Teams Leading in HR and Singles, Etc.

I noted a day or two ago that Trea Turner is leading the NL in singles. Well, the Phillies are as well, as a team, and leading in MLB, not just the NL. Both they and the Cardinals have 300 singles, but the Phillies have played one fewer game.

Using 2025 team data, the correlation between singles/game and home runs/game is -.13. The team that has done best in both, if we sum ranks, is the Tigers. They are 4th in singles, and 7th in home runs. As only the Athletics, 9th in both, also have two top-10 ranks, there are no other real candidates for the strongest combination. The Tigers are 4th in runs-per-game so far this year, behind the Cubs, Yankees, and Dodgers.

I haven’t written about this yet, but I have noted that, at least in some contexts, there are some remarkable correlations between singles, walks, and OBP, if you consider singles and walks together. To say that a player has a high OBP may essentially really be saying that he is strong in singles or walks, or perhaps both.

So, while singles and home runs have a -.13 correlation, singles and OBP go together much better — here they have a .61 r.

In observing the correlation, the average MLB team has a .315 OBP. Teams 1, 2, 3, and 4 in singles (where we add the Padres to the Phillies, Cardinals, and Tigers) all have OBPs of .326 or better.

Somehow, the Rays are tied for #6 in singles, but with a .304 OBP, are 23rd in that. You would think then that they don’t walk at all, but they are actually only 9th-worst. It appears that, apart from singles, they just do everything else related to OBP poorly, if not any one thing abysmally.

The very worst teams in singles all have been hapless OBP-wise. The Angels, Rockies, and White Sox occupy the last three spots on both lists, in the same order, while the Rangers are 26th in singles and 27th in OBP, and the Orioles 27th in singles and 24th in OBP.

Despite Paul Goldschmidt, the Yankees league-best .347 OBP has rather come about despite their 5.21 singles-per-game, which ranks them 21st, than because of it. The Dodgers, 2nd in OBP, are likewise not a singles-hitting club. The Diamondbacks (6th in OBP, 25th in singles), and Mets (8th in OBP, 22nd in singles) make for two more exceptions to the correlation.

I sought out to find the last team to lead the league in both home runs and singles. I went into this with a couple of beliefs.

First, taking my cue from the -.13 r, I did not expect to see teams commonly excelling in both categories, but I did not think I was attempting the equivalent of solving the Rubik’s Cube, where every attempt to solve A would undercut B.

There was also a concern that this was a sort of reverse tautology, in the way that if you are dealing with percentages from the same sample, say of type of strike from the swinging/looking/foul/in-play menu, the higher one category is, the lower on average the others have to be. But I did not think this applied here because of opportunity being defined by outs, not at-bats. The set of baseball events to which home runs and singles belong doesn’t have a fixed sum, unlike percentages.

So, in the realm of the empirical, what did I learn?

Because of the Designated Hitter difference until 2022, I worked just within league for declaring leaders, which had the incidental effect of making co-leadership more likely. If all I had to go on was the American League, I would say the correlation between home runs and singles is more negative on average than this year’s -.13. It is true that I am only going on what I saw from the singles leaders, which could have its own trend. But generally, a baseball fan could see that these singles-hitting teams were fair power-hitting teams at best.

The last American League team to do the double of singles and home runs is the pennant-winning 1967 Red Sox, who you might also think of as the Triple-Crown winning Yastrzemski Red Sox, although with 124 singles, George Scott beat out Yastrzemski. In fact, Mike Andrews, with 102, was closer to Yaz than Yaz was to Scott. We know there wasn’t a whole lot of offense to go around, so the totals for this team will not blow your socks off, but they did score 39 more runs than anyone in the league.

The key fact, though, is that, traversing mostly through a time of 14 or 15 teams a year, we do not have dual champions once every 14 years, but we have one over the last 59 years.

The 2017 Astros came close, leading in singles, while their 238 home runs made them one of five squads between 232-241. I do think there was funny business with that team, and I don’t think it only because of official reports.

Tethered to this search, and going back father and farther without knowing if I’d find any matches, I became interested in some of the simple singles’ leaders. Specifically, I made a game of noting teams that led in consecutive years.

Since 1967, here are AL teams to lead in one year and then the next.

2010 and 2011 Royals

2004 and 2005 Angels

1994 and 1995 White Sox

1987 and 1988 Red Sox

1979 and 1980 Rangers

Think of those as your honorable mentions. Then for three singles “championships” in a row in this timeframe, we have

2013-2015 Tigers

1996-1998 Yankees

1973-1977 Twins

The Tigers’ single list over those three years breaks down in the following way.

Miguel Cabrera 333

Victor Martinez 332

Ian Kinsler 259

Torii Hunter 230

I don’t think you need me to tell you that you should not conclude from this that Martinez was as good a player as Cabrera, although interestingly, he needed only 11 more AB to get basically the same number of singles. The key, though, is he was outhit by Cabrera over these three years 529-478.

If you take an intelligent approach, you actually have to conclude that his competition for best singles hitter on the team wasn’t Cabrera, but Kinsler, who was with the Rangers in the first of these years before the Tigers got him for Prince Fielder. Therefore, Kinsler got his 259 singles in just two years. He placed 8th in the AL in 2014, and 4th in 2015. Cabrera didn’t have a top 10 finish from 2013-2015, while Martinez’s best showing was an 8th in 2013.

When I thought of the 2013-2015 Tigers and singles, I presumed Cabrera drove the bus, maybe with a little bit of help from Martinez. I thought the same with Derek Jeter and the 1996-98 Yankees. But this time, I was right.

Yankees singles leaders ‘96-’98

Derek Jeter 435

Paul O’Neill 351

Bernie Williams 319

While Jeter’s per-season average here of 145 might not look that much higher than Kinsler’s 130 over 2014-2015, we find him well up from Kinsler after drilling down. For Jeter led the AL in singles in ‘98, was tied for the AL lead in ‘97, and was 4th in ‘96.

In the case of the Twins dynasty in this realm, I hope you thought of Rod Carew. Carew won his first Twins batting title in ‘69, and won another with them in ‘78 before leaving for the Angels, so we can’t have a cursory knowledge of his record and arrive at these exact years. All the same, it was hard to believe he wasn’t pivotal to the history.

As the data show, over the ‘73-’77 period, in the AL, no less with the Twins, Carew absolutely demolished everyone else in singles. (You have my blessing to make the information below your fact of the day, if you are so inclined.)

Rod Carew 807

Thurman Munson 628

Bert Campaneris 591

Chris Chambliss 573

George Scott 567

Carew was not first in singles all five years, with Munson beating him out by a single in 1975, and George Brett beating him out by 10 in 1976. However, in the other years, Carew had the most singles by margins of 14, 31, and 15.

I don’t want to discount the role of other Twins, but observing that no other one had a top-5 finish, I decided it was nothing seismic that we needed to know about (although RIP Lyman Bostock).

Beginning the NL search, my thought was that the Rockies added a new variable (as a statistician, my tolerance for them is either peculiar or indefensible; I’ll let you pick which).¹ Pulling off the double would doubtless be easier for them.

The 2014 Rockies are indeed the last team to do it. Which Rockies team exactly was this? A 96-loss one, apparently, although not a last-place club, with Arizona losing 98 games of their own. The Rockies slashed .276/.327/.445, en route to scoring 37 more runs than anyone else in the league. Rationality prevailing, given their record, they also were worst by 76 in the runs-allowed department.

So, in good conscience, I did feel that I had to go and find the last non-Rockies NL team to lead in singles and home runs. I thought I should do this because the Rockies didn’t truly shed light on the natural inverse relationship. However, the problem was that the Rockies parking their sorry asses all over the singles and home runs columns would likely make the double even less likely to be seen than otherwise. I thought my best hope for a match consequently might lie before1993. And if I could check back that far in the American League, why could I not, then, too, in the NL?

But the 2010 Cincinnati Reds, bless their hearts, came to my rescue. They had 188 home runs, the 2nd-place Brewers 182; 1004 singles, the 2nd-place Cardinals 1003.

On the surface, I will say that the principal in this discovery seemed to undermine any thought that leading in singles and home runs reflected team greatness. I was rather drawing a blank on this team, I must say.

So, in getting up to speed, I was happy to see that their data fit in nicely with the ‘67 Red Sox and ‘14 Rockie co-leaders, as they topped the NL in runs by 18. Under Dusty Baker and the recently deceased Walt Jocketty, they also took the Central, which is one of their two division titles this century.

That was certainly the team of Joey Votto, the runaway league MVP who managed the .300/.400 slices of the .300/.400/.600 triple with ease, and slugged .5996 to pull off the hat trick. His 144 runs created dwarfed the total of team runner-up Jay Bruce, who had 88. More pertinent here, Votto hit 37 home runs, with Bruce again second on the team with 25.

The toll (for individuals, who differ from teams) that extra-base hits take on singles is reflected, however, by Votto’s being rather soundly beaten in this category by Brandon Phillips and his 116 singles. Phillips, for his part, wasn’t in the NL top 10, and Phillips and Votto were the only Reds in triple digits, while 30 guys in the NL had 100 singles or more. While allowing that Dusty Baker wasn’t quite in the Tom Thibodeau school of pushing players (even if he did push pitchers!), so individual singles totals aren’t necessarily to the point, it’s hard to conclude from this look that the Reds weren’t something of an unlikely singles champion, something perhaps reinforced by that one-single margin over the Cardinals.

In full disclosure, the second half of the history I was tracking was percolating even while there were these home run/singles champions to analyze in surrounding years. The 2015-2017 Marlins (groan) led the NL in singles in each year.

Perhaps they should not be conflated with the disastrous 2024 Marlins, or with the team’s chronic low attendance numbers. With win totals of 71, 79, and 77, the 2015-2017 Marlins were not ultimately successful, but even without looking at their singles totals directly, they quickly figure as a team well-suited for that. In 2016 and 2017, only the Rockies hit for a higher average, and in 2015, they were 4th in average. And except for when Giancarlo Stanton hit 59 home runs in 2017, the Marlins were not getting to those hit totals with home runs, twice placing only one up from the bottom. Beyond home runs, they were getting a lot of hits.

The Marlins had a nice singles supporting cast of Christian Yelich (328 singles 2015-2017), Marcell Ozuna (300), J. T. Realmuto (283), Martin Prado (270), Adeiny Hechavarria (212), Ichiro Suzuki (194), Justin Bour (176), Derek Dietrich (164), Stanton (162), and Miguel Rojas (126). I go to the trouble of going that deep because what stands out to me is that, unlike their counterpart Tigers in the American League, this group all were there for at least part of all three years. I don’t know if that’s random, or some kind of reflection of the fact that the Marlins will generally not bring in high-salaried outside players, and when sampled will show to have a “core.”²

That was the supporting cast, but what I didn’t realize was that these teams had a singles force, if not quite on the Carew level, then just behind that. Derek Jeter, certainly, has nothing on Dee Strange-Gordon, who led the NL with 170 singles in 2017, and 169 in 2015. Strange-Gordon hit .309 cumulatively over these three years. With his rate of hits and rate of singles to hits (83.6%), you can bet no one in the NL was particularly close to those 2015 and 2017 singles totals.

Gordon got to that 412 over the three-year span despite his 2016 suspension for PEDs. His season consisted of a .268 average in 79 games. You can see that, as I said, the Marlins did have a solid supporting cast, but it’s surprising they still led in singles despite Gordon not making the contribution of which he was capable. With 135 2016 singles, tied for 2nd in the NL, Martin Prado had a particularly good year.

Setting aside the 2014 Rockies, that another team from the last couple of decades could lead in both home runs and singles makes our starting point less clear-cut. But my current thinking is that singles and home runs on the team level are indeed quite inversely correlated, but again, not through any statistical opposing weight. Ballparks could come in, making singles easier and home runs harder in unison, certainly. But I think the dynamic is more that the single and home run characteristic is rarely found in the same player. Teams are made up of players, so if a team invests in a lot of one or the other characteristic, they end up having a deficit of the other. Just like a football team might be light but fast in their front 7, or stout but slow, I think it is hard for a team to check both of the hitting boxes. But, theoretically, I don’t think there’s an issue. I think singles and home runs are separate talents, not opposing ones, and I think on the team level the measurement of them is clean.

1. Not that it is clear what actions I would take if I ceased being tolerant.

2. It seems one could perhaps argue the opposite?