Quiz – all-time greats … and one other guy
Posted
Tuesday, November 6th, 2012 at
1:34 pm by Doug
Here is a list of all-time greats, plus one player who presumably doesn’t belong with this group. Except that he does belong.
These are the only players since 1901 to accomplish what feat.
| Player |
|---|
| Ty Cobb |
| Nap Lajoie |
| Tris Speaker |
| Harry Heilmann |
| George Sisler |
| Rogers Hornsby |
| Bill Terry |
| Ed Morgan |
| Lou Gehrig |
| Stan Musial |
Hint: the feat is in multiple parts.
I have managed to stump our esteemed panel here (a pretty rare feat). The answer is that the above players are the only ones with a season since 1901 of 120 runs, .600 slugging, and HRs of less than one-third of extra-base hits.
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All of them have more walks than strikeouts. Is that part of it? Or is that simply an artifact of the era when most of them played?
Not part of the criteria.
I don’t know, but I did find it fascinating that, in 1930, he tied (with Jimmy Foxx) for the AL lead in strikeouts with 66. That’s the lowest since the end of the Dead Ball Era, and the third lowest in league history. Now, you have players K’ing 66 times by June
???
A season with
120 runs
200 hits
40 doubles
115 rbi
ops+ over 1.000
and…?
Morgan holds the record for:
Most at bats, extra inning game, 11, 7/10/32 (tied)
It was the Eddie Rommel, Johnny Burnett, Jimmie Foxx game:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CLE/CLE193207100.shtml
Batted at least .349 while only having the third best BA on his own team?
One of those parameters in comment #3 is part of the answer.
So how many multiple parts/parameters are there?
3 parts
Obviously Ed Morgan is the odd one out. I doubt very much that it could be a career accomplishment since his career was so much shorter. (Ted Williams, Babe Ruth and many others have had BB > K.) So it is most likely either a seasonal feat or game level, or a combination. Morgan, in 1930, had 6 games with 4+ hits. (And a PI search shows that that isn’t it. It probably isn’t something that would show up in a game level PI search, since those only go back to 1918, after Lajoie had retired.)
It is a seasonal accomplishment.
They all appear on a list with BA>.349, 2B>43, 3B>11 and BB<100 along with a bunch of other players. The trick now is to eliminate that bunch.
I did not see post 12 when I submitted post 13.
SH > 10 and OPS > 1.000????
Nope
Doug, can all three accomplishments be found in Standard Batting?
Yes.
I think 350 Total bases or more has to be one criteria. Several of these guys (surprisingly in some cases) only did it once.
No. Total Bases isn’t part of the answer.
I thought I may have had it searching OPS > 1.000, hits > 200, and SH > 19. The players to do that are Morgan, Heilmann, Cobb, Hornsby, Speaker, Terry, Gehrig. No Lajoie, Musial, or Sisler though. Musial’s high in sacrifice hits was 10.
Actually, none of those three criteria are part of the answer.
Blech, no matter what 3 criteria I put in the play index, Kiki Cuyler’s 1930 season follows me around like the plague.
Hmmm, perhaps Kiki’s season gives us a clue that OPS > 1.000 is one of the criteria. Cuyler only OPS’ed a .970. Is that one of the criteria, Doug?
No. OPS is not part of the answer.
How about more doubles than triples and home runs in a season with OPS of over 1.000? That would be two out of three.
No. Neither of those criteria.
I ran R>121, HR<27, BB103. The top 11 guys were the ten on the list plus Al Simmons. I’ll keep manipulating.
I’m a round number kind of guy, Richard.
I came up with this but it’s more than three parts and it’s not round. I sorted by OPS and set R>121, HR<27, BB103. The top 13 on the list included the ten guys on the list (two guys appeared twice) and Al Simmons. All the OPS’s were above 1.000. Maybe someone else can proceed from that point, I have run out of patience.
Typo corrections: BB103 instead of BB103.
Doug: I know you said OPS is not part of the answer but I did the best that I could.
Let me try again, BB is less than 95 and RBI is more than 103 instead of BB103.
Answer does not involve BB or RBI.
More extra-base hits than strikeouts?
Doug:
Give in. you’ve got everyone flummoxed, you subtle devil.
I don’t think “give in” is the proper term. Doug should declare victory!
120 runs
45 doubles
10 triples
(That’s not the answer (Ruth, Dimaggio, T Williams and others did it as well), but those are among the remaining criteria that Doug has not eliminated)
Can’t be runs and doubles, because in #9 Doug says only one of those in a parameter. This has proven to be a stumper up to this point.
Actually, Doug didn’t say that “only” one of those was a parameter. But I don’t think he would deliberately mislead us with a statement that is true by logic but false by common understanding.
My meaning was that only one of the parameters that Voomo tossed out was correct.
I’ve no idea of the answer, but I’m focusing on why Ruth and Williams don’t make the list.
For a minute I thought that was a definite sign that doubles was a key factor, since neither Ruth nor Williams ever had more than 45 in a season (44 was the high for Ted). However, Terry made the list, and his high was 43 doubles.
Assuming that Morgan’s 1930 season has to be the one involved in the feat, and comparing that to Ruth’s 1921, the Babe wins or ties in every Standard Batting category except AB and SH.
Also interesting is the positional breakdown of the list: 4 OFs, 4 1Bs, 2 2Bs. No SS, 3B or C.
Morgan’s 1930 season is the one that puts him in this list.
Looks like I have stumped you, so here is the answer. The listed players are the only ones since 1901 with a season of:
- 120 runs
- 600 slugging percentage
- HRs of less than one-third of XBH
I was intrigued by the high slugging percentage with modest HR totals, a feat requiring a very healthy batting average, as suggested by the heavy concentration of 1920s and 1930s hitters here:
Generated 11/7/2012.
No player has done this since Stan Musial in 1953. The closest are these guys who each had the other two of the three requirements.
- 113 runs, Larry Walker, 1998
- 0.595 slugging, Edgar Martinez, 1996
- 35.8% of XBH are HRs, Edgar Martinez, 1995
BTW, Ed Morgan (whom I’d never heard of before) has the shortest career of any career .300 hitter scoring 500 runs, and the second-shortest career among .300 hitters with 400 RBI. He had 139 OPS+ through his first four seasons to age 27, and then sputtered just when he should have been entering his prime, compiling just 321 games and 91 OPS+ from age 28-30. That OPS+ is the lowest for age 28-30 among the 85 players with OPS+ >= 139 in 450+ games through age 27. Only 4 others (Kal Daniels, Eric Davis, Don Mattingly, Bobby Murcer) of those 85 players had an OPS+ below 120 for ages 28-30 (median OPS+ was 152).
Nice one, Doug!
P.S. Of all players since 1901, I think Jim Bottomley (1928) and Lefty O’Doul (1930) came the closest without making the list. Both qualified on R and SLG, but their HRs were exactly 1/3 of their XBH (not less than 1/3, as stipulated). Also, Al Simmons (1925) missed by 1 point of SLG.
Thanks, John.
Those extra names make Ed Morgan stand out all the more. No slouches there.
Lefty O’Doul, BTW, had a 5-year slash of .365/.428/.555 for 147 OPS+. At age 31-35, no less. For age 32-36, his OPS+ was 149. Too bad, he couldn’t get a chance earlier (played only 76 games before age 30).