Line Drive Hitter of the Year

The distinction may not be meaningful, but baseball people used to take obvious pleasure declaring that someone “was not really a home run hitter, but a line drive hitter.” Meaningful or not, I have decided to have fun with this concept.

I think of my 8th-grade math class. Perhaps the best student, I’ll call him Craig, came out of nowhere. No one had thought of him as a good student as we’d matriculated our way down the football field of school since kindergarten, but in algebra, he had found his calling. The teacher loved him for his talent, but had no illusions that this kid was a worker.

Towards the end of the year, the teacher decided to set five minutes aside to pay tribute to another student. Unlike Craig, the teacher explained, “we all know John isn’t going to make his money doing math.” But despite this, he was very capable in the class, and did really well.

In my analogy, Craig is the slugger; John is the line drive hitter who can still hit home runs.

Or you can argue that our tendency to place hitters into categories is inspired by boxing, where we have middleweights, heavyweights, etc.

The Home Run and Double Ingredients

My research has shown that doubles and home runs both reflect power. They correlate, and a high number of doubles can foreshadow an eventual home run hitter. But it is natural to think of the double as the province of the line drive hitter, while what makes a home run hitter is self-evident, his number of home runs. There is a term, “fly ball double”, and there are ground ball doubles, almost all hit down either the left field or right field line. But by far the biggest category of doubles is line drives.

In a Note I wrote in September, I observed that, if one looked at the players this year who had the most home runs, but still more had doubles than home runs, it was a group of uncommon ability: the top eight in order of home runs were Francisco Lindor, Bobby Witt Jr., Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Rafael Devers, Teoscar Hernandez, Manny Machado, Bryce Harper, and Matt Olson. So here, I was suggesting that not only might there be distinct line drive hitters who could be distinguished by their ratio of doubles to home runs, but that we might be able to declare just how proficient a line drive hitter someone was by his number of home runs, once this condition of had been met. Not infallibly, but as a gauge.

Highest Career HR Percentages for Those with More 2B than HR

I started to apply the test to individual previous years, but after finding the winners by this criterion for 2023 (Mookie Betts; 39 HR, 40 2B) and 2022 (Austin Riley; 38 HR, 39 2B), it occurred to me I could take a career approach. But if I ranked players by career HR who had fewer HR than 2B, I would be recognizing longevity as much as ability, and that wasn’t my intention. So what I did instead was to rank all players with more doubles than home runs by home run percentage, while keeping everyone honest by insisting upon 4000 at-bats.

The top 10 home run percentages from those who qualified were recorded by

1. Ted Williams

2. Albert Belle

3. Carlos Delgado

4. Hank Greenberg

5. David Ortiz

6. Lou Gehrig

7. Jeff Bagwell

8. Jim Edmonds

9. Bryce Harper

10. Lance Berkman

This was really just exploratory, and I suppose I had no intention of writing an overflow post¹ at this point, so I don’t remember getting bent out of shape about the quality of the names on the list. Any list that compares players without adjusting for era is going to be biased, and this one had six players who began their careers in the 1989-1999 window, including four from 1989-1993.

Another issue apart from the quality of the measure is that, even with an at-bat minimum, using rates does mean that short careers are inevitably rewarded. In other words, it is easier to compile a good rate in a short career than a long one. I think this has something to do with why non-Hall of Famers are on the list. First, players with short careers both look better by home run rate than they were, and, second, their rates have historically been overlooked because they weren’t produced alongside a great career home run total.

All of this said, I think it is interesting to see Albert Belle #2 on the list. I love and respect Joe Posnanski, but when he said Belle was an unfathomable Hall of Fame nominee of the Contemporary Baseball Era Players Committee, maybe he was taking too narrow a view of Hall of Fame merit. I’m not saying he should be in the Hall of Fame, but I am saying there is something really there with him.

Rather than getting hung up on the particular players, I was really most concerned with whether these guys truly were line drive hitters. Had I just not realized Ted Williams fit more in the line drive than the home run category, or did his presence suggest the whole concept was misguided? Had I gone about it wrong? He was only 4 home runs short of having as many home runs as doubles, in which case he would not have been eligible. So very quickly, I was zeroing in on the ceiling for this ratio as something that might need to be rethought.

David Ortiz also raised red flags for me. But was my image of him overly influenced by his 54-home run year? He’d only hit 29 doubles in 2006, but that year was certainly a departure for him; in his career, he had 4 seasons of more home runs than doubles and 13 seasons of more doubles than home runs. Ortiz’s enormous size also made him a slugger by default in many minds, regardless of his actual abilities.

I was also already batting around adding a batting average component to the line driver hitter definition. Again, just gathering data, Williams’ career average read .344, while Gehrig’s read .340. For the seven players in the top 10 who came more than a couple of generations later, their batting averages were all between .280 (Delgado) and .297 (Bagwell). Greenberg’s career overlapped with both Gehrig’s and Williams’, but is alone on this graph, sitting at .313.

Career HR/2B Ratios Over 1.3

I then got to playing around, and asked how many players with 4000 AB had a HR/2B ratio of 1.3 or greater? This was probably just the research version of a digression, but can be defended on the count of broadly examining whether the 1:1 2B/HR ratio was too inclusive.² In gathering the best home run percentages on the other list, I had had to employ a home run percentage minimum, but here, the problem figured to take care of itself. If a player had 30% more home runs than doubles, he figured to have a fair number of home runs.

It also turns out that only 25 players have had ratios this extreme. That’s certainly a small number, but then again, it’s a ratio well over 1:1.

The great news was that a “type” absolutely did emerge. Those of us who study baseball records develop what I would call statistical imagery, a less-than-fully-conscious ability to group players together. Tapping my experience here, this is a coherent group.

The 25 highest HR/2B ratios ever.

#1 Mark McGwire 2.31, #2 Harmon Killebrew 1.98, #3 Dave Kingman 1.84, #4 Ralph Kiner 1.71, #5 Sammy Sosa 1.61, #6 Cecil Fielder 1.60, #7 Norm Cash 1.56, #8 Frank Howard 1.56, #9 Mickey Mantle 1.56, #10 Gus Zernial 1.49, #11 Willie McCovey 1.48, #12 Eddie Mathews 1.45, #13 Hank Sauer 1.44, #14 Babe Ruth 1.41, #15 Roger Maris 1.41, #16 Giancarlo Stanton 1.41, #17 Leon Wagner 1.41, #18 Adam Dunn 1.38, #19 Ryan Howard 1.38, #20 Jose Canseco 1.36, #21 Jim Thome 1.36, #22 Mike Schmidt 1.34, #23 Jay Buhner 1.33, #24 Rocky Colavito 1.32, #25 Darryl Strawberry 1.31.

Some HR/2B Journaling. Trying To Get a Grip on the Meaning of the Ratio.

I think it is safe to say this is a group of non-live drive hitters. That this group has a more coherent personality than players whose ratios were high but not extreme (such as we saw at the top of the list of home run percentage among < 1.0 HR/2B guys) certainly makes sense. However, if we took the opposite end, and asked for the players with the lowest HR/2B ratios, those wouldn’t fit the mode of the line drive hitter better than the < 1 criterion. To be called a line drive hitter is a compliment, and players with a low HR/2B ratio have not necessarily excelled in any respect whatsoever.³ There has to be an element of achievement in designating line drive hitters, something I capture by ranking the most home runs given a certain ratio.

The respective importance of home runs and doubles to these ratios is an interesting question. We presume that very low HR/2B ratios identify decided punch-and-judy hitters, not good doubles hitters. To have a ratio as low as a player with 1 HR and 20 2B, a player with 10 home runs needs to have 200 doubles. And a skeptic would likewise ask if the +1.3 list doesn’t just reflect home run ability, not doubles deficiency.

While I think home runs do take precedence, this view goes too far. Putting the two lists together, after all, Ted Williams still rates 8th in home run percentage, and four others from the < 1 list shown before would make the overall top 20 in home run percentage. So double rate is playing a role.

The typical batting averages of the groups are also very different, with the high HR/2B players generally sporting mediocre batting averages. Only Ruth (.342 career) and Mantle (.298) in this group could hit for average; one has to all the way down to .279 (Ralph Kiner) to find the third highest average.

A final note about the high HR/2B ratio group. I couldn’t help but notice it includes four of the stars of the 1961 American League: Mantle, Maris, Norm Cash, and Rocky Colavito. Since these players are here by dint of their entire careers, not just 1961, I don’t think their presence necessarily says anything about the style of play in that particular year, but I will be examining HR/2B ratio by era later in the post. While Colavito played more games in his career with Cleveland than Detroit, we are also talking about only the 1961 Yankees and Tigers being represented, and one can well see how Yankee Stadium and Tiger Stadium would have increased HR/2B ratio.

Highest Career HR Percentages for Those with < 0.85 HR/2B

At this point, I formally revisited the criterion of a ratio of <1.0 for a line drive hitter, animated by my concerns about whether Williams, Ortiz, etc., really fit that bill. I realized that it was a fallacy that a player’s place on the home run/double spectrum could be defined just by which one he had more of, and a mistake to treat a ratio of 1.0 as sacrosanct. Home runs and doubles actually have different scales, after all, although there is a certain pleasing rough similarity (it’s not like we’re comparing doubles to RBI, or something). The working number I had in mind for a revised maximum ratio was 0.80 HR/2B, or 0.85.

Even allowing 0.80+ by using a 0.85 cutoff, none of the home run percentages that had comprised the former 10 still counted. Ranging from 0.85 to 0.90, we did still have Greenberg (0.873), Ortiz (0.856), and Edmonds (0.899). But setting the threshold at 0.85, Larry Walker (0.813; 13th previously by HR%) would be the new #1. After him, one had to go all the way down to Paul Goldschmidt (previously 28th in HR%), and then Ryan Klesko (33rd) for the next best home run percentages with HR/2B ratios under 0.85.

Walker’s hard to evaluate because of the Colorado factor, but is in the Hall of Fame. Goldschmidt probably will be a Hall of Famer, or so I read everywhere. Klesko seems sort of random; I would certainly flinch at nominating him as the third-best line drive hitter of all time.

Maybe these names just seem less impressive because they are recent. One clear indication to me was that dropping the ratio beneath 0.80 would probably not be a good idea, since 0.85 itself had effected such a drastic change. But it is important to keep in mind that, switching over to looking at annual performance, a player with a career 0.85 ratio will still qualify in about half of his seasons, if that same ratio is adopted.

In any event, again, maybe because this was exploratory in nature, I decided to plow forward and apply a 0.85 standard, even without a clear idea of what effect it would have, and whether it truly moved us closer to finding line drive hitters.

Organizing and Fine Tuning the Annual Leaders (the Line Drive Hitters of the Year)

To determine historical annual leaders, I returned to my framework of honoring the top home run hitter by home runs hit, not home run percentage. It was certainly a relief not to have to have to worry at all about qualification, the way one does when ranking by percentage. Using totals and ratios with no reference to playing time also meant that no special rules were needed to accommodate shortened seasons. The Negro Leagues were easily included.

I did need to keep Negro League performance separate from the AL and NL, however, because one can’t really be comparing home run totals of players with a certain ratio of home runs to doubles if some played far fewer games than others. As it might have suggested second-class citizenship to segment Negro League leaders from MLB, I decided to segment out the National and American Leagues out as well. Doing this I created a lot more work for myself, but with the benefit of giving recognition to more players, something very much appropriate, I think, since it’s hard enough to lead one league.

I don’t think this year’s regular season had wrapped up when I started this work, so I began tabulating the winners starting with the National League, 2023. In the back of my mind was that batting average requirement for a line drive hitter, which I was penciling in as .300. Maybe including this is a bit of cheating to gild the lists, but I think it can be hard to take a “line drive hitter of the year” seriously if he doesn’t hit .300. (Ryan Klesko actually hit .279 career, but in my mind, that was .250, and I was mindful of Klesko’s having the third-best career HR% among players with < 0.85 HR/2B. I didn’t want the Klesko type.)

I started out finding the winners both ways, both with and without a .300 requirement. Without the average requirement, Matt Olson won in 2022. Not only did he intuitively seem ill-fitted as a line drive hitter (intuition perhaps aided by knowledge of the 54 home runs he hit the next year), but he also hit all of .240. Then, without insisting upon .300, I found Javier Baez winning in 2018, and Adam Duvall (ugh, and .249) winning in 2017. I felt the decision was made for me, and switched over to running all other years exclusively with the average requirement.

So the “Line Driver Hitter of the Year” is the player with the most home runs whose HR divided by doubles are under 0.85 and who also hit .300.

I carried the test out back to 1920. Before Live Ball, I did not think it made sense to figure winners. Presumably, almost all good hitters had home runs less than 85% of their doubles then, and so we would essentially be dropping one criterion, and the most important and interesting one, in chronicling the pre-1920 winners.

Space reasons argued against identifying all 296 winners by league and year in a vertical list. With this option off the table, I forsook an alphabetical sorting for presenting the winners from most recent to initial, without identifying years. I think this approach will make you more likely to spend time with the list, and less likely to have your eyes glaze over.

Winners are also broken down by the number of titles that they won. For multiple winners with the same number of titles, the more recent player is considered the player with the most recent title, not the player with the most recent first title.

Perhaps in contravention of my desire not to make the Negro Leaguers appear second-class citizens, I place an asterisk next to Negro Leaguers. That is there even if they played in MLB, if their title(s) only came in a Negro League. Jackie Robinson won two National League titles and one Negro League title, and does not have an asterisk. The asterisks are used for the purpose of giving you guidance if you haven’t heard of a player, and are wondering why you haven’t.⁴ Winners were determined in all Negro Leagues recognized as major leagues.

Here is the list.

Line Drive Hitters of the Year

Seven-time winner: Stan Musial.

Five-time winners: Freddie Freeman, Tony Oliva, Willard Brown*, Hank Greenberg, Buck Leonard*, Turkey Stearnes*, Chuck Klein, Oscar Charleston*.

Four-time winners: Albert Pujols, Cecil Cooper.

Three-time winners: David Ortiz, Miguel Cabrera, Matt Holliday, Don Mattingly, Orlando Cepeda, Henry Aaron, Al Kaline, Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio, Joe Medwick, Lou Gehrig, Rogers Hornsby,⁵ George Carr*, Ken Williams.

Two-time winners: Anthony Rendon, Aubrey Huff, Todd Helton, Edgar Martinez, Dante Bichette, Cal Ripken Jr., Dave Parker, Carl Yastrzemski, Roberto Clemente, Minnie Minoso, Vic Wertz, Ted Williams, Lester Lockett*, Larry Doby*, Enos Slaughter, Johnny Davis*, Lennie Pearson*, Bill Hoskins*, Frank McCormick, Johnny Mize, Jud Wilson*, Willie Wells*, Al Simmons, Jim Bottomley, George Kelly.

Solo winners: Ivan Herrera, Bobby Witt Jr., Corey Seager, Jose Altuve, Bryce Harper, Byron Buxton, Lourdes Gurriel Jr., Xander Bogaerts, Mookie Betts, Jose Abreu, AJ Pollock, Prince Fielder, Andrew McCutchen, Joey Votto, Aramis Ramirez, Robinson Cano, Troy Tulowitzki, Jacoby Ellsbury, Ryan Braun, Adam Lind, Vernon Wells, Travis Hafner, Miguel Tejada, Alfonso Soriano, Jason Giambi, Carlos Delgado, Eric Karros, B.J. Surhoff, Barry Bonds, Raul Mondesi, Nomar Garciaparra, Jeff Bagwell, Alex Rodriguez, Reggie Sanders, Ken Caminiti, Rafael Palmeiro, Charlie Hayes, John Olerud, Ryne Sandberg, Ken Griffey Jr., Chris Sabo, Mariano Duncan, Rickey Henderson, Will Clark, Ruben Sierra, Andres Galarraga, Kent Hrbek, Dave Winfield, Tim Raines, Benito Santiago, Kevin Bass, George Bell, Kirby Puckett, Jeffrey Leonard, Bob Horner, Andre Dawson, Pedro Guerrero, Tom Paciorek, George Hendrick, Larry Parrish, Jack Clark, Ben Oglivie, Bill Robinson, Larry Hisle, Greg Luzinski, Thurman Munson, Jim Rice, Willie Stargell, Jeff Burroughs, Tony Perez, George Scott, Cesar Cedeno, Joe Rudi, Joe Torre, Bobby Bonds, Bobby Tolan, Felipe Alou, Frank Coggins, Jerry Kenney, Hawk Taylor, Billy Williams, Vada Pinson, Rich Rollins, Frank Robinson, Brooks Robinson, Bill Skowron, Gene Woodling, Al Smith, Yogi Berra, Gus Bell, Mickey Vernon, Duke Snider, Mickey Mantle, Vern Stephens, Bobby Thomson, Tommy Henrich, Luke Easter*, Bob Elliott, Henry Kimbro*, Roy Cullenbine, Tommy Holmes, Roy Campanella*, Wild Bill Wright*, Neil Robinson*, Johnny Lindell, Stan Spence, Bonnie Serrell*, Dick Wakefield, Larry Doby*, Ted Strong*, Danny Litwhiler, Monte Irvin*, Frank Bradley*, Buster Clarkson*, Ed Mayweather*, Marshall Riddle*, Bill Williams*, Ed Young*, Pat Patterson*, Jeff Heath, Vic Harris*, David Whatley*, Jerry Benjamin*, Walter Cannady*, Jim West*, Ripper Collins, Hal Trosky, Josh Gibson*, Tom Finley*, Leonard Henderson*, Wally Berger, Goose Goslin, Ed Morgan, Mule Suttles*, Charlie Smith*, Tony Lazzeri, Hack Wilson, Biz Mackey*, Irish Meusel, Baby Doll Jacobson, Cristobal Torriente*, Jack Fournier, Heavy Johnson*, Cliff Lee, Harry Heilmann, Bing Miller, Bob Meusel, Cy Williams, George Sisler, Jimmie Lyons*.

While Hall of Famers are rife among the solo winners, the much smaller number of players who have won twice suggests that is a whole other level of achievement. The pyramid pattern is the rule, but is upset by the presence of just two four-time winners, while there are eight five-time winners (data!).

Just eyeballing things, there seems to be a distinct difference in quality between three-time winners and two-time winners. Among three-time winners, Ken Williams isn’t a Hall of Famer, with a late start to his career all but eliminating his opportunity to compile the needed numbers. Matt Holliday is regarded as having been very good and not great, but much of that opinion derives from discounting his Coors Field-aided numbers, something the Line Drive Hitter of the Year methodology doesn’t do.⁶ I can’t really speak to George Carr. But looking at the other 10 players who have three titles, they make for a stellar group.

If three wins stamps you as having been special, the same certainly has to hold for four wins, making Cecil Cooper’s perch a matter of particular interest. Presuming that your inclination is to think that he wasn’t one of the 11 best line drive hitters of all time, possibilities include that he was the rare very lucky player, that his wins are representative of flaws in the systems, that he was criminally underrated, or of course all of the previous. I will explore his numbers in depth later.

Scanning for Phonies, Based on the Name Test

Normally, the reason we apply measures and create lists is for the rigor and objectivity they afford. I maintained that interest, but as this is pilot work, I also kept an eye out for where the measure might not be working, and exactly how it might not be working. I was attuned to potential phonies: players either not of high quality, or not in the spirit of line drive hitters. While stray aberrations in any era might be informative, clusters of weak winners particularly interested me.

Because I compiled the winners within league, I gravitated toward looking within league for clusters as well, although I think if the other league doesn’t display a pattern of phonies at the same time, the cluster’s significance can be questioned. With this stricture in mind, working backwards from the present day, the American League from 2003-2009 was the first period that raised my antennae. Aubrey Huff emerged as the Line Drive Hitter of the Year not once in this period, but twice (once with the Rays, and once with the Orioles).⁷ Adam Lind was the Line Drive Hitter of the Year in 2009, and he doesn’t pass the name test, at least not for me. I thought Vernon Wells, the 2006 winner, was only a marginal embodiment of the kind of player I hoped would be recognized. When I realized he had been second to Huff in another year, I didn’t know whether I should then feel better about him, or worse about the methodology.

1999 featured B.J. Surhoff and Eric Karros as the respective winners in the leagues. With McGwire and Sosa clearing 60 home runs, Larry Walker putting up a 1.168 OPS, Chipper Jones hitting 45 home runs and winning MVP, and Mike Piazza, Vladimir Guerrero, and Todd Helton all productive as well, I suppose this was a bit like when Venetian Way, Ballyache, and Celtic Ash accounted for the three Triple Crown races in 1960, while Kelso, who would ultimately win the first of his five Horse of the Year titles the same year, got not a Triple Crown sniff. It happens.

The American League had more than its share of strong winners in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but I would say the NL from 1977-1999 is the weakest group of winners in the whole survey. Tim Raines, Will Clark, and Ryne Sandberg, three of the seven winners or co-winners from ‘87-’92, represent exceptions, but this period includes Bill Robinson, Larry Parrish, Jeffrey Leonard, Kevin Bass, Benito Santiago, Mariano Duncan, Chris Sabo, Charlie Hayes, and Reggie Sanders. Not only does that not sound like exemplars of an important category, it doesn’t even really sound like a postseason team. Their average bWAR is 16.4, and their average bWAR-per-162 games, 1.7. Orlando Cepeda took NL titles in ‘58, ‘66, and ‘67. But from ‘68 through ‘99, the only multiple winner in the NL is Dave Parker.

Even the American League shows some cracks in the heart of this period. 1977-1981 included Larry Hisle and Ben Oglivie. They were rather in the Kevin Bass mold: good players capable of an all-star season. But Tom Paciorek (1981) can only be understood as an idiosyncratic winner.

Generally, the smaller leagues pre-1970 or pre-1960 seemed to produce fewer head-scratching cases. 1967 AL thoroughly broke down, though, which I will discuss. And, for better or worse, you will still find your Rich Rollinses (1963), your Bob Niemans (co-winner 1958), your Danny Litwhilers (1941), and your Ed Morgans (1930).⁸ If the award were for on-base percentage, Gene Woodling (1957) and Roy Cullenbine (1946) would not give pause, but for the categories pertinent to line drive hitting, their spot is dubious.

Scanning for Very Low Numbers

At some point, however, I had an epiphany, which was that the credibility of the names said less about whether the award criteria were reasonable than the actual numbers of the leaders. Of course, the leader’s typical score should fluctuate over time, as any non-indexed value should. But those changes should not generally be out of keeping with offensive levels, and totals should never be farcical. And if a player with a very low home run totals wins the title, the chances that it will be a name that doesn’t pass muster increases.

As far as setting a bar for when a leading number is unsatisfactory low, one approach that can be taken is strictly empirical. A low total would simply be one that stacks up as low compared to other years. At first this seems the obvious way to go.

But another approach is to take a theoretical tack. There is an argument to be made that the award isn’t capturing what it was intended to unless the champion has at least 25 home runs. The logic is that 25 home runs are needed to assure at least 30 doubles (home runs cannot be more than 85% of doubles). Doubles are not specifically invoked to determine the Line Drive Hitter of the Year, but they are supposed to be a crucial element, and if the home run total doesn’t assure a good number, the system is on shaky ground.

Having established this as an ideal, I will now turn to some cases where the failure was monumental, of a scale that transcended debates over the value of a few more home runs here or there.

2024 National League

First, Ivan Herrera. Unfortunately, the circumstances of the most recent NL winner do need to be addressed. If he were buried in the middle of the list, or if fans were not generally most interested in current baseball, there might be some chance this eyesore could escape detection. But as it is, there seems no way but to face it head on.

When I originally compiled 2024 data for the prospective new measure in my “notes” space, I did not distinguish between American and National Leaguers. With his average well over .300 and the right mix of doubles and home runs, Bobby Witt Jr. guaranteed at least one worthy winner as a fallback even if I were to take a restrictive approach to the award. Impressed by the plethora of good candidates who emerged when the measure was based on only HR-to-2B ratio, I did not notice the chaos that would be injected into the National League race if a .300 batting average requirement were added. Just how drastic the effect was can be seen in the coronation of Herrera. As he hit only 5 home runs, truly almost the last man standing.

If 2024’s .247 did not set a record for the lowest NL average, the collapse of the Line Drive Hitter of the Year system shows that we are still in the middle of an anomalous era when it comes to batting average. Among the 266 National Leaguers who hit a home run, only 11 had a .300 average, no matter their number of at-bats. Ivan Herrera emerges because only three of these players had double-digit home runs: Shohei Ohtani, Marcell Ozuna, and Christian Yelich. None of them had a HR/double ratio of less than .85.

Do give Herrera credit for outhomering Luis Arraez, 5 to 4, however. Arraez would at least have made a more positive statement, would have passed the “names” test component. However, a “name” winner with a low number of home runs would not really have signaled any less of a weakness in the system.

Weak is not quite the same thing as untenable, however, and my careful use of that term indicates that I do not intend to get rid of the .300 requirement, or at least a batting average requirement of some sort. This process, in a way, is not that different from statistical modeling, and in modeling, changes that fix one case often lead to problems in others.

To be sure, the notion that Ivan Herrera was the NL Line Drive Hitter of the Year is the equivalent of giving Eric Sogard the Face of Baseball award in 2014⁹, but the achievements that the award signifies in his case should be acknowledged. If you haven’t heard of him, I excuse you, but he’s a catcher¹⁰ who won’t be 25 until next June, so could have a future as a hitter. He also maintained his .300 average through 229 AB. (And hey, Byron Buxton won his 2021 title with just 235.¹¹) Whether he can force Willson Contreras off catcher, or even beat out fellow youngster Pedro Pages for the job with the Cardinals, is an open question,¹² but you know he will have a fan in me, whenever and wherever he gets his chance.

1942 National League

Excluding seasons where there was a strike, and prime World War II years (1943-1945), there are only four other cases where a Line Drive Hitter of the Year hit fewer than 15 home runs.¹³ One of those was in the 1942 NL, where 13 home runs made for the winning score. The year had previously not caught my attention because 15 is a cutoff I just now landed on to make a point that such low home run-leading totals were infrequent, rather than clearly representing some real division in the data. Line Drive Champion seasons with 15 to 20 runs have numerous entries on the graph.

But now that I look, I see that 1942 NL does conform to the pattern of a low league batting average accompanying a low winning total. Home runs were a bit hard to come by in that league as well, if not so different on a per-game rate than some surrounding seasons. The league only had four 20-home run hitters. But what really stands out is the 1942 National League only hit .249 as a league,¹⁴ the lowest total in the entire 1918-1962 span.

Enos Slaughter was the winner, hitting .318 with 31 doubles in addition to his 13 home runs. Those 13 home runs actually placed him in a tie for 7th in the league. There were eight batting average qualifiers who hit .300.

Slaughter is also the NL Line Drive Hitter of the year for 1946, the year of his famous mad dash home in the World Series.

1967 American League

A disaster on a scale even surpassing the Ivan Herrera verdict came, as mentioned before, in the 1967 American League. It is a plain fact that hitting was even worse in 1968 (.230 league batting average) than 1967. That is easy to see, and historians do not have that wrong. But 1967 was the penultimate step in a seasons-long trend. At .236, the league batting average remains second worst in American League history. So the .300 requirement for a line drive hitter proved a formidable obstacle.

The overlap between the league’s real .300 hitters and its best hitters was actually unusually close. There were four .300 batting average qualifiers (in order of highest batting average: Carl Yastrzemski, Frank Robinson, Al Kaline, George Scott), and only Harmon Killebrew prevented the same four players from taking the top four spots in the league in runs created as well.

With HR/2B ratios north of 1.30, Yastrzemski and Robinson didn’t fit my profile of a line drive hitter, but Kaline and Scott were very close to qualifying on the ratio front, and one or the other would have been the Line Drive Hitter of the Year if common sense could be appealed to. Kaline, champion or co-champion in 1956, 1958, and 1961, hit 25 home runs and 28 doubles, and Scott (the 1973 champion) had 19 home runs and 21 doubles. But, if you work them out, those ratios just miss.

With none of those players qualifying, we are left with five players who hit one home run apiece and hit .300. Frank Coggins, Jerry Kenney, and Hawk Taylor survive the ratio requirement, and emerge as co-champions.

The fact that they are the winners with only 1 home run is really all that one needs to know. But I will detail their obscurity, because I could hardly have picked a more obscure threesome if I had tried. That they happen to be singled out is more than a little bit funny and great fun. I also feel something of a duty to identify them for you, a duty I relish. I will honor the process, wherever it brings me. Who knows, maybe the players’ grandchildren will find this post and be touched, if wish that their grandfathers’ games had been portrayed in more flattering terms.

Frank Coggins (.307 in 75 AB) was a 23-year-old second baseman for the Senators. The rest of his major league career only included 172 AB. Of our three players, he is the only one I would be out-and-out shocked if you told me you remembered.

Jerry Kenney, also a rookie, came up on September 5 for the Yankees and hit .310. He would become a regular or semi-regular for the Yankees from ‘69-’71, mostly playing third base. His career .299 slugging average shows that power was the weakest part of his offensive game, but he also flirted with or failed to hit .200 more often in his few remaining seasons than he approached the .300 he technically notched in 1967.

Getting his first MLB action in 1957 at age 18, most of Hawk Taylor’s story had already been written at the time I have christened him co-champion American League Line Drive Hitter of the Year. In all, Taylor played parts of 11 seasons for the Milwaukee Braves, the Mets, the Angels, and the Royals, with catcher his primary defensive position. However, he only totaled 724 at-bats.

He was with the Angels in 1967, although for all of 52 at-bats. This is an American League award; adding in Taylor’s time with the Mets that season, he actually only hit .281.

Unlike Kenney, Taylor had some power, blasting 16 bombs in his career. However, he retired with just a .218 average. Line Drive Hitter of the Year only got him work with the Syracuse Chiefs and Seattle Angels in 1968, but he returned to the big leagues with the expansion Royals in ‘69, compiling a strong 13-for-49 record as a pinch hitter.

1968 National League

Felipe Alou’s championship was caught up in the same vortex of low averages. His 11 home runs in the 1968 National League were good enough to win, with Pete Rose, who never emerges as Line Drive Hitter of the Year, one behind him. There was actually a huge difference in terms of league average between the National League and American League in 1968, with the National League doing better by 13 points.¹⁵ However, the National League was extreme in its lack of .300 hitters, irrespective of playing time. Only six men hit .300 with a home run. Alou had the best home run total of the group, so he would have won even if I had not used a < 0.85 HR/2B ratio as a criterion.

Averted Catastrophes in the Late ‘60s

Just to demonstrate how lethal the batting average requirement was to the pool of plausible candidates in these years, the integrity of the American League honor roll in 1965, 1966, and 1968 was saved only by Yastrzemski and Tony Oliva. Yastrzemski had qualifying seasons of 20 (1965) and 23 (1968) home runs, winning championships both years. Finishing right behind Yastrzemski for Line Drive Hitter of the Year, Oliva hit .321 with 16 home runs and 40 doubles in 1965, then topped the annals with 25 home runs the next year. But in 1965, 1966, and 1968, no one else qualified and had double-digit home runs. And you know what happened in 1967. So, regardless of what the winner’s total indicates in any given year, conditions were more or less the same in the American League from 1965-1968. Tony Oliva’s three consecutive championships from ‘69-’71 with home run totals of 24, 23, and 22 remind one of an economy recovering in its usual fashion, which is to say gradually.¹⁶

Generating the AL’s .300 hitters in 1968 gave me the pleasure of remembering Gates Brown, whose bench brilliance that year made him my foremost weapon when I played MicroLeague Baseball. It never dawned on me before that it wasn’t just any year he hit .370, but in 1968. One wonders why Mayo Smith didn’t find a way to get Brown in the lineup more, but maybe he had the heart of an analyst and understood Brown’s success as most likely a fluke.¹⁷

Brown hit 6 home runs and 7 doubles (0.857), so couldn’t have won Line Drive Hitter of the Year. The other two .300 hitters in the league with a dinger, Jerry Moses and Gene Martin,¹⁸ had less than 20 AB apiece and also ratios that didn’t fly, so Brown would have been the last line of defense.

1990 National League

The problem of the system’s being too picky in the late ‘60s, and left with virtually no one legitimate, was a logical biproduct of league statistics. Whether the 1990 National League would prove to represent anything more than stars aligning¹⁹ was not as clear. That year Mariano Duncan was the champion, with 10 home runs.

From my memory, Duncan made you notice him, but he wasn’t a particularly outstanding player (compiled almost 5000 PA, but just 0.7 bWAR-per-162 games). He always had one of the lowest walk rates in the league. In 1990, he did have a fine year, though, starting all four games for the Reds at second base in their World Series sweep of the A’s. During the regular season, he had hit .306 and led the league in triples, if playing in only 125 games. He far from only saw left-handers, but when he did, he crushed them to the tune of .410/.437/.606.

The NL average in 1990 was a healthy .256. Fourteen batting-average qualifiers hit .300, and 25 players in all hit .300 with at least 1 home run.²⁰ But no one had the right profile. First, nine of the qualifying .300 hitters had less than 10 home runs. The other five had between 26-40, but none hit enough doubles to remain as candidates.

In all, twenty-three players in the league hit at least 20 home runs.²¹ Coming up just short were Tim Wallach (.296, 21 home runs, 37 doubles), and 1989’s champion, Will Clark (.295, 19 home runs, 25 doubles).

This breakdown made me wonder if I was confronting a problem, or at least a reality, where average hitting and power hitting diverged more than they do today. The consequence would be that there were few line drive hitters, as I defined it. The split could occur between home runs and average, or home runs and doubles, or both. Although the bottom only fell out in 1990, you will remember that other winners in the league around this time disappointed me, increasing my interest in a systematic study.

Time And League Trends

If there were truly systemic problems in the Duncan period, I reasoned that this should reveal itself as a trend in decreased home runs for the year’s leader. In a given year, of course, a Yastrzemski can save the day, but over time, leaders largely reflect the pool of players, I reasoned. Leader scores at least seemed a good place to start.

Going more or less decade by decade, with reconfigurations for the pandemic, strikes, and World War II, I broke up the data this way, and obtained the following numbers.

2021-2024: Average 25.3; median 28.5 (median supplied b/c of Ivan Herrera season)

2010-2019: Average 29.6 (31.7 AL, 27.4 NL)

2000-2009: Average 35.6

1995-1999: Average 31.2

1990-1993: Average 25.0

1980-1989: (exclude 1981): Average 26.5 (29.3 AL, 23.7 NL)

1970-1979: Average 23.7 (25.1 NL Average, so different from the ‘80s, when the AL dominated)

1960-1969: Average 22.6

1946-1959: Average 23.8 (26.1 NL, 21.5 AL)

1943-1945: Average 16.5

1930-1942: Average 28.1 (30.9 AL, 25.3 NL)²²

1920-1929: Average 23.5

Some notes.

Roughly 23 home runs seems to be a floor for an average year. Aside from the war era, no period is under 22.6 (the ‘60s average), but the ‘20s, ‘46-’59, and the ‘70s are barely much higher.

Numbers started to inch up in the ‘80s, then basically exploded from 1995-2019. With the rarity of .300 hitters doubtlessly a factor, totals have cooled off a bit in the 2020s.

The only period I haven’t covered in this summary is ‘30-’42, which, while blown away by the 2000s, had the highest numbers up to that point.

If seasons close to the Mariano Duncan season generally had lower scores among the leading candidates, this was not evident from the winning scores.

The other notable thing was league differences. They were too large and persistent for me to write them off. This naturally brought up the question of whether they were just a function of relative league hitting in general, or whether they were specific to star players, or to the particular categories that comprise Line Drive Hitting.

I don’t think anyone will be too surprised at the American League’s having more exciting totals in the ‘30s. Even though he isn’t a character in the Line Drive Hitter of the Year drama, rightly or wrongly, I tend to assume an extended Babe Ruth era where his impact was even greater in his own league.

On the other hand, probably only those in the weeds expected the NL’s advantage of more than 5 home runs a season from ‘46-’59.²³ We do know the NL had more Black players during this time.

I will count myself as one not previously in the weeds, but having looked at the AL position players season by season with the benefit of Stathead, they rather disappointed me. You had Williams and Mantle and Berra, certainly, but they tilted more towards very good than great, or that was my impression. I think the NL just had a stronger class.

We don’t see a statistical advantage for the NL in the ‘60s, but the names probably continue to jump out a little bit more. That depends, to some extent though, on how we evaluate Tony Oliva,²⁴ who won five titles from ‘64-’71. The 1960 through 1967 NL winners were a pretty fair group: in order, Clemente, Clemente, Frank Robinson, Pinson, Billy Williams, Aaron, Cepeda, Cepeda.

1980s scores ran on different tracks in the AL and NL, with the AL having the higher set. And this had nothing really to do with the DH difference, since all hitters face 100% real pitchers, DH rule or no DH rule.²⁵

AL leaders also did better than NL leaders from 2010-2019. Up until 2019, when Washington’s Anthony Rendon had 34 home runs and Boston’s Mookie Betts 33 to top their respective circuits, the AL had had the better score in every year of the decade, with one year tied. I don’t have any particular theory or explanation for this, except that Miguel Cabrera won two titles in this period, and David Ortiz two as well, and they were good guys for a league to call its own.

HR/2B Buckets Over Time: A Study

Now that I had firmly established the trends in the scores, I wanted to see how these corresponded with HR/2B ratio generally. While I did ultimately invoke the aggregate for comparison, my particular inspiration was to break down the number of players in each time period falling into different HR/2B ratios. This allowed me to address the question of whether baseball has at times been a game of largely home run hitters or doubles hitters, but not both, and whether this might be reflected in the scores. Pairing these data with the home run and double data generally, we are in a much better position to explain the leaders’ scores.

Notes on the study design

-The first ratio bracket to track was easy: 0.85+ HR/2B, so I could explicitly see how many players in each period I had eliminated by the rule I put in place.

Then, given a constant number of doubles, as long as the ratio is under 0.85, the higher it is, the more home runs it can represent. I therefore conceived of the middle category as one where a player might have a chance to win a championship, if his double total was high enough. So I made the range 0.60-0.85.

The third category was simply ratios beneath that.

-The players included are batting average qualifiers in the given season. I didn’t think the qualification basis for compiling the number of players in each ratio range was extremely important, as trends figured to be informative from just about any reasonable selection of players. But I did want the players to have some sample size behind them.

-This analysis did not adhere strictly to a decade-by-decade look, but consolidated some decades together. I was interested in capturing points where the average for Line Drive Hitter of the Year significantly changed. Because there were league differences as well, and league differences that changed over time, the amount of consolidation I could do and still investigate these was limited.

So I ended up with the following periods.

1995-2024; 1980-1993 NL; 1980-1993 AL; 1960-1979; 1946-1959 NL; 1946-1959 AL; 1930-1942 NL; 1930-1942 AL; 1920-1929.

I hope the batting average qualifier comment made it apparent, but in case it didn’t, the data are for player seasons, not players. In other words, David Wright supplies not one ratio in the 1995-2024 period, but eight.

Notes on results

-After compiling the data, perhaps my first observation, and one that surprised me, was that the ratio of 0.85+ to 0.60-0.85 HR/2B players has been relatively consistent over time. More change occurs in the percentage of 0.60+ ratio players total, most notably comparing pre-1943 to post 1945. (Before 1943, there just weren’t a lot of players who hit home runs.) And in this 1995-2024 period, both the 0.60-0.85 ratio range and the 0.85+ range percentages are high, the highest of any of the eras constructed, so both parts of the ratio have gone in the same direction. Make no mistake, there have still been meaningful changes in the ratio, but they have been somewhat subtle.

Ratio of 0.85+ HR/2B to 0.60-0.85 HR/2B Players

1995-2024 1.21

1980-1993 NL 1.12

1980-1993 AL 1.31

1960-1979 1.69

1946-1959 NL 1.79

1946-1959 AL 1.68

1930-1942 NL 0.67

1930-1942 AL 1.03

1920-1929 0.77

The 1920-1942 period is obviously its own entity, although the ratio is still within range of 1.00. Setting those years aside, ironically, given my previous concerns, the Mariano Duncan year was actually part of the era where the middle group flourished the most on a relative basis of any period since. In every post-World War II period, there have been more players with 0.85+ HR/2B than 0.60-0.85 HR/2B, but the disparity was just 12% in 1980-1993 NL.

-We could be of two minds about the frequency of classic home run hitters and what it portends for Line Drive Hitter totals. On the one hand, my Line Drive Hitter currency is home runs. High ratios then suggest there are plenty to go around, which might ultimately redound to the putative line drove hitters’ benefit. On the other hand, the fact is that players with a 0.85+ ratio are strictly eliminated by the system.

In this rundown of the size ratio of the top and the middle group, both 1946-1959 periods and the 1960-1979 periods cluster together, with ratios of between 1.68 and 1.79, easily the highest observed. While Line Drive Hitter of the Year scores were not depressed in these years, not in the way they were during World War II, anyway, the averages were run of the mill, around 22 a year (with the exception of the 1946-1959 NL, when players did a bit better). So it would seem a high ratio in the size of the top-to-middle group is not a staple of high scoring.

If we concentrate specifically on the size of the 0.85+ group,²⁶ we see that for two of these three periods, it measures as large even in absolute terms. In fact, for 1946-1959 NL and 1960-1979, the percentage of players with home runs greater than 85% of their doubles was nearly as great as in the current 1995-2024 period.

Percentage of Qualifiers with > 0.85 HR/2B

1995-2024 30.1%

1946-1959 NL 29.6%

1960-1979 29.5%

1946-1959 AL 25.0%

So, what was before just a possible implication can now be asserted: a high percentage of high HR/2B hitters does not automatically indicate a good environment for Line Drive Hitter scoring, and might actually be detrimental. Since the highest rate did not prevent the 1995-2024 period from also showing the highest leading scores, however, we need to seek other data which can explain the discrepancy.

-Ranking the periods just by the proportion of players in the 0.60-0.85 HR/2B group does indeed succed in distinguishing 1995-2024. Of the total batting average qualifiers, 24.9% had ratios in that slot, with no other period having a percentage higher than 19.6% (1980-1993 AL).

Taking this step was also edifying because it showed the 1980-1993 NL low ratio between the top and middle groups really to just be a function of a small top group. The pedestrian leader scores of that group are no longer curious. 1980-1993 NL had just 17.5% of its qualifiers in the middle group, an average percentage.

-Looking at the bracket sizes, my insight into some of the league differences for same time periods remains limited. We might at least need to finger correlates other than the percentage of 0.60-0.85 HR/2B ratio players to understand them.

While 1980-1993 NL’s middle group size was much smaller than what it has been in the last 30 years, its deficit compared to 1980-1993 AL (17.5% vs. 19.6%) does not seem sufficient to explain the 5.9 home run difference a year in the leaders’ scores. In this instance, the size of the top group, which favored the AL 25.6% to 19.7%, was more indicative. Since it would not seem good to have players who got disqualified, we could cite more home runs in the AL generally as a more salient theory, but actually the difference in that largely vanished when I corrected for the DH difference: without designated hitters and pitchers, the AL from 1980-1993 hit 0.75 HR/G, the NL 0.72. My hunch is that the size difference of the top groups in the two leagues again points in some indirect way to more star players hanging their shingles in the American League. The explanation for the AL’s superior leader scores does not seem to include designated hitters themselves being Line Drive Hitting champions: there were not any from 1980-1993.

Invoking special star players again is plausible for the 1946-1959 NL’s advantage in leaders’ scores. The NL’s top/middle ratio was more top heavy at 1.79-1 (which overall seems a negative), and the size of its middle group larger by only 1.9%. Yet NL leaders averaged 4.6 more home runs during this time than AL leaders. I want to save most of my discussion of individual stars for later, but the numbers that Stan Musial and Henry Aaron specifically compiled can be cited as playing a role.

A simple explanation may just be that the NL was the better home run league generally from 1946-1959. The home run rate in the NL was 0.84/game, in the AL, 0.71/game. NL 1946-1959 also outperformed 1960-1979 in leaders’ scores, and 1960-1979 only had a home run rate of 0.78/game, including games that were played with designated hitters for many teams during some of this time. To gauge the home run effect of designated hitters, from 1980-1993 in the AL, designated hitters produced 0.12 more home runs per game than pitchers.

-As I mentioned in my decade rundown, the 1920-1929 leaders’ scores and 1930-1942 NL leaders’ scores were of a piece with those generally seen before the 21st century, while the 1930-1942 AL leaders’ scores were actually higher.²⁷ Since, even in 1930-1942 AL, the percentage of players in both of the 0.60+ brackets were far off later decades, it seems sound to make a distinction in the trend among average players, on the one hand, and stars, on the other. My suspicion is that this difference largely reflects a majority of players not having tapped the possibilities of home run power pre-World War II, rather than the stars having been particularly exceptional, but there is no way of knowing this. It is only common sense to think that the Live Ball creed was relatively slow to infiltrate the ranks, but that its possibilities were there to be realized for the savvy.

Leaders’ scores might also have outpaced favorable HR/2B ratios because many fewer players were eliminated by the .300 average requirement in the ‘20s and ‘30s than in later decades. This was obviously a positive offsetting factor.

It is also true that HR/G for 1930-1942 is more competitive with later decades than the percentage of players with 0.60+ HR/2B is. It’s possible that exceptional individual hitters carried the cumulative home run rate to a surprisingly high point, but it makes more sense that the HR/2B ratios specifically were kept in check by a high doubles rate. Checking on this, 2B/G ranged from 1.65 to 1.78 in the three periods I feature before World War II. In comparison, the five periods I feature from 1946 through 1993 had 2B/G ranging from 1.34 (1960-1979) to 1.57 (1980-1993). The 2B/G rate for 1995-2024 has been 1.75.

More on What Drives Overall HR/2B Ratio

Trying to understand summaries of the ratios is a bit of a fraught process because the same ratio can mean different things depending on just how many home runs and doubles went into it. Considering this, it’s actually surprising how much sense we can make of them. I am relatively satisfied, in any event, that there has never been the kind of dynamic I feared, where the HR/2B ratio changed overall but this wasn’t reflected in corresponding changes among individual players.

Making sense of the era top-to-middle ratio is difficult because half of that ratio is a product of the size of the middle group. Middle groups usually refer to average groups, and attempted prediction of an average group is generally considered a no-no. To illustrate where the 0.60-0.85 range falls generally, since 1946, the cumulative HR/2B rate is 0.59²⁸. The middle group can indeed roughly be termed an average group in its HR/2B ratio.

The interpretation of the numerator in that ratio, the size of the top group, seems more clear. I found that this correlated very strongly with the HR/2B ratio of the period generally. I will quote each of these below, and as you can see, the rank order is the same.

PCT Qualifiers w/ 0.85+ HR/2B Ratio, Followed by Cumulative League HR/2B Ratio

1995-2024: 30.1, 0.62

1946-1959 NL: 29.6, 0.59

1960-1979: 29.5, 0.58

1980-1993 AL: 25.6, 0.56

1946-1959 AL: 25.0, 0.51

1980-1993 NL: 19.7, 0.49

1930-1942 AL: 9.5, 0.33

1930-1942 NL: 6.0, 0.31

1920-1929: 3.8, 0.24

Since the “middle group” actually represents somewhat above-average ratios, one could well see how it might have caught many of the performers in the high HR/2B leagues and diverted them from the top group, but that did not happen to the extent that it scrambled the correspondence.

I also want to make it clear that a high HR/2B ratio does not necessarily mean a high home run rate, and that is particularly true for eras, which represent summaries. The three 1946-1959 middle periods had the three lowest 2B/G rates, which obviously buttresses their HR/2B ratios.

How Well Did Line Drive Hitter of the Year Work in the Negro Leagues?

If you’ve had a job as essentially a statistical processor, as I have, the company typically gives you a job title such as “analyst”, not just to gild, but because the company actually does wants a knowledgeable person there as a last line of defense in case the computer is generating things that don’t make sense. In this case, providing the Negro League data without commentary and generating it without consideration would certainly have been better than nothing, particularly because Negro League buffs could supply the gaps and comment on whether the proffered Line Drive Hitters of the Year really convinced as such. Although I did selectively double check some results just to make sure I hadn’t goofed on the prompts, including with the American and National Leagues, Stathead means that we can get results without having to really immerse ourselves in the data. Knowing MLB data as I do, I was equipped to play gatekeeper without making a special effort. But with the Negro Leagues, I needed to develop some idea of how Line Drive Hitting champions were a twist on statistics in conventional categories. I needed to know what I was looking at, in other words.

I had read that home run percentages in the Negro Leagues were lower. That, in fact, it was more of a line drive game. This made me wonder if all I was doing in producing my list was essentially repeating the home run leaderboard over the leagues’ histories. Maybe no one had HR/2B ratios over 0.85.

I also saw some very gaudy batting averages as the Stathead data queries emerged. It rarely seemed the case that a winner had to squeak out the “.300 batting average” part. This would also mean that there were few cuts on this front.

So my first step in conducting a reality check was to compare league home run leaders to my winners. And what I found was that the Line Drive Hitter of the Year did in fact take things in a different direction. However, it is a bit hard to speak of this trend generally, because Josh Gibson was the dominant home run hitter in the Negro Leagues, and he had a 1.23 career HR/2B ratio. So despite never stumbling on the .300 requirement, his 11 home run titles get shaved to 1 here. Otherwise, I would say there was still significant and consistent difference between the regular home run champions and Line Drive champions, if quite a bit less than in MLB. (In MLB, only 5.2% of Line Drive Hitting champs actually hit the most home runs that year.)

Four times Buck Leonard took the baton when Gibson’s ratio disqualified him. In 1940, when Gibson is only credited with having played 2 games, Leonard won the proper home run title, too (although with four others, only one of whom also stayed around once HR/2B were taken into account). Leonard was on the wrong end of the stick in 1939; with Gibson, he led the National Negro League with 11 home runs, but only hit 10 doubles, too few to be LDH of the Year, given that number of home runs.

That Leonard was not the actual home run champion in four of his five years as the Line Drive champion is not meant to say he didn’t deserve those titles. Stating the obvious, that’s not the idea of the award, to find the top home run hitter. I am merely timidly suggesting, as someone not knowledgeable here, that he may be better classified as a Stan Musial than a Willie Mays.

As for the batting average component and the question of whether that functioned as a real variable — the batting average for a median year in the Negro National League was .277, in the Negro National League II, .274, and in the Negro American League, .258. No one will confuse these with the elevated averages that generally prevailed in MLB in the ‘20s and ‘30s, but they also did not make the Line Drive Hitter of the Year automatically a contest between a select few. Since players did not accumulate a great deal of at-bats, however, it makes sense that there was great variation in batting average, which could include the very high batting averages that I observed.

For some reason, I still didn’t notice many players getting knocked off because of batting average. One who did came from that lower batting average league, the Negro American League. Turkey Stearnes, age 39 and in the final season of his career in 1940, led the league with 5 home runs and hit enough doubles to qualify, but hit just .262.

So, as far as I can tell, the game in the Negro Leagues fit the Line Drive hitting framework absolutely fine. But an issue far more than trifling is that rating by total home runs doesn’t work when official games played between players on different teams are so uneven. These discrepancies involve both different numbers of games that the teams played, and the percentage of team games that had box scores and are thus included in a player’s statistics (see the most important footnote of this piece)²⁹. The consequence is an uneven playing field probably more slanted toward its beneficiaries than anything Chuck Klein got from Baker Bowl or the Colorado players got from Coors Field in its heyday. Maybe the disparity a bit like if MLB ballparks were generally divided among Coors Fields and more “normal” parks, instead of like the current case, where there is only one Coors Field.

It would probably be harder to find years where there wasn’t an issue, but to show how things often played out —the 1939 Philadelphia Stars of the Negro National League compiled data in 50 games, while no other team in the seven-team league had more than 33 games of data. Our winner was Pat Patterson, who came from the Stars.³⁰ In 1926, two Hall of Famers, Biz Mackey and Oscar Charleston, share the Eastern Colored League Line Drive Hitting title.³¹ But Mackey’s Hilldale Club has player data for 88 games, and Charleston’s Harrisburg Giants has data for just 48.

I don’t want to detract too much from the winners that emerged. They are quite a group. Even I know that, ignorant as I am, and that suggests the results must have been capturing much beyond games played. One wonders, however, if there is a tendency for the most famous players to have more games on record than less heralded players, which naturally leads to a better appearance in counting stats. This, in turn, reinforces the idea of their superiority.

An exercise blissfully free from these problems is simply noting HR/2B ratio of Negro League greats. This gives us information about what type of player each was. Home runs and doubles were in each box score alike.

To start with Turkey Stearnes, his five Line Drive titles are notable considering his career ratio ran a little high at 0.81. With a ratio like that, he could perhaps be equated to having been a 130-lb jockey who excelled in the Kentucky Derby, when the horses were allowed to carry just 126. Stearnes was a career .348 hitter.

Other ratios and batting averages for some players who figure prominently in the winner’s list.

Buck Leonard 0.67, .346

Oscar Charleston 0.59, .365

Willie Wells 0.54, .330

Willard Brown 0.43, .351

That Brown’s career ratio is so low is interesting. One might not think that ratio was high enough to win five Line Drive titles, let alone six real home run titles. Does he benefit significantly from more games recorded than other players? Were home run rates in the Negro American League just low generally? I do not know. He was known as Home Run Brown (or that is a nickname for him on Baseball Reference, anyway) so one would think his power was first rate. Regardless, he certainly had a better career home run rate than Home Run Baker.

Just as with Stearnes, it might be a mistake to assume Leonard was wholly on the line drive side of things just because he won five Line Drive titles. Gibson and he clearly have to be classified differently, but Leonard’s ratio looks quite high versus these other guys, who all had major power bona fides. So I await the right MLB comparison for Leonard. Musial might not do.

I will conclude by saying that I think that the use of black type on Baseball Reference to mark Negro League leaders in categories such as runs, home runs, etc., as has traditionally been done for MLB, is of questionable wisdom. Defensible, but questionable. Either those in charge did not consider the issue, did not want to deal with the headache of explaining why they appeared not to be giving the Negro Leagues equal treatment, or just thought recognizing players, whether they were worthy or not, was important. We are looking at technical leaders, disguised as real leaders. When you see that black type, you take for granted that Baseball Reference has applied the normal guardrails. It seems inconceivable that there would be a problem of this magnitude and they would just ignore it and sanction the black type.

Rate statistics are of course different. They make for as even a playing field as we are going to get. Of course, as I wrote, a low number of games theoretically becomes an advantage when it comes to the chances of leading a league, but opportunities among players are never equal, regardless of data coverage. And it is very different thing to declare a league leader when only spread is an issue than to recognize a league leader when the very numbers are on average larger or smaller depending on opportunity.

All-time Single-Season Line Drive Hitting Leaderboard

Overview

I haven’t been able to deliver the data to you all at once and in total, but through the different angles I have provided, I hope you will eventually get a relatively full picture. To this point, I have only captured individual accomplishment in terms of league titles.³² Normally, this is actually just a small part about what we carry in our head about great players, however. We want to know what great players’ numbers look like; we memorize some, and can give the essence of many others. And there may not be many players whose immortality is owed in great deal to a certain category in which they never led the league, but there probably are some. So some names might also be falling through the cracks by telling the whole story with league leaders.

My effort to erase these shortcomings was to supplement the yearly leaders with a list of the all-time single season leaders, focusing on all seasons of 35+ home runs that met the two criteria.

How Much Spread Do We Normally See in a Leaderboard? How Much Do We See with Line Drive Hitting? Limitations of Single-Season Line Drive Hitting.

Ironically, given my initial concern, having now done this, I believe that the quantitative side of my statistic should play less of a role in determining the best ever than with a traditional statistic.³³ I believe this because the results suggest there is a practical ceiling on how high the number can go. Harping on the number, then, seems misguided.

The leaderboard for the highest Line Drive Hitting totals is probably more clustered than for most traditional statistics, but it is, admittedly, a small and subtle difference, if one in fact exists.

To document those other statistics.

For home runs where there is no average or HR/2B ratio maximum, the numbers are greater, and that in and out of itself means there should be more spread. Bonds and McGwire are way out ahead of the pack on the single-season list; anyone with a working knowledge of statistics, even if he knew nothing about baseball, would see right away that their 2001 and 1998 totals are remarkable. But once we get past Bonds and McGwire, every count 56-66 for home runs is represented.

Earl Webb’s 67 doubles are 3 clear of everyone else. The next 61-double season will also be the first.

Owen Wilson hit 36 triples in 1912, leading all other players ever by 5. Thirty triples is also a missing level.

While the top pitching wins totals ever, all compiled in either 1884 or 1885, are 60, 53, and 52, respectively, and they are the only seasons of 50+, every total of 49 and under has happened.

Francisco Rodriguez’s 62 saves in 2008 have never really been approached, with Edwin Diaz (2018) and Bobby Thigpen (1990) 5 behind him. No one has had 56 saves.

Etc.

In the case of Line Drive Hitting, with 43 the best season ever, every total at least through 35 is represented.³⁴ The best seasons ever do seem to represent the tail of a potential bell curve, more or less. They are clustered, but less clustered than the seasons just behind. To wit, the four units from 40-43 have 6 total counts; the four units from 36-39 have 16 counts.

To explain my comment that there is a practical ceiling on the Line Drive Hitting totals, the highest total ever is Albert Pujols’ 43 in 2001, when he married it with 51 doubles. If Earl Webb had hit 56 home runs, those would have stood, but obviously a season like that is far-fetched. There have been only 25 seasons ever of 55 doubles or more. Fifty-five doubles only allows you 46 home runs.

It’s not a coincidence that Pujols has the all-time single-season record, and he ran right against the 85% limit of HR-to-2B (84.3%). But the #2 guy (Todd Helton, 2000) hit 59 doubles along with his 42 home runs (a 71.2% ratio).

Analysis of the Leaderboard

Because the very top individual seasons do not differ much from each other, I believe tallying the number of these seasons by player is a better contribution toward rating the players than taking note of the exact totals.

Only four players have had more than one total of 35+ in Line Drive Hitting.

Albert Pujols (2001, 2003, 2008)

Hank Greenberg (1935, 1937, 1940)

Chuck Klein (1930, 1932)

David Ortiz (2007, 2016)

If we recognize the difference between the American League and National League during his career that the leader averages suggest, Klein is the only one of these whose seasons didn’t come in an era of generally higher numbers. However, there is substantial evidence he wouldn’t have approached his numbers if he hadn’t played his home games in such a friendly ballpark for hitting.³⁵

Coming by their numbers more honestly in the National League in that time were, first, Rogers Hornsby, who had 39 home runs and 47 doubles in 1929. Babe Herman then hit 35 home runs in 1930, leaving him 5 home runs behind Klein. He was eligible with a .393, 48-double supporting line. Those seasons also deserve commendation.

Since they were lonely efforts, three seasons in the 65-year period from 1933 to 1997 in the National League impress me at least as much as any of the 40+ home run seasons on record (Pujols and Helton, as mentioned previously, plus two by Greenberg, and one each by Klein and Carlos Delgado). The NL only had three 35+ seasons in this period, but all went well past, coming in at 39 even. They trace to Musial, 1948; Aaron, 1959; and Frank Robinson, 1962.

It might seem I am playing a bit of a game by looking at just the National League in the 1933-1997 window, since, if you paid close attention to the era delineation, you know that the National League leaders actually outperformed the American League ones from 1946-1959, and did not perform worse than them from 1960-1979. What am I hiding?

It is true that the 65-year drought would not survive the American League onslaughts from 1934-1940, but there really is a legitimate case to be made that was an easier environment for Line Drive Hitting. But, from 1946-1984 in the American League, as in the National League, there were no 35+ seasons. Don Mattingly changed that in 1985, but with just 35 home runs. And there wasn’t a really big American League season until Delgado’s 41 in 2000.

I stopped in 1998 on the National League side because a supposedly clean Barry Bonds (and hey, line drive hitting is all about the clean) qualified with 37 home runs. By this time, however, I think we can assume that players had the wind at their back, no matter what we see exactly in that season or in those one or two before or after.

I’ll throw in Bryce Harper’s .309/35 HR/42 2B MVP 2021 as a recent season that was more than your run-of-the-mill league leading one, considering where Line Drive Hitting averages are. However, there is no actual reason why National Leaguers can’t score as high as American Leaguers can now. And Witt Jr. had 32 to lead the AL this year, and Corey Seager, 33 in 2023 (in only 119 games!)³⁶

My Top Three Line Drive Hitters of All-Time

The choice for the Line Drive Hitter of all-time (because of the statistical holes in the current databases, and my inexperience with the data that exists, excluding Negro Leaguers) comes down to three players for me, with one of them a pretty clearly third. I believe the most impressive records were compiled by Musial and Greenberg,³⁷ with Pujols rating an honorable mention.

If Musial hadn’t won a bunch of titles, I would have to question my work even more than I already have. I didn’t develop the tool with him consciously in mind, but he is the prototype: the line drive master, the man who hit home runs but wasn’t a home run hitter. As Musial also won seven batting titles, eight doubles titles, and five triples totals, I may have done nothing elegant in devising another tool where he separates himself from the pack, but certainly his dominance translated.

It also wouldn’t be right to represent the choice for all-time number one as amounting to Musial’s number of titles versus Greenberg’s per-season excellence. While Musial didn’t play when 30+ seasons were common, when he won, it tended to be with a higher number than when other guys won. His 1943 title came with just 13 home runs. But his six titles or co-titles from 1948-1957 were won with an average of 29 home runs. The National League titles not captured by Musial in this era, 1946-1959, were notched with an average of 24 home runs. That’s a pretty big difference.

Certainly, we could try to use other frameworks to analyze these Line Drive Hitting greats, but we run into roadblocks. A statistic where you can’t get a total for a player in some years, where he is sometimes disqualified, cannot be analyzed with the usual ease.

Unlike Musial, Greenberg standing out to the degree he does was a complete surprise to me. I know he played much of his career in the 1930s, when the hitting was good, and I know he is already highly estimated, but I still contend he is underrated.³⁸ He always comes third behind Gehrig and Foxx when we talk about first basemen. Foxx hit those 58 home runs before Greenberg did, and a first challenge to Ruth was novel.

In a way, I think those 58 home runs overshadowed the rest of what Greenberg did, and were more harmful to his memory than beneficial,³⁹ because they pigeonholed him and stuck to him. If you rate Greenberg only by his power, he is not on as short a list of great players. We also may not think of Greenberg as a line drive hitter because, by the standards of the day, he did strike out a lot, leading the AL in 1939. In 1936, he played only 12 games, but every other year from 1934-1938, he was always 2nd or 3rd in the league in strikeouts.

Greenberg’s HR/2B ratio in 1938 was extremely atypical for him. For that year, he was certainly slugger and not line drive hitter. The 58 home runs came with only 23 doubles! That was a shift from his normal proclivities of Matt Olson proportions. A changing of his game Bryson DeChambeau would envy. But, besides 1938, Greenberg is the Line Drive Hitter of the Year in the AL in all of his other healthy seasons from 1935-1940.

How did he do it? In the presence of many doubles, his home runs would push right up against the allowable limit, but never edge over. He could do both things. Thirty-six home runs and 46 doubles in 1935, 40 home runs and 49 doubles in 1937, 33 home runs and 42 doubles in 1939, 41 home runs and 50 doubles in 1940. There simply isn’t another record like it.

Then, after missing four seasons in the military, when even many players who eventually served got to play in 1941 and 1942, he came back midway in 1945 and won the Line Drive Hitter title again. This is one scenario where a 13-HR title cannot be considered cheap. His .311, non-qualifying batting average bettered Snuffy Stirnweiss’s league-leading .309 mark, and his 4.8 home run percentage bettered proper home run champ Vern Stephens’ 4.2.

I will not say the choice is clear, but if Greenberg’s total Line Drive Hitting credentials slightly trail Musial’s, because he achieved them in a period of time so much shorter, and that shorter period of time largely reflects an event outside of his control, I rate him #1.

Obviously, Pujols is in rarefied air both in terms of his number of his wins (4) and the sheer number of home runs he hit in those seasons. Some might bristle at the classification of him as a line drive hitter, but I think his swing was very much a line drive one. The 703 home runs raises some doubts,⁴⁰ but he never hit more than 49 home runs in a season. In his prime, too, he was certainly a fantastic average hitter⁴¹.

His case is an interesting one. Since he won three of his titles in his first three seasons in the big leagues, my initial opinion was that he evolved from a line drive hitter to a home run hitter. But then I noticed that his Angels’ HR/2B ratio (1.04) and his Cardinals’ HR/2B ratio (1.00; 469 HR, 469 2B) hardly differed at all. Pujols played regularly through age 39, and through 42 altogether. From 35 on, his ratio is 1.46, very top heavy. Before that period, though, it was liable to be anything in any given year, although when he was with the Cardinals, it was never lower than 0.79 (like Greenberg, he tended to brush right against that 0.85). What stands out is that his doubles fell off with the Angels basically the same amount as his home runs.

Other Top Players, Some of the Methodological Issues They Raise, and Some Observations

I think the theory that great hitters tend to start out as line drive hitters and graduate to home run hitting is right, but is best argued with examples other than Pujols. There is a striking similarity with Mantle, ARod, and Griffey Jr. Each won one title, and they came at the ages of 20, 20, and 22, respectively. Again, one thinks of the graduation from one weight class to another in boxing. Or in horse racing, from sprinting success to routing success.

David Ortiz certainly produced some of the best seasons ever by this criteria, and there is a parallel to be drawn between him and Greenberg. Both had one big home run season but their HR/2B ratios generally distinguish them from the true sluggers. In Ortiz’s case, the numbers perhaps lie, though. Fenway seemingly made a lot of his home runs doubles, and gave him some doubles that would have been outs at most other ballparks. He was two different players at home and on the road over his career. A 0.63 HR/2B ratio at home; a 1.20 ratio on the road.⁴²

I began this work in September, so I feel like the World Series stole my Freddie Freeman thunder. I thought I was the only one who knew he was great, and think he should be known for his five Line Drive Hitter titles before he is known for his RBI record in a World Series and consecutive home run games in the World Series. He may not be the champion of WAR, but the more one looks at his numbers, the more one appreciates how remarkable he’s been.⁴³

Just why does he do so well in this system? I was pleased to see it, because he is a superior doubles hitter, and I use doubles here in a rather original way. This indicates that the system can work.

The other point is that, although our low-average era has obscured it for many, Freeman is a terrific average hitter. He’s never won a batting title, but he’s been second or third in hitting five times. His averages have also gotten better with age, and his strikeouts have decreased a bit, meaning that if one did not adjust her perception of him, his excellence in batting average may have been missed.

But it is important to say that Freeman benefits from the .300 average requirement really being an anachronism and overly demanding for this time in baseball. He’s still going strong, so might add to his legacy, but I don’t rate him with Greenberg, Musial, and Pujols as a line drive hitter. I think titles are more impressive when batting average plays a smaller role.

Without the possibility of dark horses like Cecil Cooper, whom my Line Drive Hitting system places among the best of all time, probably no one would do work like this. Cooper first had the best Line Drive Hitting score in 1979, and last did in 1983, meaning he won four times in five years. In 1981, he was 2nd, so he just missed winning five consecutive years. Add to that that he was tied for 3rd in 1978.

If I stand by the Line Drive numbers and go all in on Cooper, I fear my SABR membership will be revoked. They’ll say, sorry, there are just some people from whom we won’t take money. We have to draw the line somewhere. But I fail to see why Cooper can’t be described as having been a poor man’s Don Mattingly, or even a working man’s Don Mattingly. The similarity goes right down to their identical .352 average in their very best average season (1980 for Cecil, 1986 for Mattingly). Cooper could field, too, or at least his peers thought he could, giving him two Gold Gloves. With a .797 career OPS on the road and an .808 at home, he wasn’t a home field creation. Yes, that’s not a great OPS, but Mattingly’s is just .830. Their career stories are different; Mattingly was Line Drive Hitter of the Year at ages 24-26, while Cooper won his first title at 29. Cooper, by the way, failed to get a single vote when proposed to the BBWAA for Cooperstown.

My sense is that there used to be an aura around the line drive hitting type. Now, that has not only faded, but things have seemingly come full circle, with sentient older fans perhaps coming to recognize in the line drive hitter the profile of a player they had formerly overated.⁴⁴ I’m not certain, however, if this applies to my definition of line drive hitting as much as it would with some other attempts to quantify it, namely because I don’t look at RBI. The narrative used to be that RBI were the bottom line, and players who procured them without hitting home runs were thought better than less-well-rounded home run hitters. While RBI are not a variable in my line driving hitting measurement, I wondered if I was picking up high totals, anyway, something that would be possible if the traditional notion of a line drive hitter as an RBI man is right. If I was getting RBI men, they figured to be RBI men first, home run hitters second, in the mold so much loved in days of yore, as my system indirectly penalizes players for home runs.

To get a bead on these issues, I noted cases where the Line Drive Hitter of the year led in home runs, RBI, or total bases as well, and then tabulated these cases of co-leadership. Only MLB, and not the Negro Leagues, was included. When players tied for a Line Drive Hitting title, they all went into a count, yielding 229 player seasons in all.

Of these categories, the one the Line Drive Hitter of the Year did best in, judging by league leadership, was total bases. The LDH winner led in total bases 41 times, or a rate of 17.9%. LDH and RBI leadership went together 12.2% of the time; LDH leadership and HR leadership, 5.2% of the time.

The two main categories of extra base hits, doubles and home runs, are at the heart of the method. They are confined to a certain ratio that might tend to minimize rather than optimize total bases, but it’s not too surprising that the net effect remains consistent with a high number.

It is a dogma with me that home runs are the single biggest factor in RBI, and so in truth, I undertook this exercise largely to debunk the myth that line driving hitting takes precedence. Without knowing the exact count, however, it is certainly true that the league leaders in home runs and RBI are often different men, and the co-leadership statistic for the LDHY and RBI (12.2%) says to me that being Line Drive Hitter of the Year is a viable alternative way to the RBI title. We certainly have more RBI LDHY champions than HR LDHY champions. However, I retain my belief that the understanding of the prototypical RBI guy as fundamentally a line drive hitter is off-base.

Ken Williams is known for his performance in 1922, when he garnered the first 30-30 season in MLB history. Never hitting more than 37 doubles in a season, his presence as a three-time Line Drive hitting champion can’t have been expected, but regardless, he was simply regularly one of the best hitters in the American League from 1921-1927. He was a good average hitter (.319 career, and in the AL top 10 every year from ‘21-’23), and one of the few guys in the league hitting home runs (an average of 24 in 467 AB from ‘21-’27). His career OPS was 182 points better at home than on the road, but the generic park factor associated with his seasons indicates this was largely individual to him, rather than a matter of playing in a park where everyone benefited greatly.

The 39-37 season is not one of his Line Drive Hitting championships — that year, he hit too many home runs for his doubles. The next year, though, he did win the title, hitting 29 more home runs, and raising his average from .332 to .357.

While it’s cool that Jackie Robinson won three times, he is probably more of a fluke in this category than Williams, as his winning totals were just 19 and 15, and 4 with the Kansas City Monarchs. As I have detailed, totals in the post-war National League were also not generally depressed. While the ‘45 Monarchs do have box scores for 50 games and none of the five other teams in the NAL except for the Chicago American Giants have data for more than 27 games, Robinson did not ride this wave as much as that implies, as he personally only has data for 34 games.

While it wasn’t quite a Cecil Cooper moment for me, it was interesting to see objective criteria honor George “High Pockets” Kelly, the winner in 1921 and co-winner in 1922. I have complete confidence in Bill James’ general assessment of players. He’s not going to place them in the wrong neighborhood, and my dim memory of James on Kelly is that he represented him as just a total fraud of a Hall of Famer, an avatar for how wrongs things went with 1920s and 1930s Giants being chosen by the Veteran’s Committee.

Line Drive Hitting requires that we reassess, or at least try to make sense of how Kelly was able to win. There’s no sudden thought of his having been valuable enough to deserve his place in the Hall of Fame, but multiple Line Drive Hitting champions, with very rare exceptions such as Aubrey Huff, can also not rightly be thought of as average. The numbers here must have a story to tell.

When I looked at Kelly’s statistics, it was apparent that what he was was a slugger. He was in the top 6 in the NL in home runs every year from 1920-1926. By the standards of the day, he wasn’t a good average hitter, never placing in the top 10, although he was still over .300 every year from ‘21-’26. The pattern only deepened when I noticed that he always ranked up there in strikeouts (five times in the NL top three). So my reading is that Kelly’s limitations were specific. It’s wrong to characterize him as a random Hall of Famer. Maybe he wasn’t outstanding overall, maybe his game wasn’t ideal for his era, but he was a guy absolutely worth noting because he had home run power (and also fielded well).

Understood in this context, he shows how the blanket .300 average requirement can fail in the direction opposite of the late ‘60s fiascos and the Ivan Herrera affair. In low-average times, basically no one qualifies. In high-average times like the 1920s, batting average isn’t serving as much of a screen. Hence, I ironically identified Kelly as a slugger, or a 1920s version, despite his having been twice the ostensible Line Drive Hitter of the Year. He had the right profile to win in the 1920s, and the fact is, the ideal profile changes.

So, going forward, it would probably be best to determine the needed batting average by referencing the league average. Something as simple as 35 points better could work. Since I know of no way to configure Stathead to capture simple categories relative to the league average, such a rendering wasn’t a realistic option for this project, but undeniably it would make for a better framework.

As I compiled the list of winners, the cognitive biases I have read about played on me as strongly as if I had been treated with an actual drug. I knew it didn’t mean anything, for instance (except that maybe I had underappreciated the consistent offensive excellence of the club), but I thought I saw a preponderance of Cincinnati Reds. Confronting Chris Sabo⁴⁵ and Mariano Duncan in back-to-back years will do that to you. Reggie Sanders, though at least a solid hitter and one who played for a long time, prevailed four years after Sabo. Frank Robinson in 1962, Vada Pinson in ‘63, Bobby Tolan⁴⁶ in ‘69, and Tony Perez in ‘73 made for another Reds run. Pinson was traded for Tolan and Wayne Granger before 1969. The Reds’ other winners have been Frank McCormick (twice), Gus Bell, Dave Parker, and Joey Votto.

Another possible theme is the strong performance of Yankees, particularly of supporting Yankees (of their “very goods” you wouldn’t confuse for Hall of Famers, in other words). The Yankees have three of the 14 three-time winners (Mattingly, DiMaggio, and Gehrig), and three of the five three-time winners to have won all of their titles in the American League. Thurman Munson and Yogi Berra are two of the seven catchers to have won, and the only two American League catcher winners. By supporting player winners, I am thinking of Bill Skowron, Gene Woodling, Tommy Henrich, Tony Lazzeri, and Bob Meusel. (I guess Lazzeri is a Hall of Famer, come to think of it, although he wasn’t when I started following baseball in 1985.) So, the fact I found quite a few Yankees I didn’t generally think of as the quality to win this, makes me wonder if I have paradoxically underrated Yankees in general. Maybe my perception is colored because they weren’t all-time greats, like some of their teammates? The recent years have not been as kind to the Yankees, with only Alfonso Soriano (2002) and Robinson Cano (2012) winning since Dave Winfield in ‘88.

Bob Meusel, who won in 1921, was joined by his brother Irish in 1925.

The only father and son team that has won is Bobby and Barry Bonds. Bobby’s victory was 1970, the year he set the single-season strikeout record that stood for so many years. A high strikeout total is no object to winning this, it appears

I’m not really bothered by that. Being a line drive hitter to me isn’t so much about how often you hit the ball, but about how hard you hit it, and at what trajectory. Of course, the Line Drive Hitter doesn’t have to be a high strikeout hitter, but it’s important that he not be a punch-and-judy hitter.

Who Isn’t on the List?

At one point, I entertained compiling and analyzing the percentage of Hall of Famers among Line Drive champions, but wasn’t sure it would add much, certainly not for the work it would entail. Instead, I decided a more interesting question would be, who isn’t here? And were there many prominent players who weren’t? It seemed to me that most of the great players had won a title at some point, even if it was just a way station on the road to becoming a full-time home run hitter, as with Ken Griffey Jr. But my perception turned out to be another case of cognitive bias. I guess I was impressed by so many of the guys on the list that I didn’t focus on the absences. Or maybe it’s hard to keep the whole pool of players in consciousness.

Searching for the best players never to be Line Drive Hitter of the Year, I looked at the all-time leaders in OPS+ among players with at least 5,000 plate appearances who started their careers after 1920 (the season when I think the Line Drive Hitting exercise starts to be relevant).

The best not here….

Mike Trout doesn’t have a title. He’s 4th in all-time OPS+.

Jimmie Foxx doesn’t have a title, and is 6th in OPS+. Interesting again to see that the system sees Foxx and Greenberg differently.

Mark McGwire, 7th in OPS+. No one would think of him as a line drive hitter, but he was a great player who doesn’t have a title.

Dick Allen, 11th in OPS+. Allen hit 351 home runs in his career and 320 doubles, giving him a 1.10 ratio. He made mild bids his rookie year, when his 29 was 4 behind Billy Williams, and in 1967, when Orlando Cepeda beat him out, 25-23.

Frank Thomas, 12th in OPS+. Hadn’t noticed his absence, but surprised by it. His best Line Driving Hitting total was just 24 in 1992, so I guess I should be even more surprised by that. He would actually have a ratio lopsided in favor of doubles on occasion (46 2B, 24 HR in 1992; 36 2B and 15 HR in 1999), but overall, it was HR/2B ratio that got him. Since he hit .300 in 10 of his first 11 years, it wasn’t batting average.

Willie Mays doesn’t have a title. 13th in OPS+.

Mel Ott, 15th in OPS+.

Manny Ramirez (17th in OPS+) is missing from the title winners. A shocker to me. Thought of as a great hitter, not just a great home run hitter. Did have a big score in 1996, with 33, but was beaten out by ARod’s 36. As Manny was just 24 years old then, he is another guy whose window (and one so narrow Greg Maddux probably couldn’t pierce it from 20 feet) was in his younger seasons.

I guess Ramirez shows that playing at Fenway, as he did in his home games for over seven years, doesn’t automatically push you into the Line Drive Hitting category. I don’t think many people would say Ortiz was the line drive hitter, and Ramirez the home run hitter, so their respective classifications are interesting. People would probably either group them together, or opt for Ortiz as the more one-dimensional home run hitter.

One possibility is that the downward weight on HR/2B ratio at Fenway is of a greater size for left-handers. Checking, this theory certainly plays out in Ramirez’s case. He actually had a higher HR/2B ratio with Boston at home (1.10) than on the road (1.05).

So, overall, of the top 17 OPS+ players, only nine won a Line Drive Hitting title.

Babe Ruth, of course, began his career in 1914, but not only belongs to the Live Ball era, he rather invented it, and he doesn’t have a LDH title. I think we should think of Ruth like a gifted high school student who placed out of some beginning college courses. Or maybe we should fashion him the gifted student who skipped junior high and high school altogether, I don’t know.⁴⁷ This is just one more area where the rules don’t apply to him.

Interestingly, whether because he altered and upped his game when he came to the Yankees, or whether it was the lively ball, Ruth profiled differently before its arrival. He actually is the theoretical winner for 1918, when he hit 11 home runs and 26 doubles for the Red Sox. Then, in 1919, even with his explosion in home runs, his HR/2B ratio of .853 only squeaked over the .85 line.

Of the players with more than 1.3 HR for every double, Ruth has the highest career double rate.⁴⁸ But if my system by-and-large identified Ruth as a line drive hitter, this would be 20,000 words for nought, and the opposite is true. Thankfully, he always came out on the home run side of the fence, with his only time in the Live Ball era having more doubles than home run coming in his on-base season, 1923. That year, he hit 41 home runs and 45 doubles (0.91 ratio).

To be thorough in reviewing the best of the best, I switched the criterion from OPS+ to total runs created. Sticking with the precedent of identifying the top eight players absent from the Line Drive Hitting roll call, five are duplicates from the OPS+ list, but three are new.

Next to Mays, Pete Rose has the most runs created for a player without a Line Drive Hitting title. Even though his career high in home runs was just 16, his period of being somewhat respectable as a home run hitter coincided with that period when he was one of the very few guys who could hit .300. So, he certainly could have won a title, and I know on at least one occasion, he almost did. As I mentioned before, when Felipe Alou was the 1968 winner with 11 home runs, Rose hit 10.

Runs Created totals also remind us of the greatness of Jim Thome. Unless we are to think of his season as a 20-year-old with Canton-Akron of the Eastern League (.337, 5 HR, 20 2B), obviously Thome was no one’s idea of a line drive hitter.

Chipper Jones shows as having the 8th-most runs created of players who debuted after 1920 and never won a LDH title. That he seems to profile as a home run hitter is a surprise to me, and I’m guessing to you. I think the basis of the confusion is that a) Jones was a career .300 hitter b) who hit fewer than 500 home runs. So our minds automatically push him to the line drive side.

Even these day we don’t have Jones wrong completely. I would say his absence from the annals is a bit of a fluke. First, his career HR/2B ratio is .852, saying he had seasons when he was a candidate. He also has individual qualifying seasons with home run totals of 29, 27, and 26. But those were simply not totals that could win in the first decade of the 20th century.

I can only conclude that while the differences between Jones and a line drive maestro are subtle, they are real. Maybe he just didn’t have quite enough doubles or home runs generally to rate really strongly by this method. That the later Brave, Freddie Freeman, does not rate at all how Jones does is certainly a reminder that we must rely on data and not images, and the devil is in the details. Because I think most people would lump Jones and Freeman together.

Neither the OPS+ or runs created screens presented Mike Schmidt, but he is another great player never to have won.

Some players who seemingly fit the line drive mold better than Schmidt but never won are Mike Piazza, Steve Garvey, and George Brett.

While Piazza produced a sterling .328 average in the ‘90s, he only hit as many as 30 doubles twice in his career, making qualification difficult for him.

Maybe my insecurity about the possibility that in the Line Drive Hitter creation I had built a shrine to the overrated player led to my assuming that Garvey, a player whose superstar reputation exasperated sabermetricians, would distinguish himself. A .300 hitter seven times in eight years (although never a batting champion), he more or less did have the game to be a viable candidate. But the particular superpowers he possessed (reaching 200 hits 6 times and 110 RBI 4 times) do not factor into the system. With only five 20+ home run seasons over his career and only 31 doubles-per-162 games, his line drive components were more very good than outstanding.

The first season that Brett hit for any power was 1977, his fourth year as a regular, when he hit .312 with 22 home runs. Minnesota’s Larry Hisle (.302, 28 HR, 36 2B) easily outdistanced him, but Brett had six more qualifying seasons where he hit 20+ home runs. That’s probably not exceptional, but in no fewer than three did he come within 1 home run of co-leadership and joining the winners’ ranks. And his best Line Drive season by number of home runs was represented by another one, the 1985 that was unforgettable for both fans of his and the Royals, when he hit 30 home runs. In 1985, he had the misfortune to bump into Mattingly and his 35 home runs, the highest Line Drive total anyone had had in either league since 1962. So Brett actually rates very well in Line Drive hitting.

His record also serves as a rejoinder to the idea that being in the 0.60-0.85 HR/2B area is necessary to rate in the top echelon. For his career, Brett’s home run-to-double ratio was 0.48.⁴⁹ That is actually a lower ratio than the two eras in which he played; 1960-1979 had a 0.58 overall ratio, 1980-1993 AL, a 0.56 ratio. Norms in the Negro Leagues may not have been comparable, but I am reminded of Oscar Charleston, Willard Brown, and Willie Wells combining for 12 championships with ratios in the 0.4-0.6 range.

I still think the advantage of higher HR/2B ratios, as long as they don’t exceed 0.85, is incontrovertible. Relevant to Brett’s case is certainly his having the 7th-most doubles in MLB history (for comparison, he has only the 19th-most hits) and 40 doubles-per-162-games. This presumably allowed him to flourish with less than the ideal ratio. To demonstrate that Brett’s ratio did run low, only in 1987, an abnormal year both for baseball and for Brett (he failed to hit .300), did Brett have a HR/2B ratio that exceeded 0.85.

There is the oddity of Larry Walker’s having the very best career home run percentage of players with HR/2B ratios under 0.85, yet not winning a single title. My initial hypothesis seems only moderately support by the data, which was that he racked up that elite home run percentage with Colorado, but his HR/2B ratio was considerably higher during that time. I would in fact describe the difference in his HR/2B ratios with Colorado (0.869) and Montreal (0.673) as only moderate, but more to the point, the level of Colorado ratio would have seemed to have given him ample opportunity for at least one qualifying season and a big home run total.

To be sure, Walker’s case is a bit of a head scratcher, and perhaps indicates the importance of complementing composite analysis with analysis of single seasons.⁵⁰ On the most basic level, what fells him is that he doesn’t have a qualifying ratio in his four big home run seasons (49, 38, 37, and 36), which did indeed come with Colorado. Additionally, he missed a lot of time for someone in the Hall of Fame: the second most games he ever played was 143, and that kept his home run totals down. His best qualifying total was 26 in 2002, when it was no match for Albert Pujols’ 34. While with Montreal in 1992, his 23 home runs did come within 3 of tying Ryne Sandberg,

Kirby Puckett seemed to me a possible winner of three or four titles. But he only won one, in 1986. It came with a strong line of .328, 31 HR 37 2B, but he shared it with George Bell and Mattingly.

The factors that held Puckett back from a better rating again seem to be subtle. Even though he was the “get out of bed and get a hit” kind of talent who almost surely had very good years left, since he was 36 when glaucoma struck, I don’t think we can blame his abbreviated 12-year career. He actually only hit 20 home runs six times. In one of those, he gets nixed on ratio, and in another, he hit .296.

Conclusion

My definition of a line drive hitter includes batting average, doubles, and home runs, and stipulates you can’t have hit too many home runs. There are other equally good ways of representing much the same thing, no doubt. For one, with what I know now, I would probably have forsaken a batting average requirement for a league-adjusted batting average, regardless of the extra work involved.

One positive to come out of this work, however, as discretionary as the method is, is that it forces us to be objective about the best performers. There is simply no realistic possibility of delving into players as accurately without subjecting them to a system. The formal analysis gives us a frame of reference that can motivate an extra look that we wouldn’t otherwise take. With Hank Greenberg and Steve Garvey and many others, because I did this work in this way, I saw things I hadn’t seen before.

The other interesting thing to come out of this work is it underscores the challenge and importance of naming traits and factors with care. The naming is part of the definition. That the same method elevated the same players again and again is just one illustration that I am leveraging the numbers to articulate a very real thing that exists in baseball. But just what is that thing? Is it really the embodiment of the Line Drive Hitter, as I am proposing? Or should we maybe call this the Tweener Award? This is not an academic point and not one of mere nomenclature. Describing a phenomenon is the final step in understanding it, and maybe the critical step. We need to keep asking questions and keep examining data until we get it right.⁵¹

1. What to do if a post cuts off in your e-mail

2. I suppose I would have done better in getting a comprehensive picture if I had looked at all players excluded by my first group, those with simply more home runs than doubles, not those with at least 30% more home runs than doubles.

3. Early this year, before I started compiling my notes and sending them out by e-mail, I remember writing a note looking at most doubles ever for low-HR hitters. This is a variant on how I ended up ranking line drive hitters here, but ranking by doubles and not home runs, and using a very low HR/2B ratio as the threshold, not tolerating all but high ones. The highest doubles totals I found for very low home run hitters were less than sensational. Some seasons I remember are Dave Cash, 1977 (42 2B, 0 HR), Pete Rose, 1980 (42 2B, 1 HR), Ferris Fain, 1952 (43 2B, 2 HR), and Wade Boggs, 1989 (51 2B, 3 HR). The paucity of these cases is again demonstrates the typical correlation among the two statistics.

4. I know many fans are fluent in the Negro Leagues. Moreover, I know that many of the Line Drive Negro League champions were Hall of Famers who generally need no introduction even for fans whose Negro Leagues knowledge is not on par with their MLB knowledge. But, for the sake of clarity, a policy needs to be universally applied. While aware of the poor optics, I thought that specifically noting Negro Leaguers (and by default non-Negro Leaguers) would add something to the educational experience of a sizeable percentage of fans who read this, so I elected to do it. For better and for worse, my assumption is that readers will tend to want the same things I would want in their place. The publication of Negro League statistics is really forming the beginning of my knowledge of the leagues’ histories, so that is where I am coming from.

5. As I said, I don’t think the “line drive hitter” methodology or distinction is sensible applied before 1920, but as Hornsby is one of the greats, and obtained rookie status (given the current criteria for that) in 1916, I would not be doing my duty if I did not provide an alternate total comprising his whole career. Including Deadball seasons as well, Hornsby would have had four total titles, as he is the technical winner in 1917. (In 1917, he did not lead in HR, but neither Gavy Cravath nor Dave Robertson, who soundly beat him in HR, hit .300.)

6. Holliday did win one of his titles with the Cardinals, in 2010, his first year with them.

7. Because I was aware that my baseball fandom during his career was less than fanatical, I wanted to be careful not to categorically dismiss Huff, and I made a special point of returning to his statistics. His 114 career OPS+ suggests he should not have had a bigger place in my consciousness than he did.

The strongest point in his resume, in my opinion, is for a year he isn’t recognized as Line Drive Hitter of the Year. Huff led the World Champion 2010 Giants (the first of their three Bruce Bochy World Series Champions) in home runs, runs, RBI, walks, and on-base percentage.

8. Morgan’s championship stands out not only because of his meager career totals and disappearance from the baseball fan’s memory, but because it came in 1930, which, if it wasn’t the Year of the Hitter, certainly makes the short list. However, the advantage to hitters was much stronger in the National League in 1930, where the league batting average was .303, than it was in the American League, where the league average was .288. In fact, AL hitters beat .288 in 1921, 1924, and 1925.

But the failure of winners to live up to conditions which seemed ripe for big Line Drive Hitter scores extends to the 1961 American League and the 1987 National League, other seasons known for offense. I laid the groundwork for the 1961 AL case before, noting how Mantle, Maris, Cash, and Colavito tilted strongly away from doubles and towards home runs in their careers. The great Al Kaline was the 1961 Line Drive Hitter of the Year, but hit only 19 home runs.

Deprived for the most part of serious offense in the 1980s, I much enjoyed the 1987 season. But ironically, the total of 18 for the NL winners (Tim Raines and Benito Santiago) was the true lowest of the decade, with only 1981 lower. Although he did not live up to his rookie year and promised to be better than he ultimately was, Santiago was not really a good hitter, although perhaps a good hitter for a catcher.

In general, I would regard the inverse scores in these years and the high offensive levels in the leagues as a coincidence.

If we could travel back to 1930, we might feel better about the feting of Ed Morgan, who played first base for the Indians. His .349/26/136 triple crown statistics all ranked him within the league’s top 10. He added 47 doubles (key with Line Drive Hitting) and posted a bWAR of 5.7.

The following year, his home runs fell to 11 in a somewhat tougher offensive climate, but his on-base percentage was .451, second only to Ruth. He was still just 27 at the end of the year, but was basically done as a good player.

9. I had to look this up, but remembered the MLB Network’s having a contest that Sogard won. Apparently, cooler heads eventually prevailed, and David Wright beat him out. Sogard’s near selection at least rested on nothing but subjectivity, what with fans given such a vague task, and could be said to be equal parts about “face” and “baseball.” Subjectivity and wiggle room in Line Drive Hitter of the Year may be ample, but is less of an excuse.

10. Herrera’s “competition” for the award also included another young catcher, Arizona’s Adrian Del Castillo, who hit .313 with 4 HR in 80 AB.

11. The .300 average in a lower number of at-bats represents less of an achievement, but to hit more home runs than anyone in the league with that same number of at-bats (among the < 0.85 HR/2B set) is certainly more of an achievement. So, a low-AB total cuts both ways, and cannot be taken by itself as either a sign of a legitimate title or a random one.

12. Since I wrote this, the Cardinals have announced plans to move Contreras to first base.

13. I am also excluding Negro League years. I will make an attempt later to explore how the system worked for the Negro Leagues, but appraising the home run totals in those leagues requires its own framework.

14. The league batting average had been .272 in 1939, just three years earlier. Perhaps some players going to war played a part in the down offense in 1942, but the average had already been falling precipitously: to .264 in 1940, and to .258 in 1941. It rebounded to .258 in 1943.

15. The American League’s home run rate was over 20% better, though. I would guess ballparks could explain this.

16. The AL average did rise considerably, coming to .248 over these three years.

17. Given his girth, it’s natural to see Brown as having been just a few years too old and largely missing out on a DH environment that would have answered his prayers. For what it’s worth, his career defensive runs saved are +13, although that was his exact total in his rookie year of 1964. When the DH did finally come into play in 1973, Brown played more than he had in any year since 1964, but at age 34, did not respond well, with a .694 OPS. His OPS for his career was .750 (110 OPS+).

18. Martin, who, to be precise, had 11 at-bats, had no further major league career. He did end up in Japan from 1974-1979, averaging 32 home runs, mostly for the Chunichi Dragons.

19. Thank ChatGPT for this. I don’t think it’s 100% a win, but it’s better than the original “planets colliding” I had. “Stars aligning” isn’t perfect because it suggests a good thing, and Mariano Duncan doesn’t even know he once won Line Drive Hitter of the Year (I don’t think!).

20. One of these was Fernando Valenzuela, who had 21 hits and a .420 slugging average to go along with his .304 average.

21. A reasonable number, I think, although this year, 49 NL players hit 20 home runs.

22. Sparked by Chuck Klein’s qualifying home run seasons of 40 and 38, the NL makes up some ground using the whole 1930-1942 period. However, from ‘33-’42, the AL has a yearly average edge of 12.1.

23. The all-star game was split 7-7 in these years. It wasn’t until the ‘60s that the National League started dominating it (the NL had an 11-1-1 edge). The American League took 9 of the 14 World Series from ‘46-’59, with the Yankees themselves (8 titles) accounting for more victories than the entire National League.

24. Apparently Oliva, at age 86, was at SABR 52, for which I arrived late. But there was a fanatical Oliva fan there that I met, a guy seemingly as at peace with his selection of Oliva as his favorite player as any devotee is with his religion. When Oliva emerged as an all-time great using these criteria, I thought how gratified my acquaintance would be.

25. Pitchers in a DH league, conversely, face nine “real hitters”, while pitchers in a traditional league have that asterisked hitter.

26. All I have done here is to reframe the % of 0.85+ HR/2B hitters not just in terms of 0.60+ HR/2B hitters, but in terms of all hitters. The low HR/2B group has been included, in other words.

27. In fact, 1930-1942 AL, with an average of 30.9 for its leaders, almost beats out 1995-2024 (31.3).

28. If you computed an average year’s rate, it would be lower, since the combined ratio of HR/2B implicitly weights recent years more, what with the effect of the greater number of teams that has come with expansion.

29. Standings reflect a certain amount of games, scored games another. A FAQ answer on Baseball Reference reveals that “only about 75% of games have player stats.”

30. Patterson had a 132 OPS+, Joe Buck.

31. The classic home run hitter Martin Dihigo is the league’s official home run champion. Impressive, since he had 5 fewer games to work with even than Charleston.

32. Indeed, I give them top billing even by the post’s title.

33. Whether this is in and of itself a revelation of weakness in the measure, I’m not sure.

34. I know that every total 35-43 is represented, and though I did not check below 35, those orders figure to be considerably easier to fill. I am 99%, and maybe 99.9%, certain that every total 1-43 has occurred, let me put it that way. Every total 35-39 has at least three occurrences, and 35’s six counts seem an indication that the numbers would probably expand substantially and quickly as we went down.

35. Klein did also win the Line Drive Hitting title playing for the Cubs in 1934, although he hit 20 home runs, roughly half of how many he was hitting with the Phillies. His 1936 title also includes 29 games with the Cubs (Klein was traded back to Philadelphia that season).

It is easy to see a parallel here between Klein and Matt Holliday. Holliday, as mentioned, won two titles with what is thought an abnormal home field advantage (playing for Colorado), and won one title after he left Colorado. Holliday’s Line Drive total when he won that championship was also lower than his Colorado championship totals. But where Holliday and Klein differ is that Holliday’s St. Louis numbers, in general, are far better than Klein’s Chicago ones.

36. With projection, you can get Seager past Pujols’ so-called record 43 if you want. I asked how many games Seager would have had to play to hit 43.5 home runs at his rate of HR/G, and the answer was 157. So less than 162. Amusingly, Pujols happened to play exactly 157 games in his record season. So Seager’s rate was a fraction better per game. Seager’s 2023 doubles total projected out to 55.4 per 162 games.

37. It is election day, and I caught myself accidentally crossing their first and last names, which would have given me pollster Stan Greenberg.

38. Not that I should be doing the rating. It’s not really my thing or my interest. If George W. Bush was “the decider”, I’m “the describer.” Not “the rater”, in any event.

39. I will admit that Greenberg’s 184 RBI the year before, while not making the all-star team, and his 63 doubles in 1934, do get plenty of play, as of course does his World War II service, and his significance as a Jewish-ballplaying pioneer.

40. This isn’t a profile unique to Pujols, though. Aaron had 755 home runs, and three Line Drive titles.

41. If each of these players were lobbying for ideal criteria for themselves, I imagine Pujols in favor of raising the minimum batting average well over .300. He hit .300 or better in his first 10 seasons, and hit .327 or better seven straight years.

42. This includes Ortiz’s 455 games with the Twins.

43. For instance, he’s led the NL in Times On Base five times.

44. Musial would certainly be an exception. His statistics have aged well.

I made a point of saying that older, sentient fans would say they had overrated the Line Drive Hitting profile because I realize those who grew up after Moneyball were not exposed to the same misinformation.

45. I was actually pleasantly surprised by Sabo when I gave him a look-see. I think I was always skeptical of him as a guy who was a 26-year-old rookie, but the fact is he was an all-star three of his first four years. His .301 BA and 26 HR in his Line Drive Hitter of the Year season should answer any severe criticism.

I was quite struck by the similarities between Sabo and Rich Rollins, the 1963 AL winner I hadn’t heard of before. Both were third basemen who wore glasses. Both began strongly but didn’t post career statistics of note. However, the description of “losing it” is more apt with Rollins than Sabo. Sabo slugged .440 and .465 in 1993 and 1994, after he had won his Line Drive Hitter of the Year. His career was mostly just short.

46. Although he struggled at the plate for much of his career, Tolan was more or less a star before injuring his Achilles tendon at age 25, and even played well in his first year back in 1972, stealing 42 bases. A mixed career such as his leads to the historical name test coming out very differently for different fans, I think. One probably had to be following Tolan at his peak to appreciate him.

47. Babe Ruth, meet Ronan Farrow.

48. A surprise 3rd? Giancarlo Stanton.

49. Even subtracting those first three or so years of his before 1977 when he didn’t hit home runs to speak of, Brett’s HR/2B ratio is 0.52.

50. The number-three guy in terms of home run percentage of those with HR/2B ratios under 0.85, Ryan Klesko, also never had a year leading in Line Drive Hitting, a status that seems more in keeping with his ability than his home run percentage ranking. So score one for the value of looking at individual championships, perhaps, although those leading overall home run percentages did not include a batting average requirement. Unlike simple home run percentage for career qualifiers, the league leader test is one that is intrinsically relative to the league, which is a plus. Of course, Walker did beat everyone in home run percentage among those with < 0.85 HR/2B, including those in his own era.

51. This effort is endemic to the field of “measurement” in psychology where a standard process exists for devising criteria to define psychological traits. When I was an undergraduate, the professor assigned our class the job of creating a measure of cynicism. All of our “metrics” (to use the baseball term) said that the thing we came up with was workable. That we could responsibly administer the public a cynicism questionnaire and get reliable results, etc. But, the professor said, “At the end of the day, I think you’ve got something. But I don’t think what you’ve got is cynicism.” In his mind, we had created something else, and would be incorrectly labeling it cynicism.