Baseball Minutiae and Trivia Only

Do you guys think Hodges should be in the HOF?  I know a lot of Dodgers and Mets fans think he should. 

Of the 47 players with 3 triples in one game, only Dave Brain did it twice, in 1905. The first time was in May playing for St. Louis and he hit them vs. Pittsburgh. The second time he was playing for St. Louis in an August game vs. Boston. He hit 11 triples that season…

Ben Chapman, Mike Donlin, and Billy Lush are the only players to pull the trick in just 3 official at bats, though all of the players had at least 4 PA.

Joe Judge had 9 PA and 7 AB in his game.

Jimmy Sheckard was the first man to do it, in 1901*. Yasiel Puig the last in 2014.
* only counting from 1900 on.

Only 4 players have also hit a double in the game and no one has hit a home run to go with the triples.

3 players have stolen a base in their three triples game including Bert Campaneris who seems to pop up on lot of oddity lists.

Lance Johnson is the only one with a 6 hit day, and the only one with 3 singles in the game…

Terrific point of discussion! Over a 9 year period Hodges hit
.284 .375 .516 .892 132. Nine years is a long peak! He was still a useful player after this nine years for a while, too. In those peak yeas he homered 287 times and drive in at least 100 runs in the first seven of those seasons.

He won three gold gloves despite being 33 when the first one was awarded. When he played his line game before going in the service it was at 3rd base. When he returned to MLB, they handed him a catchers mitt, but Campanella was on the way up, so they transitioned him to first base.

We have no evidence to show that Hodges would have broken out earlier than he did if he hadn’t signed up for military duty. His biggest “fault” is a late start and an early regression that takes away from his counting stats.

To me, Gil Hodges is a HOF player… He had intangibles through the roof…He exuded positive energy…

I remember Gil Hodges playing for the last handful of his best years.  He was a universally popular player, like Stan Musial or Yogi Berra from that era.  A solid player and a solid, good character man.  His power numbers took a hit when the Dodgers moved from Ebbets Field to the LA Coliseum, although not nearly as drastically as the lefty-swinging Duke Snider's did.  Of course that decline could have been just natural regression -- he was 34 when the Dodgers began play in Los Angeles.

I don't have any particular problem with Hodges being in the HOF -- he was an excellent player for a long time on some great teams.  I will say that his numbers in some ways are amazingly close to Don Mattingly's - Hodges had 7,030 ABs, Mattingly had 7,003. Hodges' career OBP was .359; Mattingly's was .358.  Hodges' OPS+ was 120; Mattingly's was 127.  They were both outstanding defensive players and good clubhouse guys.

But I think Mattingly has an edge in some key areas.  First of all, there's a lot more black ink in Donnie's resume than in Gil's.  In fact other than twice leading the league in games played and once in strikeouts, Hodges has no other black ink categories in baseballref's standard hitting stats.  Mattingly has a lot of it -- twice for hits, three time for doubles, once for RBIs, once for BA, once for SLG, once for OPS and OPS+, twice for TB.  Mattingly's BA was .307 to Hodges at .273, although that of course means Hodges was walking a lot more than Mattingly.  In fact Mattingly's BB peak was 61 in 1993, when he was winding down, whereas Hodges had nine seasons with more walks than that, including a high of 107 in 1952.

I knew Mattingly was a great contact hitter, but looking at the actual stats was eye-opening.  The most times he ever struck out in a season was 42!  Hodges topped that number 12 times in an era where strikeouts were not as prevalent as when Mattingly played.  So while I'm fine with Gil being in the Hall -- he was also a difference-maker as a manager and I give him a smidgen of extra credit for being the only prominent Dodger who continued to live in Brooklyn after the team left -- it makes Mattingly's HOF case even stronger.  And I don't feel like getting into it just now, but check out the stats for Keith Hernandez.  He is stride for stride with Donnie in a lot of key areas.

Wildfire Schulte is one of only four players ever to have the quadruple 20 season you mentioned.  After he did it in 1911, nobody did it again until Willie Mays in 1957.  Then it didn't happen again until 2007, when both Jimmy Rollins and Curtis Granderson did it.  So it's about a once-every-half-century occurrence, just slightly more common than Halley's Comet.

That 1911 season was indeed a great one for Schulte -- he won the Chalmers Award, the equivalent of the MVP.  He was unusual in his time in that he held the bat down at the end and let it rip.  I thought it was interesting that as many players in that era did, he performed on stage in the off-season.  He was in a play called "Wildfire."  He later owned a racing horse, a trotter which he named Wildfire.  Apparently his nickname came from the horse, not the other way around.

"She ran calling Wildfire...."

Maybe it's just me, but when I first heard that song, toward the end when he's working himself up he sings a line that sounded to me like he was saying "we're gonna leave South Boston behind."  It didn't make sense in the context of the song, but then again a lot of things don't make sense.  It took me awhile to realize he was saying "we're gonna leave sod bustin' behind," which fits in better with a song  set in Nebraska.  I have never determined if there is an actual place called Yellow Mountain.

I'm not particularly a fan of Murphy, but he wrote a song for Mike Nesmith called "What Am I Doin' Hangin' Round" which I thought was pretty good.  It sounded like something Nesmith would have written himself.

And I know, I should take this to the music thread.

For me, hearing that song once was more than enough for a lifetime.