He breaks a tie with George Springer, and only trails Jose Altuve (27) and Manny Ramirez (29).
He has hit a home run on 9.52% of his career postseason at-bats, the 4th highest rate of anyone with at least 100 career postseason at-bats. He trails Babe Ruth (11.63%), Giancarlo Stanton (10.17%), and Nelson Crus (9.63%).
Been formulating a piece on Kyle Schwarber (as the number one fan of really stupid TTO baseball) and why Baseball Reference should add gold letters to single-season records on players pages, when I thought about how many of the records in baseball that we used to care about are basically unbreakable. The game has just been around for that long.
To see just how impossible some of these records are to break, I found the single-season record since 1901 for every single one of the 27 different stats you can find under "Standard Batting" when viewing a players page.
I will be going over each of these records, and giving a rating for how likely I think it will be broken at some point in the future (yes, even the stupidest ones). Here we go!
Hits: 262, held by 2004 Ichiro Suzuki
Triples: 36, held by 1912 Owen Wilson
Stolen Bases: 130, held by 1982 Rickey Henderson
Caught Stealings: 42, held by 1982 Rickey Henderson
Batting Average: .426, held by 1901 Nap Lajoie
Sacrifice Hits: 67, held by 1917 Ray Chapman
Hit By Pitches: 50, held by 1971 Ron Hunt
Yeah, we're not going to speculate on these ones that much. Frankly, it's more interesting to just gawk at the fact that we ever played baseball in a way that these records were achieved. There's plenty already said about Rickey Henderson as a unique talent, and everything else here is WAY down since the early 20th century. 262 hits finding its way in here might seem strange considering it was only about 20 years ago, but Ichiro hit .372 with the 8th most plate appearances in a season ever. That's never going to happen again, with the way baseball has progressed.
Of note, Ray Chapman would have obliterated the career sacrifice hits record if not for his tragic passing. If you gave him the same number of plate appearances as Eddie Collins, the current record holder with 512, Chapman would've had 876! Considering nobody has had more than 25 sacrifice hits in a season in over 30 years, that sort of mark would be able to stand alongside Cy Young's 749 complete games in "completely and utterly unbreakable until the sun consumes the Earth" land.
rOBA: .587, held by 1920 Babe Ruth
Runs Scored: 177, held by 1921 Babe Ruth
rWAR: 14.1, held by 1923 Babe Ruth
Total Bases: 457, held by 1921 Babe Ruth
Slugging Percentage: .863, held by 2001 Barry Bonds
Home Runs: 73, held by 2001 Barry Bonds
Adjusted OPS+: 268, held by 2002 Barry Bonds
Walks: 232, held by 2004 Barry Bonds
On-Base Percentage: .609, held by 2004 Barry Bonds
On-Base Plus Slugging: 1.422, held by 2004 Barry Bonds
Rbat+: 290, held by 2004 Barry Bonds
Intentional Walks: 120, held by 2004 Barry Bonds
Ok, so...we kind of uh...don't have players like these anymore, for very obvious reasons. Now, are all of these unbreakable? No, IF you had a hitter that was ten thousand times better than anyone else like Ruth or Bonds, you could break some of these records since a lot of them benefit greatly from being Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds. A full one-third of the 27 records we're discussing were achieved in just three seasons!
But even then, it's hard to see anyone surpassing those 120 intentional walks. The next highest by anyone else in a season is just 45. Bonds had more intentional walks in his career than the Rays franchise until just a few years ago. So yeah, wake me up in about 50 years when the next ridiculous talent, even more so than Judge, rolls around. Then maybe we'll see some changes here.
Also, has anyone cared about Rbat+ and rOBA ever? I've never seen them mentioned, yet there's on the page. What gives?
Runs Batted In: 191, held by 1930 Hack Wilson
Sacrifice Flies: 19, held by 1954 Gil Hodges
Still not getting close to realistically beatable, but these two are considerably more dependent on outside factors, so I figured talking about them separately was worth it. Driving in runs has always been good, but quite dependent on how often your teammates are on base; while Hack Wilson "only" had a 177 OPS+, he got to bat behind three, sometimes four, teammates with OBPs in the .400s. Meanwhile with sac flies...uhhhhh...I guess just get lucky with your opportunities to have someone on third? Ozzie Albies has 14 this year? Maybe it's possible? This is easily the most random of all of the counting stats for hitters; the career record is only 128 by Eddie Murray.
Games Played: 165, held by 1962 Maury Wills
Plate Appearances: 778, held by 2007 Jimmy Rollins
At-Bats: 716, held by 2007 Jimmy Rollins
Three stats related to playing time. Plate appearances and at-bats being held by the same season is promising, and breaking one likely means breaking the other. Now, I'm frankly not sure on the specifics for how someone might want to break this record except "lead off and pray everyone else is really good". Jimmy Rollins had a 119 OPS+, good for 5th out of everyone to play at least 100 games for the 2007 Phillies. A bunch of players have gotten within 50 of either of his marks, with 2023 Marcus Semien getting the closest with 753 plate appearances and 670 at-bats, but it doesn't seem very likely.
And yes, you read that Games Played line correctly. How? Well, Maury Wills was an everyday shortstop for the Dodgers who played in all 162 regular games that year. But then, the Dodgers and Giants were tied for the best record in the National League, and so a tiebreaker needed to be played (which DOES count for regular-season stats) to determine who won the pennant, the last time such a thing has happened.
Now, for reasons that I cannot fathom, ONLY the NL made that tiebreaker a three-game series. The AL did a single game in 1948 between the Indians and Red Sox, but the NL ran four of these tiebreaker series between 1946 and 1962. Wills, naturally, played in all three games of the tiebreaker, finishing the season with an (in hindsight, thoroughly undeserved) MVP trophy thanks to 104 stolen bases. Since we don't have tiebreaker games anymore, the only way someone could break his record is by getting traded midseason; Rafael Devers played in 163 games last year thanks to that. But even then, that leaves such an incredibly small margin of error.
Doubles: 67, held by 1931 Earl Webb
Double Plays Grounded Into: 36, held by 1984 Jim Rice
Finally, things that might actually be doable! Hitting doubles and being good despite hitting into a ton of double plays have been and continue to be relevant aspects of baseball, so there have been a few strong challengers in recent years.
Freddie Freeman hit 59 doubles in 2023, just one more than what Nick "80 grade meme" Castellanos hit in 2019. The fact that Earl Webb himself never hit more than 30 in any other season further suggests that a lot more players could threaten the record than just the superstars. Brian Roberts, Matt Carpenter, and Garrett Anderson have all had seasons of at least 55 doubles this century, and none of them were worth more than 30 rWAR for their career. I don't have a pick for who will hit 68 doubles as a result, but it's certainly at least within reaching distance for the foreseeable future.
Things are a little different for GIDPs. While there have been 8 seasons of at least 30 GIDPs this century, there is one clear candidate to break this record. Junior Caminero has put up 31 and 26 GIDPs in his first two full seasons, and he's only 22 years old! He has the ingredients to keep this production up:
- Lots of balls in play (14th in MLB in batted balls across the past two seasons)
- Strong contact (92nd percentile hard hit rate) on all pitches, but especially bad pitches (31st squared-up rate). He ranks as the 4th worst of 281 qualified players across the past two seasons in Launch Angle Sweet Spot percentage, meaning much more of his batted balls aren't getting hit well compared to other elite hitters.
- Slow (30th percentile sprint speed)
Thankfully for Junior, he is still quite productive in spite of this, with 10 rWAR and 86 home runs to go along with those 56 GIDPs across the last two season. I expect him to sign a massive contract with the Rays soon, hopefully much bigger than Wander Franco's so we never have to talk about him ever again. It's unclear how likely Caminero is to break Jim Rice's record, but nobody else is particularly close to as likely to do it. I'd see he's about as likely to hit into 37 double plays as he is to hit 60 home runs.
Strikeouts: 224 and counting, held by 2026 Colson Montgomery
Yes, I am very salty that Schwarber didn't break the record first.
We still have a few games left, but whatever number Montgomery ends up with will almost certainly be broken at least one other time within the decade. The catch is that you still have to be at least somewhat productive; Montgomery has salvaged 1.9 rWAR from a slashline of .202/.288/.413 thanks to 31 homers and 10 OAA.
My pick to break Montgomery's record is his teammate Munetaka Murakami, depending on how he progresses in the offseason. He has struck out at almost the exact same clip this season (35.6% vs 35.5% of plate appearances), and makes up mediocre defense with about 35 more points of OPS+. Montgomery has also missed 9 games this year, so he likely left at least a dozen strikeouts on the table.
I totally understand “oh let’s start cheating if they’re cheating and not getting punished” as a post, but it’s almost certain that Balmer just wanted to try and swing public opinion again. The article couldn’t even argue that he was innocent, just that he didn’t directly give Kawhi money (he would’ve sent it through shell companies like Aspiration anyway, so this is moot).
I also understand how “oh billionaires never get punished” a popular opinion that’s pretty reasonably grounded in reality, but like…
…they’re gonna punish Balmer considerably. If I wasn’t on the toilet right now, I would send some comments I’ve gathered on r/nba recently that would support the idea that they’re very clearly not taking this lightly.
Also fuck u/YujiDomainExpansion for demanding we apologize to the Clippers. That was beyond scummy.
He has less than half the career plate appearances of those two; the next most career triples by any player with less than 3000 plate appearances is 37 by Jarren Durran.
Active Leaders & Records for Triples | Baseball-Reference.com
Every team in MLB ranked by the difference between their actual wins, and Pythagorean wins based on run differential (higher is "luckier" in some sense):
Rays: +7
Reds: +5
Diamondbacks, Phillies, Padres, Astros, Rangers, Twins, Blue Jays: +3
Guardians, Athletics: +2
Cardinals, Orioles: +1
Brewers, Braves, Cubs, Marlins, Royals: 0
Mariners: -1
Yankees, White Sox: -2
Dodgers, Red Sox, Nationals, Mets: -3
Pirates, Giants, Rockies: -4
Angels: -5
Tigers: -10
rip the streak but fuck it we ball
I made way too good of a meme for us to lose, trust
He has some stiff competition though; Nick Kurtz, Zach Neto, and James Wood have the 3rd through 5th most strikeouts by July 9th. For reference, 2009 Mark Reynolds (the single season record holder for strikeouts with 223) only struck out 117 times at this point in the season.
Schwarber also set a record with 17 3+ strikeout games by July 9th, 2009 Mark Reynolds only had 12 by this point.
If you're a Nats fan, how dead are you?
WEMBY DID THE CHET THING LFG
