Obscure League Leaders

Every so often, when researching statistics in baseball, one happens to come along a season or a player that makes you wonder exactly what happened at that time frame. While looking into various statistics on an outfielder named Gavvy Gravath who played from 1908 until 1920, I noticed that he had several seasons with an extremely high adjusted OPS+. In 1913, his adjusted OPS+ was 172. He then followed this season by producing seasons in 1914 and 1915 with an OPS+ of 161 and 171, respectively. As such, I got curious as to where these ranked as the highest over the course of a season.

For those that don't know, adjusted OPS+ is OPS adjusted for the park and the league in which the player played, but not for fielding position. An OPS+ of 100 is defined to be the league average. An OPS+ of 150 or more is excellent and 125 very good, while an OPS+ of 75 or below is poor. OPS is determined by adding on base percentage and slugging percentage. As such, in the sabermetric community, it is regarded as an extremely useful tool to determine the value of a hitter.

When looking over the leaders in OPS+ for a season, the top three marks are held by Barry Bonds, which should not come as a surprise. In fact, most of the top ten is filled by Bonds, Babe Ruth (five through seven) and Ted Williams (eight and nine). However, in fourth place, is a player by the name of Fred Dunlap, who in 1884 posted an OPS+ of 258. This record actually stood until 2001, when Bonds passed it with a mark of 259. Here is a link to the list from baseballreference.com: http://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/onbase_plus_slugging_plus_season.shtml

Dunlap, nicknamed 'Sure Shot' due to his strong throwing arm, was 25 in 1884. That season, for the Saint Louis Maroons of the shortly lived Union Association, he managed to hit .412 with a .448 OBP. He led the league in hitting, OBP, slugging (.621), home runs (13), hits (185), and runs (160). These statistics were compiled over 101 games, in an era when the mounds stood fifty feet from home plate and an overhand throwing motion was considered legal for the first time. Still, this was nominally a part of the dead ball era, so these statistics were extremely impressive, especially for a second baseman.

With a sport such as baseball, where the history of the game is as much of the present and future than with any other sport, it can be quite enlightening to go through and look through some of the season leader lists. Prior to Bonds constant intentional walks and power surge, it seemed quite unlikely that this record would have been broken, yet no one realized that it existed. For all those that state that DiMaggio's 56 game hitting streak is unapproachable or that there will never be another .400 hitter, there's no guarantee. It did take 118 years for someone to pass Fred Dunlap after all.