{"id":889,"date":"2008-12-29T08:58:01","date_gmt":"2008-12-29T15:58:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/2008\/12\/29\/triple-crown-plus-obp-plus-more\/"},"modified":"2008-12-29T09:02:58","modified_gmt":"2008-12-29T16:02:58","slug":"triple-crown-plus-obp-plus-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/2008\/12\/29\/triple-crown-plus-obp-plus-more\/","title":{"rendered":"Triple Crown, plus OBP, plus more?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The 2008 edition (37th volume) of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sabr.org\/sabr.cfm?a=cms,c,107,36\">The Baseball Research Journal <\/a>(available only to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sabr.org\/\">SABR<\/a> members) had a couple of good articles on the baseball Triple Crowns, one by Bill Nowlin and one by John E. Daniels. The article by Nowlin, titled The OBP Triple Crown, discussed who the Triple Crown winners would have been had on-base percentage been substituted for batting average. Others have done similar exercises, creating alternate triple crown listings using an assortment of statistical measures. But Nowlin&#8217;s article in particular got me thinking about the seasons where a player led the league &#8212; or was amongst the leaders &#8212; in the most categories.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Nowlin starts with 1903, and notes that since then there have been 12 triple crown winners. But if you substitute OBP for Avg, there would have been 22. For one thing Babe Ruth would have won it five times. Ted Williams would have captured a third crown. And the most recent winner would no longer be Carl Yastrzemski in 1967, as the feat would have occured five times since then: Willie McCovey (1969), Harmon Killebrew (1969), Dick Allen (1972), Mike Schmidt (1981), and Barry Bonds (1993).<\/p>\n<p>Three players would lose their triple crowns by substituting OBP for AVG, namely Foxx (1933), Medwick (1937), and Mantle (1956). If you add in Nap LaJoie&#8217;s 1901 season, in which he won the standard triple crown and the OBP title too, that gives us 10 seasons when a player led the league in all four categories:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>1901 Nap LaJoie<\/li>\n<li>1909 Ty Cobb<\/li>\n<li>1922 Rogers Hornsby<\/li>\n<li>1925 Rogers Hornsby<\/li>\n<li>1933 Chuck Klein<\/li>\n<li>1934 Lou Gehrig<\/li>\n<li>1942 Ted Williams<\/li>\n<li>1947 Ted Williams<\/li>\n<li>1966 Frank Robinson<\/li>\n<li>1967 Carl Yastrzemski<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And that got me thinking: what single-season has the highest <a href=\"http:\/\/www.baseball-reference.com\/about\/leader_glossary.shtml#black_ink\">Black Ink or Gray Ink score<\/a>? These measures don&#8217;t actually include OBP, though they do include total walks. Even so, it would be an interesting ranking I think. So I went over to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.baseball-reference.com\/\">Baseball-Reference.com<\/a>, assuming I&#8217;d find the answer there. But I can&#8217;t seem to locate single-season Black Ink or Gray Ink numbers, or an all-time single-season leaderboard for these measures (they only list career totals it seems). If you can find this analysis online somewhere, please let me know.<\/p>\n<p>Short of that, I thought I&#8217;d start down this path by seeing which major statistics the above ten seasons led the league in &#8212; beyond already impressive HR, RBI, AVG, and OBP. So here is what I&#8217;ve found:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>1901 Nap LaJoie<br \/>\nHR, RBI, BA, OBP, SLG, R, H, TB, D<br \/>\n\u00c2\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>1909 Ty Cobb<br \/>\nHR, RBI, BA, OBP, SLG, R, H, TB, SB<br \/>\n\u00c2\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>1922 Rogers Hornsby<br \/>\nHR, RBI, BA, OBP, SLG, R, H, TB, D<br \/>\n\u00c2\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>1925 Rogers Hornsby<br \/>\nHR, RBI, BA, OBP, SLG, TB<br \/>\n\u00c2\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>1933 Chuck Klein<br \/>\nHR, RBI, BA, OBP, SLG, H, TB, D<br \/>\n\u00c2\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>1934 Lou Gehrig<br \/>\nHR, RBI, BA, OBP, SLG, TB<br \/>\n\u00c2\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>1942 Ted Williams<br \/>\nHR, RBI, BA, OBP, SLG, R, TB, BB<br \/>\n\u00c2\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>1947 Ted Williams<br \/>\nHR, RBI, BA, OBP, SLG, R, TB, BB<br \/>\n\u00c2\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>1966 Frank Robinson<br \/>\nHR, RBI, BA, OBP, SLG, R, TB<br \/>\n\u00c2\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>1967 Carl Yastrzemski<br \/>\nHR, RBI, BA, OBP, SLG, R, H, TB<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Often these seasons were also best in their league in various newer statistics such as Batting Wins, Win Shares, Adjusted Batting Runs, OPS, Power\/Speed, and others. But at that point it starts to get a bit redundant, so I wanted to stick with the standard stats that everyone knows about.<\/p>\n<p>Again, I&#8217;d be really interested in learning the top 20 or so single-season black-ink and gray-ink seasons if someone has this info. The above seasons would rate highly, but perhaps some other seasons, that barely missed the actual triple crown, but that led in other key categories, would out-rank some of these ten?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The 2008 edition (37th volume) of The Baseball Research Journal (available only to SABR members) had a couple of good articles on the baseball Triple Crowns, one by Bill Nowlin and one by John E. Daniels. The article by Nowlin, titled The OBP Triple Crown, discussed who the Triple Crown winners would have been had [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":96,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/96"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/889\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}