Two Pair

Yes, pace can be a dangerous navigator, a “The sign is pointing askew” proposition – blindly follow the arrow’s point toward the extrapolated destination and all sorts of problematic surprises might await, perhaps camouflaged by regressions to the mean or hiding behind rocky slumps or lying among Injured List stints.  There’s downside, for sure.  But following the pace-bricked road also allows us to imagine, to contemplate the lightning in a bottle season actually striking, to revel in the wonder of a hot streak never really cooling, to envision all the pieces falling into place to, finally, at season’s end, create a picture of the special, the historic.  By looking ahead, then, we can imagine a link to the past where the immortals and once-greats still deliver pitches, crack drives and blaze from base to base to create a stat line that shines extra bright.  And sometimes, we spy an invite that doubles up on the pleasure.

This past Thursday, the Cubs played in their 81st contest of the season, a 3-0 win against their NL Central foes, the Cardinals.  With the outcome part of the inked-in story of this season, Pete Crow-Armstrong sat with 21 home runs, 61 RBI and 44 extra-base hits.  His teammate, Seiya Suzuki, also claimed 21 longballs while owning 67 RBI and 42 extra-base hits.  To bag and bundle it all together, both Cubbies were more than halfway – at the halfway post to the season – to a 40-HR, 120-RBI, 80-XBH season.  While such end-year stats do shimmer up a season fairly often (there have been 115 more of them since Babe Ruth had the first, in 1920), teammates pressing the bars on all three categories in the same campaign is rare – uncommon enough to tick off the entrants – arm in arm – using just a pair of hands.  

The first pairing electrified 1927 in the form of two heavies amid New York’s Murderer’s Row – Ruth and his partner in crime against AL pitching, Lou Gehrig.  Ruth set a single-season record with 60 HRs, but took a back seat to his teammate in RBI (165 to Gehrig’s 173) and extra-base hits (97 behind Larrupin’ Lou’s 117 – only the second highest tally in the books to this day).  With Gehrig’s 47 longballs thrown into the account, the 40-120-80 pairing club was open for business, co-founded by the greatest 1-2 batting punch the game has ever seen.  

The 1930 and ‘31 seasons saw the same pair meet the same criteria and then the space went undisturbed for more than 60 years, Ruth and Gehrig probably, by this time, tired of looking at each other’s face.  The mid-90s then saw a rush at the doors, where the nine seasons from 1996 through 2004 saw six more pairs of teammates join up with the Yankee greats.   Colorado’s Ellis Burks and Andrés Galarraga started the flow, to be followed by Mariners Ken Griffey, Jr. and Álex Rodríguez in 1998, Blue Jays Carlos Delgado and Shawn Green in 1999 and Astros Jeff Bagwell and Richard Hidalgo in 2000.  Rodríguez chaperoned a new partner in 2001, as he and his Rangers teammate Rafael Palmeiro made the cuts, and then finally in 2004, Boston’s David Ortiz and Manny Ramírez shut the door behind them.  

And this is where this story ends, at least for now – with Crow-Armstrong and Suzuki on pace to join the others, the not-so-simple requirement being that they replicate what they’ve been doing across the first 81 contests.  

The Cubs’ sluggers aren’t the only set of teammates who have used the past three-or-so months to collaborate on an offramp toward something rare and memorable.  In New York, Yankees southpaws Carlos Rodón and Max Fried have current lines* that could forecast toward a finished piece that includes 18 wins and at least 200 strikeouts.  Toss in an ERA for both that stays under the 3.00 limbo line and we have another three-bar set to search for in the past.  

*Fried is at 10 wins, 104 strikeouts and 1.92 ERA.  Rodón owns nine wins, 119 strikeouts and a 2.92 ERA.

A portsider’s season featuring 18+ victories, 200+ K’s and a sub-3.00 ERA has been accomplished 56 times since 1893 – not much of a congregation from which to pull out teammates handling all the requirements in the same season.  And lo, if Rodón and Fried were to do this, they’d make an uninterrupted trek across more than a century of barrenness to find two guys sporting the same uniform and posting the requisite numbers in the same season.  

The very early days of Major League Baseball wouldn’t produce any left-handed pitchers whose work on the bump ultimately pointed toward a space in the plaque room in Cooperstown.  In retrospect, that part of the narrative would only commence in 1897, when a 20-year-old known as Rube Waddell debuted for the 1897 Louisville Colonels.  By 1904, Waddell was an ace on Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics, paired with another future immortal, Eddie Plank.  That season, the brilliant Waddell would pace the AL with an astounding 349 strikeouts (more than 100 ahead of the number two finisher) to go along with 25 victories and a 1.62 ERA.  His southpaw mate, Plank, tallied 26 wins, authored a 2.17 ERA and just crept over the 200-K line, punching out 201 opponents.  The very next year, the duo did it again, with Plank (24 wins, 2.26 ERA, 210 strikeouts) playing second fiddle to Waddell (27, 1.48, 287) as Rube captured the infant league’s second pitching Triple Crown (after Cy Young managed the feat in the debut season of the AL, in 1901).  Two Hall of Fame portsiders on one team, two seasons, three thresholds to cross – and an open invitation that, perhaps, 2025’s partnership of Fried and Rodón can affirmatively RSVP.  

Every day’s worth of games from here on out (or in the case of the two hurlers, every two of five days) will be a chance to re-measure the distance to the line – some days will see our pursuers fall a tick or two behind, others will observe a surge ahead.  It can be a fun way to follow the unfolding of a season:  track and watch, look ahead and explore behind, imagine the splendors of a final destination in which the stars of the present accumulate and refine their numbers until they are shaped in a way that can dovetail with the names of long ago.  If you choose to make the trip, though, just remember to pace yourself – it’s a long season.  

Here’s the full list of the nine pairs of teammates to go 40-120-80 in a season, with the numbers