Starting in December and ending on Opening Day, Joe Posnanski will count down the 100 greatest baseball players by publishing an essay on a player every day for 100 days. In all, this project will contain roughly as many words as “Moby Dick.” Yes, we know it’s nutty. We hope you enjoy.
Sometimes at night, when I’m looking to fall asleep, I think up baseball lists. These could be about anything, really. They could be the best baseball players named Joe or the best curveballers I’ve ever seen (Mark Eichhorn, anyone?) or my favorite ever uniforms.
One of my favorite lists contains the batters who hit the ball the hardest.
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By hardest, I am not talking about those players who hit the longest home runs. That’s another thing. I’m talking about those batters who hit the ball so hard that corner infielders back up a step and begin to sweat. I’m talking about those batters who hit the ball so hard that you feel a different tension in the ballpark when they step to the plate, and you catch a different look on the pitcher’s face, and you wait because you know that you might see a baseball hit so impossibly hard that your breath just rushes out of your body.
Nap Lajoie was famous for how hard he hit the baseball. So was Paul Waner. Stan Musial and Ted Williams crunched baseballs. There was, as Buck O’Neil always used to say, a different sound when the ball came off the bat of Josh Gibson.
I never saw them, unfortunately, nor Mickey Mantle or Frank Howard, and so my list contains players I saw in my lifetime. I don’t put them in order or contain the list to some round number like 10 because this isn’t that kind of list — it’s just a meandering thought to set my imagination and nostalgia neurons sparking. I think of it more like poetry.
Dick Allen. Albert Belle. Rico Carty (I loved him so). Adam Dunn. Edwin Encarnación. George Foster. Joey Gallo. Josh Hamilton. Ichiro (in batting practice). Bo Jackson. Harmon Killebrew. Greg Luzinski. Willie McCovey. Mike Napoli (when he was right, wow, he hit it hard). Al Oliver. Dave Parker. Carlos Quentin. Frank Robinson. Willie Stargell. Jim Thome. Chase Utley (such a quick bat). Vladimir Guerrero. Dave Winfield. Xander Bogaerts (needed an X but he hits the ball plenty hard). Yaz. And, of course, Zack Greinke, who would never forgive me for leaving him off this list.
Three others deserve special recognition.
There’s Tony Oliva, my father’s favorite player, who hit the ball so hard that in Minnesota they still reminisce about some of his foul balls.
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There’s Gary Sheffield; I am there on his Wikipedia page saying, “I can’t imagine there has ever been a scarier hitter to face.”
And, perhaps most of all, there’s Miguel Cabrera.
Miggy was a hitting prodigy. At age 16, scouts lined up around his home in Venezuela in 1999 to sign him; the Dodgers’ scout Camilo Pascual was in the Cabrera home at midnight the first night teams could sign players. Cabrera signed instead with the Marlins for almost two million dollars, at the time one of the largest contracts ever given to an international player. The only worry about him was his position. The Yankees refused to get into the bidding because they worried that he was too big to stay a shortstop. They were right. And, at the same time, they were very wrong.
Cabrera hit a walk-off home run off Tampa Bay’s Al Levine in his first game. He was 20 then and he hit cleanup for the Marlins in the postseason, mashing three home runs in the NLCS (including a three-run homer off Kerry Wood in the first inning). He also cracked a home run off Roger Clemens in the World Series when it looked like the Yankees might be ready to take control.
After that, he put up 13 consecutive seasons of such consistent awesomeness that looking at his Baseball-Reference page almost feels like looking into the sun.
Life off the field was anything but consistent for Cabrera. He made a seemingly never-ending series of mistakes and bad choices. He was arrested for drunken driving. The police came to his home after a domestic dispute. He faced a lawsuit from a former mistress. He did go to an alcohol abuse center, and by all accounts has worked hard to put his life together.
As a hitter, though? It could not have looked easier. There was no weakness. He hit every kind of pitch. He hit to all fields. Every year, Miggy hit .324 or .339 or .328 or .316. Every year he hit 34 or 27 or 44 home runs. Every year he drove in 100 runs, every year he scored 100 runs, every year he hit 40 or 50 doubles.
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And I’ve never seen anyone hit the ball harder. There was something fundamentally different about the ball coming off Miggy’s bat. His ground balls would crash through the infield. His line drives careened into gaps. There is only so much you can tell about a hitter in one game, but just about every game Cabrera would hit one point so hard that you just knew there was something different about him.
In those 13 seasons, he hit .323/.402/.566 with 502 doubles, 434 home runs, and an average of 110 RBIs per year. Few players in baseball history have had 13 seasons like those.
Since 2017, Cabrera’s power has sapped as he has dealt with injuries and wear and tear. He’s slugging just .400 or so over the last three seasons, and he has another four years and more than $120 million left on his deal, so it will likely not be a particularly celebratory ending for Miggy. But he should become just the fifth player — joining Henry Aaron, Barry Bonds, David Ortíz and Albert Pujols — to hit 500 homers and 600 doubles.
And even now, every so often, he turns on a ball and hits it so hard the eye can barely follow and it sounds like the fourth of July.
In many ways, I think Miggy did not get the credit he deserved for his astounding Triple Crown season. I will readily admit: I was one of those people who missed how special, in its own way, that season was. It was, I believe now, the most impressive Triple Crown season in baseball history.
The first “real” Triple Crown in baseball history came in 1901, when the gloriously named Napoleon Lajoie hit .426, hit 14 home runs and drove in 125 RBIs. Yes, there had been a couple of other Triple Crowns in the 19th century. Paul Hines did it in 1878, but that wasn’t baseball as we would recognize it. Tip O’Neill won it in 1887, but he won it in the old American Association, which qualifies as Major League only in the most technical of ways.
So Lajoie was the first to do it in the modern era … but even Lajoie’s Triple Crown is pretty questionable. He did it in the first year of the American League. The league was still developing, there were only eight teams, the competition was pretty light. The only other Hall of Famer to finish Top 10 in any of the three triple crown categories was someone you probably did not know was in the Hall of Fame, a third baseman named Jimmy Collins who was voted in by the Old-Timer’s Committee mostly for his defense.
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Point is, you could argue that Lajoie’s Triple Crown is not the first “real one” either.
That would make Ty Cobb’s Triple Crown of 1909 (.377, 9, 107) the first real Triple Crown. But, come on, can you really say that someone had a triple crown season with nine home runs?
When I was a kid, it was a thing for young baseball fans to memorize all the Triple Crown winners (much like it was a thing to know everybody in the 500-homer club). I would always remember the most obscure of the bunch, Heinie Zimmerman, because, I mean, his name was Heinie. He won it in 1912 with the Cubs. He hit 14 home runs.
After Zimmerman, you start to get Triple Crown seasons that look like actual Triple Crown seasons. Rogers Hornsby won it twice — in 1922 and 1925 — and hit .400 both times, hit 42 and 39 homers, drove in 152 and 143 runs.
Then came a long series of all-time greats. In 1933, Hall of Famers Chuck Klein and Jimmie Foxx each won the Triple Crown in their respective leagues. Lou Gehrig won it the next year, Ducky Medwick three years after that.
In the 1940s, Ted Williams won it twice. The second time, 1947, was a strange year in the American League. Nobody other than Williams hit .330, nobody other than Williams hit 30 home runs, nobody other than Williams drove in 100 RBIs. And yet the MVP went to Joe DiMaggio who, by WAR (which includes defense), was only half the player Ted Williams was that season.
The next three Triple Crowns — Mickey Mantle in ’56, Frank Robinson in ’66 and Carl Yastrzemski in ’67 — have been celebrated more than any of the others, I would say. That’s because each of them comes with a great story.
• Mantle had been this brilliant and beloved young player with unlimited potential — think the hype of the young Ken Griffey plus the young Bryce Harper plus the young Ronald Acuña Jr. — and then he arrived with this unthinkable season, .353 average, 52 homers, 130 RBIs. He led the league in just about everything.* There’s something so satisfying about seeing a genius put everything together.
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*Mantle actually did not lead the league in on-base percentage despite hitting .353 and walking 112 times. His brilliant .464 on-base percentage was topped by, you guessed it, a 37-year-old Ted Williams (.479 OBP).
• Robinson’s Triple Crown came one year after the Cincinnati Reds traded him away for Milt Pappas and change. Robinson was known for his competitiveness anyway. He always played a little bit angry. But he was particularly angry in ’66. He had never hit 40 homers in a season — and never would again — but that year he mashed 49. In addition to the triple crown categories, he led the league in runs, on-base percentage and slugging percentage, too.
• Yaz’s Triple Crown season of 1967 is probably one of the five most famous seasons in baseball history, as he led — carried, really — the Impossible Dream Red Sox to the pennant.
This is all a long lead-up to say that after Yaz, there were no triple crowns for 45 years … until Cabrera did it in 2012. But it was different by then: The Triple Crown seemed utterly out of date. I mean, look at the categories: Batting average? You mean, the less accomplished (but the infuriatingly more famous) older brother of on-base percentage? Home runs? By 2012, many baseball fans were sick of home runs. And runs batted in? That’s a team-based stat more than an individual one.
Cabrera’s Triple Crown (.330, 44, 139) was so uneventful for so many of us modern baseball fans that we actively fought against him winning the MVP award. Sure, I was one of those fighting, and I don’t regret it. That was the year Mike Trout emerged, and while he lost out on those old-fashioned stats, he had a higher on-base percentage, was a much better base runner and defender and scored 20 more runs. By WAR, Trout was worth three more wins than Cabrera, not exactly a small difference.
Cabrera still won the MVP award running away.
In retrospect, I’m glad he won. I mean, yes, I would be glad if Trout had won since I still believe he had the better all-around season. But Cabrera’s Triple Crown was special in a way that should be remembered. He is the first and still the only player to win a Triple Crown since the leagues expanded in 1969. That means a lot. When Hornsby, Foxx, Williams, Mantle won their awards, they won them in much smaller leagues against much less competition.
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Take Mantle’s ’56 season. How many truly great hitters were in the American League that year? Yes, there was Ted Williams, but, as mentioned, he was 37 years old by then. Do you know who finished second to Mantle’s 56 homers that year? Vic Wertz. He hit 32. Al Kaline was a truly great player, and he finished second to Williams in RBIs. Yogi Berra was a legendary player but was an aging catcher in the midst of his last great season. Larry Doby was a terrific player but he was coming to the end, too. Minnie Miñoso is a legitimate Hall of Fame candidate but he was not really a batting average-home run-RBI threat.
Now look at Cabrera’s triple crown — he had to beat out Mike Trout. He had to outhit Derek Jeter, Joe Mauer, Adrián Beltré, Robinson Canó, Dustin Pedroia and others. He had to outhomer peak Josh Hamilton, Edwin Encarnación, Prince Fielder, Paul Konerko, Chris Davis, José Bautista, Adam Dunn, Nelson Cruz — all of them capable of smashing 40 homers in a season. He had to drive in more runs than those guys and a new addition to the American League, Albert Pujols.
While Mantle won the Triple Crown against the best hitters on eight teams, Cabrera won his against the best hitters on fifteen teams. Mantle won his Triple Crown in a league that was still mostly still segregated, in a league that might not have had a job for Miguel Cabrera himself.
Point is, you might find the Triple Crown itself to be archaic and uninteresting. But even if you do, Cabrera’s was the most impressive one in baseball history.
Note: Portions of this series were adapted from previous work that originated on my personal blog.
(Photo: Jim McIsaac / Getty Images)