Top Team Batting Months |

Here are the highest OPS numbers posted, since 1916, by a major league team over a full calendar month (min. 750 PAs):

1. Yankees (June, 1930) 1.035 OPS
2. Cardinals (April, 2000) .959 OPS
3. Red Sox (June, 2003) .945 OPS
4. Indians (April, 1997) .942 OPS
5. Indians (July, 1936) .940 OPS
6. Mariners (May, 1999) .935 OPS
7. Giants (June, 2000) .932 OPS
8. Cardinals (July, 1928) .931 OPS
9. Yankees (May, 1936) .929 OPS
10. Yankees (July, 1927) .925 OPS

In June of 1930, the Yankees’ most common batting order was
Earl Combs (OF) 1.197 OPS that June
Lyn Lary (SS) .541 OPS that June
Babe Ruth (OF) 1.477 OPS that June
Tony Lazzeri (2B) .986 OPS that June
Lou Gehrig (1B), 1.501 OPS that June
Harry Rice (OF) .903 OPS that June
Bill Dickey (C) 1.093 OPS that June
Ben Chapman (3B) .936 OPS that June

Sam Byrd (“Babe Ruth’s Legs”) and Dusty Cooke were the fourth and fifth outfielders on this club. Byrd (career .762 OPS) put up an 1.177 OPS that June, while Cooke’s June, 1930 OPS was 1.109 (compared to a .728 career OPS). Lyn Lary broke his thumb on June 20 (see Lary’s bio at SABR) and was replaced in the lineup mostly by guys who didn’t hit any better than he did. Amazing that the Yankees let Lary and his replacements spend the month batting second in the order. Note that the Yankees skipper that season, Bob Shawkey, was new to managing, having replaced Miller Huggins who had sickened and died suddenly late in the 1929 season at the age of 50.

The Yankees offense average an astounding 9.3 runs a game that June. They had a win-loss record of 20-8 that month, and ended the day on June 30 with an 42-25 record for the season, though that was still 2 games behind the Athletics. But over their first 8 games of July, they averaged only 2.5 runs per game, went 1-7, fell to 6 and a half games out of first and never really recovered. They finished 3rd in the AL, behind Philadelphia and Washington. It was the only season between 1926 and 1939 that the Yankees finished lower than second, and Bob Shawkey was replaced as manager after one season by Joe McCarthy.

As many HHS readers will know, 1930 was the highest-scoring season in modern major league history. Many of us will remember the huge hitting years of 1999-2000 when run scoring averaged about 5.1 runs per game per season, but then imagine 1930 when run scoring in the majors averaged over 5.5 runs a game. The Yankees in June that season represent the perfect storm of team hitting: the biggest hitting team, in the biggest hitting season, on its biggest hitting roll of all.

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mosc

10 years ago

That Babe Ruth guy was pretty good eh? I was looking at splits for him a while back and there are some real variations. I guess when you are putting up “ruthian” numbers, there’s just so much variation in raw numbers between a good and bad month, a good and bad matchup. He can have monthly splits with more OPS range between them than some pretty good guys put up at their peak.

Richard Chester

Strange that 1930 appears only once on that list. Baker Bowl sure helped the NL that year, overall BA there was over .350 and overall OPS was over .930.

Sammy Byrd later became a top-notch pro golfer. He is the only person to play in a WS and participate in the Master’s tournament, finishing second in 1945.

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birtelcom

Reply to Richard Chester

Byrd’s period of biggest success on the PGA tour seems to have been in and around the years of World War II. I wonder if he was aided, as were MLB players in the league during those years, by the absence of many players from the circuit due to military service.

Reply to birtelcom

I googled pro golf during WWII and there were many top golfers (including Ben Hogan and Sammy Snead) who entered the armed services. So it looks like Byrd did benefit somewhat due to absence of players.

bstar

RC, there was no Masters tournament from 1943-1945 because of the war. Sammy Byrd did finish third in 1941 to Craig Wood and fourth in 1942 to Byron Nelson at Augusta National.

http://www.masters.com/en_US/discover/past_winners.html

Byrd did almost win the PGA in 1945, losing in a match-play playoff to Byron Nelson.

Reply to bstar

Thanks for the correction. I misread Wikipedia.

james braswell

A bit off topic, but does anyone know the most consecutive games in one season a team scored 5 or more runs (since 19OO)?

Reply to james braswell

The Red Sox scored 5 or more runs in 18 consecutive games from 8-12-50 to 8-30-50. That’s the record in the game searchable era. They won 16 of those games while scoring 158 runs. In June of that year the Sox scored 104 runs in 7 games, also a record.

Amazingly Ted Williams was hurt and didn’t play during that 18 game streak!

Reply to Ed

Williams’ replacement, Billy Goodman, did a fine job filing in for Ted.
From the All-Star game, when Williams was injured, to the end of the season Goodman batted .361 with an OBP of .447 that almost matched Williams’ seasonal mark of .451. He was weak power-wise but did contribute 44 RBI in that period. He ended up with a .354 overall BA, good enough to lead the AL.

HHS: Just wanted followup comments via e-mail. Thanks!

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Bryan O'Connor

Lyn Lary must have had some kind of bat control.

Richard, Thank you for the research! The 195O Bosox are the last team to bat .3OO or better, and scored 2O or more runs three times that year also. The Elias Sports Bureau are good at churning out stats, but HHS is tops!

Mike L

Interesting list. Two WS winners (and two other WS losers) but the 1999 Mariners finished 79-83 with a seasonal team OPS of .798, OPS+ of 100, and an ERA+ of 95.
Outlier month?

Reply to Mike L

Seattle’s team OPS by month in 1999:
April .832
May .935
June .777
July .812
August .717
Sept .733
October (3 games) .644

I want to double-check, but it looks to me like the two highest scoring 28-game sequences by any team since 1900, regardless of whether they were calendar months or not, were the Yankees’ 28 games from June 1 through June 30, 1930 (261 runs scored over the 28 games), and the same team that year from June 3 through July 2 (262 runs scored over 28 games).

birtelcom: I made a check and it looks like you are right. I don’t know how you did it but I went to the PI Game Result Search Tools, clicked on Streaks, set games in streak to 28 and selected All years. Then I searched each of the 30 teams one-by-one. Is that what you did?

That’s what I did too. It gets a little hairy with some of the NL teams with histores that go back pre-1900, because you get long lists of pre-1900 streaks due to some strange periods where the rules/parks/competitive imbalances produced some Little League type runs numbers. I was a little concerned that I had eyeballed those pre-1900 numbers quickly and might have missed a post-1900 streak stuck in there somewhere — thanks for checking.

Doug

The 1936 Indians (#5 on the list) had no fewer than 5 players with 20+ game hitting streaks spanning nearly the entire featured month of July. Rk Strk Start End Games AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BA OBP SLG OPS Tm 1 Hal Trosky 1936-07-05 1936-08-02 28 126 26 52 7 2 11 39 .413 .435 .762 1.197 CLE 2 Odell Hale 1936-07-11 1936-07-30 21 99 26 42 12 3 4 13 .424 .436 .727 1.163 CLE 3 Joe Vosmik 1936-07-11 1936-08-04 20 82 12 36 9 1 0 17 .439 .483 .573 1.056 CLE 4 Roy Weatherly… Read more »

Reply to Doug

That Indians team had a .352 team batting average in July; only the June 1930 Yanks and the July 1925 Indians had a higher team average for a calendar month. The pitcher George Uhle was on both those Indians teams — he was also a good hitter who often pinch-hit; in July of ’36 he was 3 for 5 as a hitter and in July of 1925 he was 1 for 2.

John Autin

The ’36 Indians also appear to hold the season doubles record for the game-searchable, 154-game era.
– 357 doubles, an average of 40 per spot in the order
– 211 doubles at home, #2 in that specified period.

7 teams have had more doubles, all from 1997-2008.

Scratch that record. I made a faulty inference from the Game Search results. The 1930 Cardinals had 373 doubles, which appears to be the record for that period. The ’36 Tribe was #2.

Hartvig

Reply to John Autin

That 1930 Cardinals team that set the record seems like an unlikely bunch

– their leading double hitter was Frankie Frisch with 46, good for 5th in the NL and 13 off the league lead
– despite having all 8 starters hit over .300 with all of those doubles four of those starters had an OPS+ of 89 or lower.

John: You can those results from the Split Finder. Click on Team Batting, then Split Type Season Totals and sort by 2B. No inferences are required.