Two Teammates, One Record

Taking aim at Ty Cobb's Tigers 105-year mark

Welcome to Warning Track Power, a weekly newsletter of baseball stories and analysis grounded in front office and scouting experiences and the personalities encountered along the way.

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Entering play on Thursday, the league batting average was an all-time low .234. On-base percentage has reached rock bottom for the century. Make no mistake, it’s a tough time to be a hitter.

For many teams, you’ll find more players in the lineup whose averages begin with a 1 than with a 3. We’ve seen this coming for a while — strikeouts on the rise, pitchers throwing with greater velocity and spinning more breaking balls — and we also expected that offense would suffer from the lockout-shortened Spring Training.

Then, there’s the actual baseball itself. For the first time ever, baseballs are being stored in humidors in every stadium.

There’s a growing list of anecdotal accounts of well-hit balls as well as Statcast-verified clouts that are dying shy of the fence. (Huh, what do they call that affliction?)

I don’t want to get into the physics concerning this year’s vintage of the ball — for starters, I’m not qualified to do so. Secondly, if we’re going to get caught up in humidors and vintages, let’s make sure we have cigars and wine.

The current offensive woes evoke stat lines from 1968, the Year of the Pitcher. That’s when the lowest batting average over a full season was established.

In fact, we may be living through the mid-’60s again right now. All I ask is, please, no more Woodstock reboots.

If we draw a line at the conclusion of World War I, the 10 seasons of lowest batting averages exist between either 1963-1972 or 2018-2021. This season is starting to reveal the offensive frustrations of ’68. Bob Gibson’s record-low 1.18 ERA is likely safe, but there are currently 10 qualifying starters with sub-2.00 ERAs.

Among the offensive struggles, though, there are some players who are thriving under current conditions. They’re easy to spot because only 21 players were hitting .300 or better as of Thursday morning.

For three teams, the discrepancy of performance within the lineup is historic.

The Red Sox, Mariners, and Padres are all currently on pace to break a modern era record. In 1917, Tigers teammates Ty Cobb and Bobby Veach tallied 407 hits collectively. Those knocks accounted for 30.9% of all team hits. (Special thanks to John Labombarda at the Elias Sports Bureau for providing this information.)

That record has stood for more than 100 years.

Today, the Red Sox duo of Xander Bogaerts and Rafael Devers are on pace to shatter the record. The teammates each have 40 hits so far, and the Sox overall have 240. That makes for very satisfying math; they are contributing exactly one out of every three Boston base hits.

Mariners teammates Ty France and J.P. Crawford are also outpacing the old Tigers. They’ve registered 31.1% of Seattle’s hits.

In San Diego, MVP candidate Manny Machado and the rejuvenated Eric Hosmer are accounting for an astonishing 36.4% of all Padres hits.

What does this mean?

The simplest explanation might be that the season is still relatively young and there’s some catching up to do. If that is the case, these developments still provide a fascinating lens through which we can view the season.

These hitters are not sacrificing power for singles either. Only France and Bogaerts have slugging percentages below .500 (.476 and .466, respectively).

Machado and Hosmer are the top two hitters in the National League, but the Padres as a team are 12th in the NL in average. Only late last week did Hosmer begin hitting directly behind Machado in the everyday lineup. Yet Machado has been issued only one intentional walk all season. How — or when — will opposing pitchers adjust?

Of last year’s playoff teams, the World Series champion Braves had the highest percentage of hits come from a duo (27.5%, from Freddie Freeman and Austin Riley). Don’t forget, though, that team was overhauled via trades in July. Only four players on their roster had more than 305 at bats.

It’s easy to wonder if the Pads and Mariners would be in this conversation if Fernando Tatis Jr and Mitch Haniger were healthy, though the active players on the roster need to cooperate, too.

The Mariners are penciling in a right fielder hitting .140, a DH hitting .150, and a catcher batting .065. In all fairness, left fielder Eugenio Suarez is batting .202, but he’s drawing walks and hitting for power; his overall offensive contributions this season are positive.

The Padres and Red Sox have similar looking lineups. But in comparison to the 1917 Tigers, today’s teams should have an advantage that would dilute the impact of any two teammates: the universal DH.

The 1917 Tigers gave 419 at bats to pitchers. They batted .148. We’d all expect those plate appearances to be better used by professional hitters today.

Back in ’17, Cobb led all of baseball with 225 hits and a .383 average. (He also was tops in doubles, triples, stolen bases, OBP and SLG.) That Tigers team went 78-75, finishing well behind the pennant-winning White Sox.

Of course no apparent correlation exists between a team’s distribution of hits and their overall success. Pitching, defense, slugging, and other factors need to be considered.

By the way, how much praise does new Padres manager Bob Melvin deserve for helping to get Hosmer away from trade-talk distractions and in the right frame of mind to be incredibly productive? If the first baseman carries this performance through the season, it’s good reason to vote Melvin as NL Manager of the Year.

In the meantime, from Ty Cobb to Ty France, this season is taking us on a journey back to the days of Walter Johnson and Shoeless Joe Jackson, to Denny McLain and Carl Yastrzemski. Whether any team can rely so heavily upon two players and win remains to be seen.

WTP wishes Bob Melvin a speedy recovery from his recent prostate surgery. The game is better with him in the dugout! Subscribe to WTP now and never miss a single edition.