SITE NEWS: We are moving all of our site and company news into a single blog for Sports-Reference.com. We'll tag all B-R content, so you can quickly and easily find the content you want.
Also, our existing B-R blog rss feed will be redirected to the new site's feed.
Baseball-Reference.com ยป Sports Reference
For more from Andy and the gang, check out their new site High Heat Stats.
ShareThisMatt Williams hit 62 HR
Well, as you saw a couple of days ago, Tony Gwynn once hit over .400 over a 162-game stretch from 1993 to 1995.
Well, back when 61 HR was the season record and it was accompanied by a regular, non-performance-enhanced asterisk, Matt Williams once hit 62 HR over 162 games.
As you can find using the summation function in the gamelog pages:
Matt Williams batting from career game #799 (Sep 3, 1993) to game #960 (May 17, 1995)
G PA AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB IBB SO HBP SH SF GDP SB CS BA OBP SLG OPS +---+---+---+---+---+--+--+--+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+--+-----+-----+-----+-----+ 162 691 636 109 178 24 5 62 143 47 8 118 2 0 6 18 1 0 .280 .329 .626 .955
It happens to be over a similar period to Gwynn's performance and also encompasses the entire strike-shortened 1994 season. He hit 62 HR with 143 RBI in those 162 games, and amazing was intentionally walked just 8 times.
It's possible that Matt Williams, more than any other player, was hurt by the 1994 strike. At the time off the strike, he had 43 HR in 112 games, which projects to 62.2 HR had that season gone the distance. Amazing to think that in 1998, McGwire and Sosa could have been chasing a 4-year old record instead of a 37-year old one.
Related posts:
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 10:22 am and is filed under Gamelogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
January 8th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
I think you mean 37 year old record.
January 8th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Yes, 37 years old, thanks. Fixed that in the original post. My math skills are awesome.
January 8th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Hey Andy, it seems the free trial isn't exactly working, in the event finder section it seems like some of the options aren't available. http://img293.imageshack.us/img293/2728/picture1ba3.png I assume that you should be able to see all the options under opponents and pitchers and all that, right?
January 8th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Dunno about that, I will alert Sean.
January 8th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
I think that there are actually 7 groups (6 in a row and then another 2 games later) of 162 consecutive games in which Williams hit 62 home runs. I believe that this is the earliest:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/gl.cgi?n1=willima04&year=1993&t=b#794:955:sum
January 9th, 2008 at 1:30 am
[...] Who got screwed by the 1994 baseball strike? [...]
January 13th, 2008 at 3:02 am
[...] Did you know that Matt Williams hit 62 home runs in a season? Stat of the Day Blog, which is run by Baseball Reference, actually compiled the strike shortened season with 2005 in the beginning and found this nugget. - (Source) [...]