In a recent comment - aawillsher asked the following question:

"I was recently wondering about a related question — what is the most HR’s hit by a player (season or career) who never hit more than one in a game?"

Using an obscure feature of the PI Batting Streak finder, we can attempt to answer this question.

Step 1:  On the bottom right corner select "Choose additional, advanced criteria:" and set HR>=1. This limits our pool to games in which a player has homered.

Step 2:  On the top right set HR=1.

Step 3: For a single season check the box "to start a season"

We may have to manually remove some results if a player had his first multiple home run  game late in a year.

Here are the results (1956-2008) to start a  single season:

+-----------------+-----------+-----------+-----+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
 Mike Piazza        1999-04-06  1999-10-02    40    162   55   71   3   0  40   80    7   18    1   1  .438  .492 1.198 1.690 NYM

 Hank Aaron         1963-04-11  1963-09-09    39    152   58   74   3   0  39   83   19   22    6   1  .487  .545 1.276 1.821 MLN

 Willie Mays        1966-04-12  1966-10-02    37    159   47   59   2   0  37   69   21    9    1   1  .371  .408 1.082 1.490 SFG

 Alex Rodriguez     2008-04-02  2008-09-17    35    132   61   68   7   0  35   66   26   23    5   1  .515  .595 1.364 1.959 NYY
 Ron Kittle         1983-04-10  1983-10-01    35    135   43   54   1   1  35   67   35   13    2   0  .400  .447 1.200 1.647 CHW
 Mike Schmidt       1982-05-02  1982-10-03    35    130   47   55   5   0  35   64   21   21    2   2  .423  .494 1.269 1.763 PHI

Aaron snapped his streak with a 2 HR game on September 10th. The other players all hit 35 or more home runs without hitting 2 or more in one game.

To figure out the career leader involves a little more work. (You can't simply check off to start a career because the PI limits the search to the players first 400 games)  However, we can do the same search as before and not limit it to the beginning of a season.

This yields the following result.

                   StreakStart  Streak End Games    AB    R    H   2B  3B  HR  RBI  SO   BB   SB   CS   BA   OBP   SLG   OPS  Teams
+-----------------+-----------+-----------+-----+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
 Rusty Staub        1973-09-21  1981-09-08   124    493  160  213  19   3 124  241   16   48    0   0  .432  .480 1.237 1.717 NYM-DET-MON-TEX-NYM

 Marquis Grissom    1989-09-11  1998-09-09   109    480  159  211  16   4 109  180   40   26   26   7  .440  .467 1.171 1.638 MON-ATL-CLE-MIL

 Cal Ripken         1985-10-05  1990-05-09   102    419  140  176  16   1 102  183   39   38    2   2  .420  .466 1.193 1.659 BAL
 Lou Piniella       1969-04-20  1984-05-18   102    397  134  176  16   2 102  184   27   18    1   3  .443  .464 1.264 1.728 KCR-NYY
 Carl Yastrzemski   1977-06-19  1983-09-10   102    403  141  184  16   1 102  206   30   40    2   2  .457  .504 1.261 1.765 BOS

Rusty Staub had the longest streak (1956-2008) of home run games with just one. However, Staub did have 12  multiple homerun games in his career.  Marquis Grissom's first 109 home runs were all hit in different games. However, after that he had 9 multiple homerun games. Similary, the streaks of Ripken and Yastrzremski were oddities in careers full of mutiple home run games. This leaves Lou Pinella as the only player (1956-2008) to have hit more than 100 career home runs, but never 2 in the same game.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2009 at 1:03 am and is filed under Leaders, Streak Finders. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.