200 hits and a .300 batting average
Posted by Andy on August 25, 2009
On ESPN Radio this morning, Jayson Stark posed the following trivia question.
Pete Rose has 10 career seasons with 200 hits and a .300 batting average, the most of all time.
A quick PI search confirms this:
From To Ages Seasons Link to Individual Seasons +-----------------+----+----+-----+-------+------------------------------+ Pete Rose 1965 1979 24-38 10 Ind. Seasons
Stark's question was this: among active players, only 3 guys have as many as 5 such seasons. Can you name them?
Answers are after the jump.
First, here are the all-time leaders in 200 hit, .300 BA seasons:
From To Ages Seasons Link to Individual Seasons +-----------------+----+----+-----+-------+------------------------------+ Pete Rose 1965 1979 24-38 10 Ind. Seasons Ty Cobb 1907 1924 20-37 9 Ind. Seasons Ichiro Suzuki 2001 2008 27-34 8 Ind. Seasons Paul Waner 1927 1937 24-34 8 Ind. Seasons Lou Gehrig 1927 1937 24-34 8 Ind. Seasons Wade Boggs 1983 1989 25-31 7 Ind. Seasons Charlie Gehringer 1929 1937 26-34 7 Ind. Seasons Rogers Hornsby 1920 1929 24-33 7 Ind. Seasons
Ichiro is one of the active players, having achieved these numbers in all 8 of his MLB seasons. (Ichiro also did it once in Japan despite much shorter seasons there. He got 210 hits in just 130 games in 1994, good for a .385 batting average.)
Anyway, here is the list of all active major-leaguers to have at least 2 such seasons:
From To Ages Seasons Link to Individual Seasons +-----------------+----+----+-----+-------+------------------------------+ Ichiro Suzuki 2001 2008 27-34 8 Ind. Seasons Derek Jeter 1998 2007 24-33 6 Ind. Seasons Michael Young 2003 2007 26-30 5 Ind. Seasons Vladimir Guerrero 1998 2006 23-31 4 Ind. Seasons Miguel Tejada 2002 2006 28-32 3 Ind. Seasons Juan Pierre 2001 2004 23-26 3 Ind. Seasons Alex Rodriguez 1996 2001 20-25 3 Ind. Seasons Todd Helton 2000 2003 26-29 2 Ind. Seasons
Michael Young came as a surprise to me. He's on pace to do it again this year, as are Ichiro, Jeter, and Tejada. Had Manny been suspended the entire season, Pierre would have had a good shot too.
August 25th, 2009 at 10:19 am
Andy,
How do you get the Season Finder to show how many seasons someone did of something as you above? Whenever I search for something, I have to manually count how many seasons someone did it for. Please assist.
Paul
August 25th, 2009 at 10:29 am
On the top right of any PI search page, there's a drop-down menu that allows you to control how the search results are ranked. For the pitching and batting season finders, there's an option to group "Players with years."
August 25th, 2009 at 11:07 am
I wonder how many seasons there've been by players who had 200 hits and batted below .300. That's at least 668 or more at bats (which is .2994011, 200/668).
August 25th, 2009 at 11:10 am
It's happened only 3 times ever actually:
Jose Reyes in 2008, Jimmy Rollins in 2007, and Juan Pierre in 2006.
So, that sort of invalidates Stark's question since those 3 guys aren't among the leaders in question.
August 25th, 2009 at 11:39 am
ollie1000, there have been 10 such seasons.
August 25th, 2009 at 11:44 am
Yeah sorry, my list included only active players. Here is the full list:
http://www.bb-ref.com/play-index/shareit/BWEF
August 25th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Of course the Ich Man is up there, but how is Michael Young a surprise? He banged out 200+ hits every season from 2003-2007, an impressive streak.
August 25th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
If you look at Young's first 8 full seasons (2001 through 2008) and compare them to Jeter's, they both are good hitting shortstops. Young doesn't have quite the speed that Jeter did, and his batting average is just very good instead of great. However, with most of his games coming out of the #2 hole, there's alot similar between these two stars. Young might not be a Hall of Famer due to the lack of great teams, but he's a pretty good poor man's Derek Jeter.
August 25th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
It's too bad for Michael Young that he didn't really get rolling until he was 26, because he could easily have over 2000 hits now and have 3000 hits as a legitimate possibility if he had started at 23. He is a hitting machine, but it doesn't look like it will happen. At least he has a shot at the playoffs this year.
August 26th, 2009 at 11:35 am
.300 AND 200 hits? LOL! Kinda of a dumb/redundant stat if you ask me. 200 hits virtually assures you will have a .300 average. In fact it never happened once prior to 2006, where it didn't.