For all the enjoyment a Major League ballgame can provide when its young stars showcase their extraordinary physical gifts – those unimaginable blends and demonstrations of reflex and reaction time and flexibility and adjustment – the opportunity to savor something with a different profile can be equally alluring. Historically, this […]
There are 20 players in baseball history who thundered so frequently in the young portions of their careers that by the time they concluded their age-26 seasons, they already had more than 200 home runs. Seven of these precocious hammerers accompanied their potency with an uncommon level of discernment that […]
In 1911, when he became the first player with at least 70 steals and 70 extra-base hits in a season, 24-year-old Ty Cobb had 14 of each through his team’s first 26 games of the year. When, in 1984, Juan Samuel joined Cobb as the only players to complete the […]
Before he turned 32 years old, Mickey Mantle had 37 career multi-homer games. At the time, here in this jaunt back to 1963, it wouldn’t have taken but a moment to go through all of the others who could make this claim. Righty-swinging Jimmie Foxx had produced 53 multi-homer efforts […]
In 1998, Texas cleanup hitter Juan González embodied that descriptive amazingly well and often, with eight different games featuring at least five RBI. No other player in the modern era has produced so many big-RBI games, although a few aren’t too far behind. In 1930, Lou Gehrig had seven such […]
It’s been more than a decade since the American League saw the same player capture the batting crown, on-base title, and slugging belt. A year after he claimed the traditional Triple Crown in 2012, Detroit’s Miguel Cabrera took home the rate-stat version, slashing .348/.442/.636. Minnesota’s Joe Mauer – in 2009 […]