three possible relationships (hit type 1 greater than hit type 2, . . . smaller than . . . , . . . equal to) the counts and percentages of the total 32,661 seasons (see Table X1).

 

 

Table [X1] tells us, in addition to the eight seasons of more home runs than doubles and the fact that a season with more triples than singles never happened, several interesting facts. First of all, a reverse differential between positions 1 and 2 in the hit spectrum (singles vs. doubles) is very rare; it happened only four times in history. Another four times the totals for the two types of hits matched exactly:

 

Player	Year	AB	H	1B	2B	2B-1B
John Kroner	1938	117	29	12	16	4
Adam Piatt	2003	132	30	11	13	2
Bobby Estalella	2002	112	23	7	8	1
Bill Duggleby	1905	101	11	4	5	1
J.R. Phillips	1996	104	17	5	5	0
Brian Hunter	1998	112	23	9	9	0
Lefty Grove	1933	105	9	4	4	0
Joe Bush	1925	102	26	12	12	0

 

Besides four seasons from the last ten years we have another four seasons from the first half of the 20th century. All seasons have relatively low at-bats totals, just making the cut of 100 at-bats. The results shown above regarding the counts/fractions of the hit spectrum relationships also indicate that the sequence triples/home runs is quite often reversed: more than one in three seasons is finished with more triples than home runs. However, this number drops to 22% if we consider only seasons after 1920, i.e., in the Lively ball era. 

And now to something completely different.