More home runs than singles in a season

Mark McGwire

Here's your odd statistical anomaly for the day: In 2019, Philadelphia Phillies outfielder Jay Bruce became the sixth player in MLB history to hit more home runs (minimum 20) than singles in a season.

Bruce, who started 2019 with the Seattle Mariners before being traded to Philadelphia, totaled 26 home runs and 24 singles among his 67 hits in 333 plate appearances.

Can you name the other five players on the list?

OK, I'm ruining it for you by giving you the answers:

1. Barry Bonds. No surprise here, right? In 2001, Bonds hit a record 73 home runs and totaled only 49 singles as a member of the San Francisco Giants.

2. Mark McGwire. The slugging first baseman accomplished this four times, three times with the St. Louis Cardinals and once with the Oakland A's. McGwire hit a career-high 70 home runs in 1998, to go along with 61 singles. The next season, he hit 65 home runs and 58 singles. In 2001, McGwire had 29 home runs and 23 singles. Going back to his time in Oakland, he had 39 home runs and 35 singles in 1995.

3. Joey Gallo. The Texas Rangers outfielder did this twice in back-to-back years, 2017-18. In 2017, Gallo finished with 41 homers and 32 singles. He had 40 home runs and 38 singles in 2018.

4. Matt Olson. In 2017, the Oakland A's first baseman finished with 24 home runs and 23 singles.

5. Ryan Schimpf. I'm guessing you didn't think of this guy, unless you're a fan of the San Diego Padres. Schimpf totaled 20 home runs and 18 singles during the 2016 season.

Giancarlo Stanton has 56 home runs -- do we care?

Giancarlo Stanton

Miami Marlins outfielder Giancarlo Stanton has a chance to become only the sixth man in baseball history to hit 60 home runs in a season.

With 10 games to play, he has 56 home runs.

No doubt, Stanton's chase for history gives Marlins fans a good reason to watch the final week and a half of the season, despite their team being out of postseason contention. And really, as a baseball fan, I feel as though I should be interested in this. However, in all honesty, I can't bring myself to care.

The steroids era has made it impossible for me to get excited about home runs. Sixty-home run seasons were once almost unheard of in the game. Babe Ruth hit 60 in 1927, and nobody touched that figure for 34 years, when Roger Maris broke Ruth's record with 61 home runs in 1961.

Another 37 years passed, and all of a sudden we had this rash of 60-homer seasons between 1998 and 2001. Mark McGwire hit 70 in 1998 and 65 more in 1999. Sammy Sosa hit 66 in 1998, 63 in 1999 and 64 in 2001. And, of course, Barry Bonds hit 73 in 2001, a "record" that still stands.

But as we all know, everything that Bonds, McGwire and Sosa accomplished is complete crap. They were aided by drug enhancements. All three men are cheats and liars, and hopefully none of the three ever gets elected to the Hall of Fame.

What does that have to do with Stanton? Well, absolutely nothing. I have no reason to believe that Stanton is cheating or on steroids. But unfortunately, when I think of 60 home runs, I don't think of Ruth and Maris and the great feats they accomplished. I instead think of those three drug cheats -- Bonds, McGwire and Sosa -- who left a stain on the game forever.

If Maris still were the single-season home run record holder, I think I would feel much differently about Stanton's pursuit. I would be following his at-bats carefully. Perhaps I would even be cheering for him.

However, thanks to the steroids era, the mystique surrounding 60-homer seasons is long gone, As a fan, I'm now indifferent to big home run totals, and probably always will be.

Frank Thomas, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine elected to Hall of Fame

I'll admit it: I was nervous. I wasn't sure former White Sox slugger Frank Thomas would be elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot.

I was worried the Baseball Writers Association of America would hold a grudge against Thomas because he played a majority of his career games as a designated hitter.

Fortunately, common sense prevailed. Thomas was elected to the Hall of Fame on Wednesday; his name appeared on 83.7 percent of the 571 ballots cast. He was comfortably about the 75 percent threshold needed for election.

Thomas finished his career with a .301 lifetime batting average, 521 home runs, 1,704 RBIs, a .419 career on-base percentage and a .974 career OPS. He also won two MVP awards and finished in the top four of MVP voting on three other occasions. Nine times, he placed in the top 10 of the MVP balloting.

There's no question that is a Hall of Fame resume, and kudos to the voters for putting aside the silly anti-DH argument and giving Thomas his proper place in Cooperstown.

Thomas will be joined in the 2014 class by two other deserving honorees, pitchers Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine.

Maddux, the former Atlanta Braves and Cubs ace, earned the most votes from the electorate, appearing on over 97 percent of the ballots. He is eighth all-time on the wins list with 355. He won four consecutive Cy Young awards -- one with the Cubs and three with the Braves -- from 1992 to 1995. He also was the best fielding pitcher of his era, earning a record 18 Gold Glove awards.

Glavine, Maddux's former teammate with the Braves, totaled 305 career wins and won two Cy Young awards. The left-hander was also comfortably above the 75 percent threshold; his name appeared on just under 92 percent of the ballots.

The two former Atlanta pitchers will be joined by their former manager, Bobby Cox, at July's induction ceremony. Cox, Joe Torre and Tony LaRussa were elected to the Hall in December for their managerial successes. 

A couple of other interesting things about this vote: Craig Biggio just missed. His name was on 74.8 percent of the ballots. That means he was exactly two votes short of induction. More than likely, he'll get into the Hall in 2015, which will be his third year on the ballot. It's a little unusual for a player with 3,060 career hits to have to wait three years. I'm not sure what the reasoning was by those who did not vote for Biggio. He seems like a no-brainer to me.

It also was notable that both Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens actually lost support. Bonds went from 36.2 percent to 34.7 percent, while Clemens dropped from 37.6 to 35.4.

What's interesting is the voters seem to draw a distinction between Bonds and Clemens and some of the other steroids guys like Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro. The latter three aren't getting near as many votes. Palmeiro, in fact, will fall off the ballot after only getting 4.4 percent of the vote this year. Sosa was at 7.2 percent, while McGwire got 11 percent.

Why are Bonds and Clemens different? Well, I think those two guys could have been Hall of Famers without using steroids. You look at their performances going back into the 1980s before all the steroid scandals started, and they seemed to be on the path to the Hall. In the case of these two men, the PEDs seemed to lengthen their careers and allowed them to put up unbelievable numbers into their late 30s and early 40s.

They aren't going to get into the Hall because that drug use taints their legacies, but there are some voters who are supporting them because their greatness is only partially attributed to steroids. Both Bonds and Clemens were elite players pre-steroids. They didn't really need to take that stuff, but for whatever reason, they chose to do so.

In the cases of Sosa, McGwire and Palmeiro, more than likely they would have just been ordinary players without the juice. At minimum, there's a perception their greatness was completely the result of steroids, and that's why they are getting little support from the electorate.

Lastly, I think it's time for the BBWAA to take a look at its own membership and review whether the guys who are voting on the Hall are qualified to do so. Right now, the standard is you have to have been a BBWAA member in good standing for 10 years in order to get a vote. Personally, I think the voters have made several errors in recent years. They've inducted some guys with marginal resumes, while making some guys who should be slam-dunk choices (like Biggio) wait.

You wonder how much baseball some of these voters actually watch. Are they really "baseball writers" anymore? Or are some of them former sports editors and former columnists who are no longer really in the industry? I wish I had a little more trust that these guys are all actually qualified to vote.

At least they got Maddux, Glavine and Thomas right. But you're allowed to vote for 10 guys each year, and it's not real hard to find other deserving players on that ballot who were left out again.

The Hall of Fame voting is broken

The Baseball Writers Association of America announced it's 2014 ballot on Tuesday, so this is as good a time as any to point how derelict in its duty to elect worthy players the BWAA has been in recent years.

Among the first-time candidates are former Cubs and Braves ace, Greg Maddux, a four-time Cy Young Award winner with 355 wins to his name, and all-time White Sox great Frank Thomas, who collected two AL MVP awards and belted 521 home runs to go along with his .301 batting average and .419 on-base percentage.

With fellow first-timer, 300-game-winner Tom Glavine, it looks like there are three no-doubt Hall-of-Famers added to this year's ballot.

But what about the rest of the ballot?

Jeff Kent and Mike Mussina are two more additions who I think have pretty strong Hall cases. Kent ranks among the best-hitting second basemen of all time. Mussina didn't collect as many wins or pitch as many innings as Glavine, but you could argue they were better innings.

How much traction Kent and Mussina -- or even Maddux, Thomas and Glavine -- receive really depends on how the BWAA approaches the backlog of candidates on the ballot.

Among the holdovers are Craig Biggio, Tim Raines, Alan Trammell, Edgar Martinez, Curt Schilling, Jeff Bagwell, Mike Piazza, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. I mention those players by name because they are the players I would vote for if I were a BWAA member. And if you could include more than 10 players on your ballot.

That's ignoring Rafael Palmeiro, Jack Morris, Lee Smith, Larry Walker, Fred McGriff and Don Mattingly. None of whom I'd vote for, even as a Big Hall supporter, but are other guys who have a strong statistical case (Palmeiro, Walker) or support from other corners (Smith, Morris).

How is it so many obviously qualified guys are getting left out?

If it were just a matter of the BWAA voters being stingy with who gains entry, that would be a good explanation. Except the voters have enshrined guys like Jim Rice (not that good), Tony Perez (also not that good) and Kirby Puckett (not good for long enough).

Part of it might also be a reluctance to render any verdict on baseball's Steroid Era, particularly with regard to Bonds, Clemens, McGwire, Sosa, Palmeiro and others.

This is another area where the logic gets fuzzy. Some of those players are suffering the steroid stigma when the evidence of PED use is flimsy and anecdotal at best (Bagwell, Piazza). Sometimes it's downright convoluted ("I think Bagwell was a 'roider, and that Biggio guy must have been, too!").

Other writers feel like it's just a great opportunity to grandstand, so submit ballots with no selections, thus demonstrating they don't really take the vote all that seriously. At least not seriously enough that we should pay attention to their nonsense. Just abdicate the duty if you don't want it.

Perhaps it will take a Veterans Committee to sift through some of these candidacies once more time has passed, though for my part, I don't think you can whitewash any steroid era, or pretend like it never happened.

The games were played, and for the most part they were with none of those players violating any MLB rules. They can't be replayed with any retroactive standard in place.

Though baseball, by and large, hasn't tried to follow professional cycling down that rabbit hole to nowhere, stripping its former champions of hardware with the largest effect being to taint the entire sport, the Hall of Fame seems willing to let column-writing voters test the institution's relevancy.

So it goes, I guess.