It appears that Christian Yelich “backed into” the batting average crown by missing the last three weeks. He edged Ketel Marte .3292 to .3286. ESPN’s stats are not MLB’s official ones, but MLB.com has the same info. Yelich also led the NL in OBP and slugging. In fact, he led the majors in slugging.
Mike Trout led the AL in both OBP and slugging.
Pete Alonso did achieve the undisputed rookie HR record with 53.
Eugenio Suarez hit 49 homers, thus improving his HR total for the fifth consecutive year. In every year since his rookie season, he has hit least five homers more than the previous year. Unless he suddenly turns into Barry Bonds, he has just about run out of room to improve. (4-13-21-26-34-49)
The Houston Astros had the only 20-game winners in baseball. It is an impossible choice between Verlander and Cole for the Cy Young:
Verlander 21-6, 2.58 ERA, .80 WHIP, 300K
Cole 20-5, 2.50 ERA, .89 WHIP, 326K
They finished 1-2 in the league in wins, ERA, WHIP and Ks
Jorge Soler led the AL with 48 dingers. In his previous five years he hit 5-10-12-2-9. I won’t start calling him “Brady” unless he falls back to 9 next year.
Freak home run years:
Brady Anderson, three successive years (1995-1997): 16-50-18
Ned Williamson, three successive years (1883-1885): 2-27-3 *
Jorge Soler: 9-48-?? **
Asterisks explained in (excruciating) depth after the jump.
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Asterisks
* 27 was an astounding number of homers for that era. It remained the major league record until Babe Ruth came along, although nobody knew it at the time. The annual record books of Williamson’s day did not even list cumulative home runs as a separate stat, although some daily newspapers did annotate the box scores with the names of those who hit doubles, triples and homers. Williamson’s record sat unnoticed for about 30 years. As of 1915, the primitive encyclopedias and yearbooks of the day listed the major league record as 25, held by the game’s fabled muscleman, Buck Freeman.
The very first baseball encyclopedia (“Balldom: The Britannica of Baseball”) was published in 1914, and did not list Williamson’s total among the best home run seasons. As expected, that encyclopedia listed Buck Freeman as the record holder for a major league season. Williamson was finally listed as the record holder in the 1916 update of the Spalding Official Baseball Record, 32 years after the fact, and 22 years after his death. If Ned Williamson could come back to life today, he would be surprised to find that he had ever been considered the record-holder for home runs in a single season.
How did Ned Williamson of the Chicago White Stockings manage to pull off this miraculous season? He didn’t, really. It was a matter of ballpark dimensions and ground rules. Chicago’s Lakefront Park had a 180-foot fence in left field, and the left field foul pole was due west of the batter, this further aiding flyballs by the powerful winds off the lake toward the Windy City, so what would be a 160-foot pop-up to the shortstop in most parks was a towering blast over the fence at Lakefront.
Ned Williamson was the master at hitting balls over that fence. In 1883 that hit was considered a ground-rule double, and Williamson led the league in doubles with 49, breaking the previous all-time record in that category by 12. In 1884 the ground rule was changed, making that same hit a homer, and Williamson led the league in homers with 27, breaking the all-time record in that category by 13! (We know these numbers now. They did not then.) In 1885, the team moved to a more sensible park, and Williamson didn’t do jack shit in either category (16 doubles and 3 homers, although he played in more games than either of the previous two seasons).
On the other hand, I assume he easily led the league in pop-ups to the shortstop.
1884 was a fascinating season in general. There was the crazy Chicago homer situation as well as Old Hoss Radbourne winning 60 games on the mound for Providence. I wrote about 1884, Williamson, Lakefront Park, Chicago’s battle with Lake Michigan, and other aspects of early Chicago baseball at tedious length in one article in Uncle Scoopy’s Ballpark.
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** To be fair, Soler was a part-time player before 2019. That said, let me summarize that in 320 previous at bats with KC, Soler had hit only 11 homers. That works out to only 20 homers per 589 at bats. This year he hit 48 in that exact number of at bats.