The Royals’ season is nearly over. I’ll leave the autopsy to our other skilled analysts. Instead, let’s talk about some of the great offensive seasons in Major League history. Understand, this isn’t a complete list, and it’s not a list of the very best seasons, just some that were memorable and some that have been forgotten.
We’ll start with the oldest and work forward. First up is a guy many haven’t heard of, and there probably aren’t many people alive today who even saw him play, since his last game came in 1944. His name was Al Simmons. Simmons had the wonderful nickname “Bucketfoot Al” for his habit of stepping away from the pitch. He was born and raised in Milwaukee. He was playing for Milwaukee in the American Association when he was traded to the Philadelphia Athletics for three players and $40,000. Remember, in 1923, forty large was a lot of money. Simmons had dreamed of playing for the Athletics as a young boy. He made his debut in 1924 and started hitting immediately.
By 1925, at the age of 23, he was one of the best hitters in baseball. He had an amazing peak run that lasted from 1925 through the end of the 1934 season. By that time, he was a member of the Chicago White Sox, having been sold by Connie Mack (along with two other players) for a reported $100,000, which made it the largest cash sale in the history of the American League. Mack, who battled financial problems regularly, often sold off his best players instead of paying what he called exorbitant salaries.
Simmons best season came in 1930 when he hit a league-leading .381 and 152 runs scored. He recorded 211 hits, which included 41 doubles, 16 triples, 36 home runs, as well as 165 RBI. He rolled up 392 total bases and finished second in the MVP vote. The kicker? He did all of this in 138 games while leading the Athletics to the first of two consecutive World Series titles. You might ask, how did he not win the MVP? Easy. There were two and maybe even three hitters who had better seasons. The MVP winner, Joe Cronin, didn’t lead the league in any statistical categories, but still accumulated 8.5 WAR. Lou Gehrig had a monster season, registering 220 hits and driving home a league-leading 173. And then there was Babe Ruth, who led the league in WAR with a 10.5 mark, along with home runs (49), walks (136), OBP (.493), and slugging (.732). Ruth only won one MVP award (1923) in his career for a few quirky reasons – the award wasn’t created until his ninth year in the league, voters were only allowed to vote for one player per team, and up until 1928, they would not award MVP to someone who had won the award before. Looking back, it’s easy to see that the Babe could have won as many as ten MVP awards.
As it were, Simmons never won an MVP, finishing second twice and third two other years. He played for 20 seasons, racked up 2,927 hits, and finished with a career slash of .334/.380.535. He retired from baseball in 1944 at the age of 42 and later coached for the Athletics and the Indians. He unfortunately died young, at the age of 54, after suffering a heart attack outside of the Milwaukee Athletic Club. Simmons was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1953.
The ball must have been juiced in 1930, as another Philadelphian named Chuck Klein wreaked havoc on National League pitchers. Klein was born and raised in Indianapolis, which earned him the nickname “The Hoosier Hammer”. In the ranking of Indiana nicknames, the Hammer comes in a close second to Bobby Knight, the “Hoosier Daddy”. Another great Indiana nickname is “The Hick from French Lick”, about some guy named Bird, who could really play ball.
Klein was originally signed by the St. Louis Cardinals and played for their AA affiliate in Fort Wayne. It was discovered that the Cards had two teams in the same league, which was a major no-no. Notorious hard ass commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis ordered St. Louis to sell all their players on the Ft. Wayne team, which made Klein a free agent. Klein joined the Phillies immediately and was a hitting savant. It’s tough to pin down his best season, as during his five-year peak from 1929 to 1933 he averaged 224 hits, 36 home runs, 139 RBI while hitting a cool .359.
For the sake of this essay, let’s say 1930 was his best year. He played 156 games, collected 250 hits while leading the league in runs (158), doubles (59) and total bases with an astounding 445, which is still the fourth-highest total ever. He also hit .386 with 40 home runs and 170 RBI. Like his cross-town rival Simmons, Klein didn’t win the MVP either. That went to Hack Wilson of the Cubs, who did lead the league in home runs and RBI with 56 and 191, respectively. It was a crazy offensive year. Bill Terry collected 254 hits while batting .401. Wilson’s RBI mark still stands. Klein, for his efforts, finished fourth.
Klein did win an MVP in 1932, though he may have been better in 1933. Klein played through the 1944 season before retiring at the age of 39. Like most players, his prodigious production dropped off after his age-32 season. He won the Triple Crown in 1933. He led the National League in home runs four times and RBI twice. He still holds the record for the most home runs (83) in a player’s first two full years of play. His jersey number was retired by the Phillies, and he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1980 by the Veterans Committee. In retirement, he ran a bar in the Kensington section of Philadelphia until suffering a stroke. Like his contemporary Simmons, he died young, at the age of 53, in Indianapolis.
In the summer of 1941, Germany accelerated the world’s plunge into World War by invading the Soviet Union. The United States wouldn’t enter the conflagration until December (after the bombing of Pearl Harbor). That meant American sports fans had one last summer of pure baseball, and what a summer it was. There were two peaks that summer. The first was Joe DiMaggio’s hitting in 56 consecutive games. DiMaggio was already a major star, having burst out of the hills of San Francisco in 1936. He won his first MVP award in 1939 (he also won in 1941 and 1947).
DiMaggio’s streak began on May 15 with an innocuous single off White Sox pitcher Eddie Smith. George Sisler held what was called the Modern Era record of 41 consecutive games, set in 1922. DiMaggio passed Sisler with another single on June 29.
Wee Willie Keeler held the record of 44 consecutive games (set in 1897). DiMaggio passed the Wee one with a home run on July 2. The entire nation watched, enthralled by DiMaggio’s virtuosity. The streak finally came to an end on July 17 at Cleveland Municipal Stadium at 56 games. Indians third baseman Ken Keltner made two outstanding plays to rob DiMaggio of potential hits. The next day, DiMaggio singled and doubled off Bob Feller to start a new streak, which ran 16 games. That streak ended on August 3, when St. Louis Browns pitcher John Niggeling held DiMaggio hitless. When it ended, the Yankee Clipper had hit safely in 72 of 73 games. Simply amazing. The 56-game hitting streak will likely never be broken. The closest I’ve seen in my lifetime was Pete Rose’s 44-game streak back in 1978, and that streak is now 47 years old. Roses’ streak was a major news event of the times, and even the publicity-loving Pete was starting to crack near the end.
DiMaggio rode his hit streak to a 9.3 WAR season in which he hit .357 and led the league in RBI with 125 and total bases with 348. He added 42 doubles, 11 triples, 76 walks, and scored 122 runs. Surprisingly, he only tallied 193 hits that summer. That production earned him his second MVP award, though not without controversy.
The controversy of that MVP selection is that it didn’t go to Ted Williams, who had a monster season. He hit .406/.553/.735 with 37 home runs, 120 RBI, 135 runs scored, while collecting 147 walks. Williams’ season was good for 10.4 WAR and remains the last season in which a player hit over .400. Sometimes I wonder if we’ll ever see that again.
When it came to the MVP vote, DiMaggio had the backing of the New York press corps, while Williams did himself no favors, as he had a contentious relationship with the media his entire career. Both men served in the US military during World War Two, each missing three full seasons of their prime.
Williams returned with vengeance for the 1946 season. In what became the best year of his illustrious career, Ted stroked a cool .342/.497/.667 with 38 home runs with 123 RBI, 156 walks, and 142 runs scored. He only struck out 44 times all summer. Williams led the league in ten statistical categories. That production was worth 10.6 WAR and gave The Splendid Splinter his first MVP award.
Ted was far from finished, winning the Triple Crown in 1947, though with slightly lower numbers than he compiled in ’46. The sportswriters screwed Williams over again in 1947, giving the MVP to DiMaggio. Looking back at the numbers, it’s laughable. Williams scored 28 more runs, hit 12 more home runs, had nearly 100 more RBI, drew 98 more walks, played in 15 more games, and outhit the Clipper .343 to .315, yet somehow that wasn’t good enough.
The last of our “old-timers” that we’ll look at is Stan Musial. Everyone who’s followed baseball knows about stan Musial. You really couldn’t invent a better story. A genial hitting prodigy who was born in the same town as Ken Griffey Sr. and Junior? Getouttahere!
Like his American League contemporaries, Musial was a huge star in the 1940s. His peak ran an amazing 16 seasons (from 1942 to 1958) in which his lowest output measured by WAR was 4.1 in 1958. Of course, he was already 37 that summer, so take that into account.
Musial also had one of the all-time great nicknames, “The Man”, given to him by Brooklyn Dodger fans, as in,
“It’s that man again.”
The Man was unstoppable in 1948, stoking 230 hits which included 46 doubles, 18 triples, 39 home runs and 79 walks. He scored 135 runs and drove home another 131, while hitting .376 and piling up 429 total bases (the 6th highest total in history). Musial only struck out 34 times all summer. Some players today strike out that many times in a month! He missed the Triple Crown by one measly home run (Ralph Kiner and Johnny Mize both had 40).
Musial led the league in 12 offensive categories in a season worth an astounding 11.3 WAR. Musial ran away with the MVP award, though Johnny Sain of the Boston Braves did pick up five first-place votes for his 24 and 15 season. In a case of baseball blasphemy, some floating turd gave his first-place vote to Alvin Dark, also of the Braves. Dark did hit .322 but only had 3 home runs and 48 RBI.
Were hitters better in the old days? It’s hard to judge, since the color line had yet to be broken and the hitters of that era didn’t have to deal with a parade of flame-throwing relievers. Some of the ballparks in those days were notably smaller. My gut feeling is that if Simmons, Klein, DiMaggio, Williams, and Musial played in today’s game, with technological and training advances available to them that were unheard of in their era, they’d still be among the best in the game. DiMaggio probably wouldn’t hit in 56 consecutive games, and Williams most likely wouldn’t hit .406, but they’d be major, major stars. As it is, we can only judge them on what they did while they played.
Next week, we’ll look at some of the best hitting seasons of recent memory.
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