Paul Goldschmidt, as you may have heard, will win the title of International par excellence this Season, and it is very likely that he will get all 30 votes in first place.
What remains is how his race for the first NL Triple Crown is going since 1937. The Cardinals’ leading scorers lead the NL in pole average and runs scored and are second in shutouts. His. the 328 average is north of Freddie Freeman (.324) and Jeff McNeil (.320) and his overall score is a front-row Pete Alonso, with no one else within screaming range.
Goldschmidt has 34 tracks, and this race is a doozy. Kyle Schwarber finished first with 36 points, followed by Austin Riley (35), Goldschmidt (34), Mookie Betts (33), Alonso (31) and Christian Walker (30). This should be a fun little subplot to watch, even if Goldschmidt doesn’t end up at the top of the category.
Instead of watching Goldschmidt’s awesome Season, I wanted to take a Minute to see the fascinating story of the Triple Crown winners. If Goldschmidt succeeds, he would join an elite company (see below for a complete List). The Triple Crown has been won only 15 times in the history of the AL/NL, 10 times in the negro baseball leagues and once in the American Association in 1887.
Triple Crown = World Series
Here’s what Cardinals fans will love: the last four players to win the Triple Crown all went to the World Series. A good omen, Isn’t it?
Here are the four: Mickey Mantle in 1956, Frank Robinson in 1966, Carl Yastrzemski in 1967 and Miguel Cabrera in 2012. the teams of Mantle and Robinson won everything, unlike the teams of Yastrzemski and Cabrera.
And it’s not like that’s common in the history of Triple Crown winners.
Ty Cobb won the Triple Crown in 1909 and his tigers went to the World Series that year. After that, the next nine winners — all in pre-expansion -did not qualify for the playoffs. Most of them didn’t even come close and played as a team a little to the north.500, but nowhere near the top of the League.
Multiple triggers
The legendary Oscar Charleston was the only player to win the Triple Crown three times: in 1921, 1924 and 1925. he surpassed the .400 runs all three times, and all three times had produced more runs than the games played.
Rogers Hornsby became the first Al/NL player to win a second Triple Crown, and he did the trick for the second time the same year when Charleston won its third in 1925. Both of these successes came at a time when he was by far the best batsman in the NL, playing for the Cardinals. For a period of six years, from 1920 to 1925, Hornsby led the NL in average on the basis of percentage and hits in each season, with a combined slash line of.397/.467/.666, good for an OPS of 1,113.
Ted Williams was the second and last Al/NL player to own a pair of triple crowns; he won the first in 1942 and the second in 1947. somehow he didn’t win the Al MVP, although he was far superior-guys, there weren’t even two times, he lost to guys named Joe with the Yankees, DiMaggio in 1942 and Gordon in 1947.
It’s a Banging Parody.
More: 10 MLB achievements from a Season that we will never see again
But most of all, I mean Josh Gibson. He was the only major leaguer to complete the tour in consecutive seasons: in 1936 with the Pittsburgh Crawfords and in 1937 with the Homestead Grays. The Negro League seasons were shorter than those of the NL/AL seasons, so their scores do not match the other TC winners, but their production was simply awesome on all levels.
In 50 games in 1936, Gibson had 18 home runs, 66 runs scored and a 389-run average. In 39 games in 1937, Gibson hit 20 home runs with an incredible 73 runs scored.417 average.
One of these pieces from 1937 was a legend. In the June 3, 1967 issue of the Sporting News, a reader asked if the rumors that Gibson would hit a ball in front of Yankee Stadium were true.
Here’s the answer: “Gibson hit one during a National Negro League game that hit the embankments outside the 161st Street railroad, about 580 feet from home plate. It was estimated that if the ride had been two feet higher, he would have left the park and traveled about 700 feet.”
A different kind of Home Run
Baseball was a very different sport in its early days.
When Ty Cobb won the Triple Crown in 1909 at the age of 22, he did it with only nine home runs, two ahead of AL Tris’ spokesman runner-up. This was the only time in his Hall of Fame career that Cobb led the league in this category, and three short of his career high (12, 1922 and 1925).
Here’s a fun fact: all nine of Cobb’s racetracks in 1909 were racetracks in the park. True Story. This is the best for every player in a single season in the history of baseball. And let’s answer your first immediate question: uh, did his ballpark have fences?
Yes. Bennett Park had a strange footprint, of course, but there were external fences. He was 480 feet from center field and 440 feet from right field, but only 295 feet from left field. Here is perhaps a more revealing fact regarding the nine Cobb players on the field, from an article by Sabr about the ballpark.
So, yes. Crazy jumps and restless jumps seem to be a good recipe for visits to the park. Here are some more fun facts about Cobb from this year. Cobb also led the league in stolen bases with 76. He was the second person to pull off this trick (Jimmy Sheckard did it in 1903 with nine tricks and 63 stolen bases) and only one other player would ever do it: Chuck Klein in 1932 with 38 tricks and 20 stolen bases to lead the NL. By the way, Klein won the Triple Crown the following year, but with only 28 titles.
