A man named Jimmy Johnston holds the MLB record for best batting average in a 7-game stretch, due to hitting 24-30 in a week in June 1923. Perhaps you’ve never heard of him, but he (check https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/J/Pjohnj107.htm) twice had 200-hit seasons, playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers typically, and hit .295 for his career, with nearly 1500 hits.
Johnston died in Tennessee in 1967.
Here, via Retrosheet, are 2 screenshots of the statistical history of the 30 current MLB franchises:
Mize is one of the fairly little-known sluggers from the time between Ruth and Mantle, Mays, Aaron, etc. In fact, considering that he won 4 home run titles, he might be the most accomplished yet least remembered major power threat of that roughly 20-year span.
Here are some notable things about his career:
He played roughly equal numbers of seasons with three powerhouse franchises, the Cardinals, Giants, and Yankees.
Mize hit 43 triples in 3 seasons, 1938-40, but I have the image of him being a lumbering slugger.
Led the league in runs scored, doubles, triples, homers, RBIs, average, and slugging % at various points in his career.
He wound that career up by winning 5 titles with the Yankees, 1949-53. I hadn’t noticed that he hit 3 homers in the ’52 Series, at age 39.
Mize was sold to the Reds after the 1934 season, without having yet played a game in the majors, but returned to the Cardinals due to injuries–pelvic bone spurs, according to his SABR bio.
He sounds a little like David Ortiz, in multiple respects. Most obviously, both were first-rate sluggers whose careers blossomed somewhat late, and won 3 or more World Series.
Ward was, along with Al Spalding, one of the first impresarios of professional baseball: a player (both pitching and playing the field), businessman, lawyer, and manager. His book, Base-Ball: How to Become a Player, With the Origin, History and Explanation of the Game, is available for free at Project Gutenberg, here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19975
Bucky Walters was one of the 1920s to 1950s pitchers who had a long career, won about 200 games with an unremarkable win-loss percentage, and is little remembered today. In Walters’ case, this is despite him winning the National League MVP award in 1939. The purpose of this post is to highlight that Walters, in the course of his life in major league baseball, did a circuit of the available jobs on the field. The circuit is: coach, umpire, manager, infielder, outfielder, pitcher.
Walters began as a position player, mostly third base but also a smattering of games at second base and the outfield, became a pitcher, umpired two games in 1942 and 1947, presumably as an emergency fill-in when a regular umpire fell sick or missed a train, then managed the Reds for a year and a half, in 1948 and 1949, and then was a coach for three different National League teams in the 1950s. Here are links to his Retrosheet page and SABR biography:
https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/W/Pwaltb102.htm
A post on this blog talked about Jamie Moyer and Greg Maddux on the 1986 AAA Iowa Cubs. Moyer and Maddux would pitch nearly 120 innings for the big league team in 1986. What’s intriguing about the ’86 Cubs is the array of top-level talent on a team that went 70-90. Here is a list of notable position players at Wrigley that year:
Jody Davis
Leon Durham
Ryne Sandberg
Ron Cey
Shawon Dunston
Gary Matthews
Keith Moreland
Davey Lopes
Chris Speier
Manny Trillo
Rafael Palmeiro
And pitchers:
Dennis Eckersley
Rick Sutcliffe
Scott Sanderson
Moyer
Maddux
Lee Smith
You may have heard of Christy Mathewson’s book, Pitching in a Pinch. It is a worthwhile look at major league baseball in the early 1910s, seen from the perspective of perhaps the greatest pitcher of that time. You can read it on Project Gutenberg, at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33291/33291-h/33291-h.htm
Major league baseball has had landmark seasons at 40-year intervals, starting with 1901, when the American League began. Here are the next three intervals:
1941: Pearl Harbor. It happened after the season was over, but some players had already joined the military. Baseball, of course, wasn’t the same after the war.
1981: The strike: an unprecedented, lengthy mid-season work stoppage. One of the impacts was establishing the precedent of a division playoff series, though in a different form than the series that began in 1995.
2021, whatever it will be like, probably will be another landmark season.
The point here is not to propose that professional baseball is governed by 40-year cycles. It’s to note these years as food for thought, to consider them and how MLB changed over each 40-year period.
Maris got a major distributorship for Budweiser in Florida that began right after his playing career ended. He operated the distributorship for longer than he was an MLB player, and it might be a bigger legacy than his baseball career. His family had a long legal battle with Anheuser-Busch after he died, and settled the battle over the distributorship for a sum that was much larger than what Maris had earned playing baseball.
Here are two links to news stories about the battle:
https://www.gainesville.com/article/LK/20050824/News/604167117/GS
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-aug-24-fi-maris24-story.html
Misc. Baseball 