To anyone equipped with access to Baseball Reference and a healthy combination of curiosity and affection for the numbers, rabbit holes can appear with a time-destroying frequency and head-spinning expansiveness. Recently, one came a-calling in a most – seemingly – benign form: Bernie Williams’ headshot on BR’s homepage. The image brought back all sorts of memories (including acute recollections of one particular swing) and the lure was cast.
On his overview page, my eyes immediately went to his mid to late 90s run of batting averages, drawn by both the aforementioned memories and by Williams’ lone bit of black (save for an intentional walks crown in 1999, shunted far to the right): an AL-leading .339 mark in 1998. Immediately below that magnificent line from New York’s magical season, even more sparking signifiers of proficiency and abundance awaited, just yearning to pull me in.
A .342 average, a third straight .300/.400/.500 slash line, 202 hits, 100 walks … oh, wait, Bernie Williams reached safely 300 times* in 1999!
*(I’m not completely certain when this enchantment with reaching safely at least 300 times began, but I’m fairly sure it took hold in 2013, when Cincinnati’s Shin-Soo Choo blended 162 hits, 112 walks and 26 hit-by-pitches to reach the benchmark; I recall following his pursuit throughout the second half of the season, having a quiet high five with myself when he got there).
Back to Williams … 300 times! I was about to dive into the rabbit hole then, but one other stat caught my eye to really land the hook: New York’s All-Star also amassed 317 total bases, a juicy and attractive 300-300 season just waiting to be explored. How many center fielders had ever done this, how many Yankees, how many other Yankee center fielders?
As always, with this pre-voyage type of packing, it’s a lot more fun to generate some hunches, a solitary trivia game play. So I equipped myself with a batch of guesses and set forth; here’s some of what I encountered during my dive into the world of 300+ times on base paired with at least 300 total bases.
Baseball history has provided us with 121 individual player seasons that meet the criteria. A third – 41 – occurred in the 1920s and 1930s (no surprise there), with another 39 coming in an 11-year span from 1995-2005 (again, little shock in this development). Expectedly, the 60s and 70s made very few appearances, with just five total contributions. In terms of single seasons, 1930 is king of all the land, requiring a throne to seat eight ballplayers. That campaign also provides us visitors with the sole example of a trio of teammates all capturing the criteria, in the form of Chicago Cubs Hack Wilson (one of the center fielders to do this), Kiki Cuyler and Woody English. There are only six other examples of a pair of teammates both meeting the bars: two from the late 90s (which will be set aside for just a moment), with the other four neatly Oreo-cookied to the Cubs’ cream center.
Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig – the fanfare announces – did this in 1927, 1928, 1930 and 1931. Well, of course they did; it’s so fun to meet familiar and expected faces on these travels. When enormous, expressive and demonstrative individual seasons with the bat are paraded for the spectators, those two are going to be grand marshals in a lopsided percentage of celebrations. To wit, they pace the entire promenade when it comes to the most such years.
Most Seasons With 300+ TOB & 300+ TB
9 Babe Ruth*, Lou Gehrig
7 Barry Bonds
6 Ted Williams*, Stan Musial
4 Rogers Hornsby, Jimmie Foxx, Jeff Bagwell, Todd Helton
3 Tris Speaker, Frank Thomas, Jason Giambi, Albert Pujols
2 Paul Waner, Charlie Gehringer, Mickey Mantle, Wade Boggs, Edgar Martínez, Carlos Delgado, Mike Trout
*Ruth (1921, 1923) and Williams (1949) are the only fellas to go 350-350 in a season
In this list above, you’ll find a number of center fielders, which traces a path back to the man who started all of this, Bernie Williams. Speaker, Mantle and Trout – along with Bernie – make up a significant portion of the center fielders who’ve chased and caught this specific 300-300 milestone.
300+ TOB & 300+ TB, Min. 100 Games in CF
| Player | Year | TOB | TB |
| Hugh Duffy | 1894 | 304 | 374 |
| Ty Cobb* | 1911 | 300 | 367 |
| Tris Speaker | 1912 | 310 | 329 |
| Tris Speaker | 1920 | 316 | 310 |
| Tris Speaker | 1923 | 315 | 350 |
| Hack Wilson | 1930 | 314 | 423 |
| Mickey Mantle* | 1956 | 302 | 376 |
| Mickey Mantle | 1957 | 319 | 315 |
| Lenny Dykstra | 1993 | 325 | 307 |
| Bernie Williams | 1999 | 303 | 317 |
| Mike Trout | 2013 | 309 | 328 |
| Mike Trout | 2016 | 300 | 302 |
| Aaron Judge* | 2024 | 322 | 392 |
*Led his league in both categories
Williams connects to a shining collection of names and/or individual seasons in this list: it opens with a 19th century Sultan of Slash line performer and moves to a pair of inner circle Hall of Famers and then welcomes the single-season RBI record holder; another pantheon guy follows, which then leads to a rare instance of an AL or NL player pacing his league in hits and walks in the same season; then we get a guy who was riding a trajectory toward joining those brilliant elites before finally ending at maybe the most valuable offensive season ever produced by a right-handed hitter.
This is the allure of a dive through baseball history – the associations and links from who and what enthralled in the past to their replications. Williams’ convergence with the other center fielders provides an opportunity to reassess, to bring out the party hats and noisemakers from storage and celebrate.
In this particular case, the enthusiasm for Williams’ season has a companion, one of the other two teammate pairings in this particular 300-300 club. As the Yankees were motoring toward another AL East title and Williams hummed toward 300-300, he usually could trace his fingers up just a couple of lines on the lineup card to find a measuring stick: Derek Jeter. That year, Jeter reached safely an AL-leading 322 times and accompanied that feat with 346 total bases, transporting he and Williams into that special land inhabited by Ruth and Gehrig and the Cubs’ trio. Individually, Jeter became – and still is – the only player ever to have at least 100 games at shortstop in a season that also boasted of 300 times on base and 300 total bases. And to close the book on one of the earlier questions I posed, Jeter and Williams are two of eight Yankees to hit the marks, along with Ruth, Gehrig, Mantle, Giambi, Álex Rodríguez and Judge.
Find some numbers, pair them, seek out the clubs. Baseball – by the sheer vastness of the numerical accumulation – beseeches us to be drawn into this activity. The stories – myths, subjective narratives, all the rest – are crucial of course, but they are also the skin dressed over the foundational and supportive statistical skeleton. For me, mashing benchmarks with repetitive numerals is particularly alluring: The 70-70 club; the 300-win, 3,000-strikeout, sub-3.00 ERA club (just Walter Johnson and Tom Seaver in that one); the 30-homer, 30-steal club that began with Ken Williams in 1922 and now counts 46 others in the room, including Shohei Ohtani who whammed and blazed his way to establish a one-man 50-50 subdivision and Jeff Bagwell, who, in 1997, became the first, and still only, first baseman to have an entry card.
In 1997, Bagwell’s 43 home runs and 31 stolen bases were only part of a staggeringly riveting package. He reached safely 305 times that year, tallied 335 total bases. In a wonderful gesture, his teammate Craig Biggio decided to do him four better in the times on base category while posting 310 total bases, thus acting as a 300-300 consort.
We almost received another 300-300 pairing in 2024, as the Yankees’ Juan Soto amassed 328 total bases but closed his regular season with 299 times on base and so Judge was left on his own. Maybe this will be the year Soto crashes the 300-300 club, or perhaps Ohtani will add the feat to his ever-growing sash of merit badges. It wouldn’t be that surprising to see Judge make the grade for the second time (although no one has done this in back-to-back years since Helton in 2003-2004) and just imagine the joy of witnessing Trout reorienting his recent career path and hitting the bars for the third time.
The 2025 season will provide – if not in this specific combination, then elsewhere, in abundance. The numbers will build every day, and throughout the months, clubs based on career marks or seasonal tallies will emerge, become part of the fabric and will, surely, be celebrated here and here and here at Coffee & Box Scores. The rabbit holes await!
The complete list, organized by oldest to most recent, of all the 300-300 seasons
Thanks to Baseball Reference and its extraordinary research database, Stathead, for help in assembling this piece.
Roger Schlueter
As Sr. Editorial Director for Major League Baseball Productions from 2004-2015, Roger served as a hub for hundreds of hours of films, series, documentaries and features: as researcher, fact-checker, script doctor, and developer of ideas. The years at MLB Production gave him the ideal platform to pursue what galvanized him the most – the idea that so much of what takes place on the field during the MLB regular and postseason (and is forever beautifully condensed into a box score) has connections to what has come before. Unearthing and celebrating these webs allows baseball to thrive, for the present can come alive and also reignite the past.