Tag Archives: Jimmie Foxx

The League of All-Time Greats: Part 2

In our last post, the League of All-Time Greats got underway, pitting the best all-time single seasons for batters up against one another in a 162-game season. April had finished with 2001 Barry Bonds slumping and 1921 Babe Ruth playing to form.

Ruth began to pull away in the Old Timers division in May, pulling off a 10-game winning streak including a three-game sweep of 2001 Sammy Sosa in which he outscored him 24-5. Bonds meanwhile clawed his way to the top of the New Timers division though his record didn’t top .500 until he beat Chuck Klein 3-1 on May 29th. Sosa, 1998 Mark McGwire, and 1932 Jimmie Foxx are bringing up the bottom of the whole league, with McGwire finishing May losing 8 of his last 9 and Foxx his last 6.

Barry really turned it around in June, going 20-10 while Babe kept pace going 19-8. By July 1st, it looked like the two of them would run away with it, with Barry up 10.5 games on Mark McGwire and Ruth 15.5 over Chuck Klein.

Most concerning for Bonds was his performance against Ruth. Barry was a meager 4-10 against him, getting outscored 89-52. This did not bode well for Barry’s chances at taking home the league title.
As the dog days of
summer rolled around though, Babe Ruth started to falter. Maybe his off-the-field antics magnified by having so many clones of himself in the locker room made him lose focus. Ruth played only .500 ball in August, though by then he had built up such a cushion over Chuck Klein that he still entered September up 14.5 games. Bonds, on the other hand, went 19-9 in August and built himself a 22-game lead over Sammy Sosa. But Bonds still could not solve Ruth, losing 4 of 7 against him in July and August.

Ruth got serious again in September pulling off a 12-game win streak to put any talk of distraction behind him. Both he and Barry pulled away as expected and finished the season more than 20 games ahead of the second place team in their respective divisions.
Season

In all, the Old Timers performed better than the “New” Timers, with Rogers Hornsby the only team in the Old Timer division to finish below .500 at 80-82. Mark McGwire meanwhile lost 102 games in the “New” Timers division.

Chuck Klein more than held his own going 84-78 and also won the batting title hitting .329 far ahead of Rogers Hornsby at .312. As a team though, Barry Bonds finished at .288 compared to Chuck Klein’s .286. Babe Ruth won the home run crown with a modest 30. Bonds topped the leaderboard for OBP (.400), wOBA (.387) and WAR (6.3).
Batting leaders

Next up: 1921 Babe Ruth vs. 2001 Barry Bonds in a nine-game World Series.

The League of All-Time Greats

Who had the greatest season of all time? Is it one of Babe Ruth’s many dominating seasons? Is it the 2001 version of Barry Bonds when he hit 73HR? Different stats tell slightly different stories. WAR has a different all-time leaderboard than Runs Created, which is also different from WPA (Win Probability Added). While that is a totally separate issue, we wanted to see how well the all-time greatest seasons stacked up head to head with each other, so the League of All-Time Greats came into being, once again using OOTP 15.

This league is made up of only 8 teams, split into 2 divisions. Going by Runs Created, which seems to be pretty robust metric in OOTP, we took the top 8 RC for a single season with the caveat that each player can only appear once – or else we would have more than half the league being made up of different versions of Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds. Each team’s lineup is made solely of that player without changing any of their season attributes, meaning that most players will be playing out of position.

The teams (Runs Created in parentheses):
– 2001 Barry Bonds (230)
– 1921 Babe Ruth (229)
– 1927 Lou Gehrig (208)
– 1932 Jimmie Foxx (202)
– 1922 Rogers Hornsby (202)
– 1930 Chuck Klein (193)
– 1998 Mark McGwire (193)
– 2001 Sammy Sosa (193)

The teams were divided into two divisions: The “Old-Timers” league was anyone from 1930 and before, while the “New-Timers” league consisted of the rest. The winners of each division meet in a best-of-nine World Series.

As we needed to set a year for this league to occur, we chose a year in between the two gaps (pre-1932 and post-1998) that had obvious baseball significance: 1961.

We also needed to fill out their teams with pitchers. We decided upon one pitcher for all, and again wanted to find someone meaningful. We didn’t want a superstar pitcher but landed someone above average with historical significance. We chose Orvall Overall, who played for the Cubs and lays claim to being the first pitcher to strike out 4 batters in one inning of a postseason game (not duplicated until Anibal Sanchez in 2013). More importantly he was the last man to be on the mound for the last out in a World Series clinching game for the Cubs.

The teams were all set up ready for Opening Day. The experts had their preseason predictions, and it looked like it was unsurprisingly going to be a Babe/Barry free for all.
Preseason Predictions

And the schedule makers wanted to start the season off with a bang.
Opening Day

In the Opening Day matchup, Bonds hit the only home run, but 3 separate Babe Ruth’s stole bases. Two Ruth doubles in the bottom of the 8th were the difference as Babe Ruth took the game 7-6.
Opening Day Game

That Opening Day loss stung Barry, and Bonds went on to lost the next two games to Ruth before finally getting a victory in the fourth and final game of the series. After winning two more in a row against Jimmie Foxx, Bonds went into a funk (maybe steroids weren’t as readily available in 1961?) and would lose 7 in a row, including getting swept by Rogers Hornsby. Bonds would show some signs of life at the end of April, beating Mark McGwire 8-0 and 17-7 in two consecutive games.

Babe Ruth meanwhile won 10 of his first 11 games, sweeping Chuck Klein and Sammy Sosa. He finished April 14-5 with a 1.5 game lead of Rogers Hornsby.

Jimmie Foxx got off to the slowest start, losing 12 of his first 13 being swept by Chuck Klein, Lou Gehrig, and Rogers Hornsby before finishing the month on a high note sweeping Sammy Sosa.
April

Will Barry turn it around? Thankfully for him Sosa and Foxx also stumbled out of the gate. More to come…