In a recent comment - aawillsher asked the following question:
"I was recently wondering about a related question — what is the most HR’s hit by a player (season or career) who never hit more than one in a game?"
Using an obscure feature of the PI Batting Streak finder, we can attempt to answer this question.
Step 1: On the bottom right corner select "Choose additional, advanced criteria:" and set HR>=1. This limits our pool to games in which a player has homered.
Step 2: On the top right set HR=1.
Step 3: For a single season check the box "to start a season"
We may have to manually remove some results if a player had his first multiple home run game late in a year.
Here are the results (1956-2008) to start a single season:
+-----------------+-----------+-----------+-----+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Mike Piazza 1999-04-06 1999-10-02 40 162 55 71 3 0 40 80 7 18 1 1 .438 .492 1.198 1.690 NYM
Hank Aaron 1963-04-11 1963-09-09 39 152 58 74 3 0 39 83 19 22 6 1 .487 .545 1.276 1.821 MLN
Willie Mays 1966-04-12 1966-10-02 37 159 47 59 2 0 37 69 21 9 1 1 .371 .408 1.082 1.490 SFG
Alex Rodriguez 2008-04-02 2008-09-17 35 132 61 68 7 0 35 66 26 23 5 1 .515 .595 1.364 1.959 NYY
Ron Kittle 1983-04-10 1983-10-01 35 135 43 54 1 1 35 67 35 13 2 0 .400 .447 1.200 1.647 CHW
Mike Schmidt 1982-05-02 1982-10-03 35 130 47 55 5 0 35 64 21 21 2 2 .423 .494 1.269 1.763 PHI
Aaron snapped his streak with a 2 HR game on September 10th. The other players all hit 35 or more home runs without hitting 2 or more in one game.
To figure out the career leader involves a little more work. (You can't simply check off to start a career because the PI limits the search to the players first 400 games) However, we can do the same search as before and not limit it to the beginning of a season.
This yields the following result.
StreakStart Streak End Games AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SO BB SB CS BA OBP SLG OPS Teams
+-----------------+-----------+-----------+-----+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Rusty Staub 1973-09-21 1981-09-08 124 493 160 213 19 3 124 241 16 48 0 0 .432 .480 1.237 1.717 NYM-DET-MON-TEX-NYM
Marquis Grissom 1989-09-11 1998-09-09 109 480 159 211 16 4 109 180 40 26 26 7 .440 .467 1.171 1.638 MON-ATL-CLE-MIL
Cal Ripken 1985-10-05 1990-05-09 102 419 140 176 16 1 102 183 39 38 2 2 .420 .466 1.193 1.659 BAL
Lou Piniella 1969-04-20 1984-05-18 102 397 134 176 16 2 102 184 27 18 1 3 .443 .464 1.264 1.728 KCR-NYY
Carl Yastrzemski 1977-06-19 1983-09-10 102 403 141 184 16 1 102 206 30 40 2 2 .457 .504 1.261 1.765 BOS
Rusty Staub had the longest streak (1956-2008) of home run games with just one. However, Staub did have 12 multiple homerun games in his career. Marquis Grissom's first 109 home runs were all hit in different games. However, after that he had 9 multiple homerun games. Similary, the streaks of Ripken and Yastrzremski were oddities in careers full of mutiple home run games. This leaves Lou Pinella as the only player (1956-2008) to have hit more than 100 career home runs, but never 2 in the same game.
