![]() ![]() 44 for the Yankees but never reached that mark with the club. Three greats of the game who each wore that number: Reggie Jackson, Willie McCovey, and Mathews’ longtime Braves teammate, Hank Aaron. (I wonder how many he hit to the warning track that year…) Cecil Fielder also wore number 45, but for the Tigers, and in 1991 he hit 44 home runs. How fitting would it have been if “ Mark Trombone” of all people, stole the crown from Eddie Mathews? However, Trumbo donned No. Then there was Mark Trumbo, who hit 47 in 2017 for the Orioles. So close, but Mathews was still the top dog. 48 during his brief stint with the Yankees, but his 48-homer season came in 1979 with the Cubs, when he wore No. I quickly worked my way from the top, through the 50s, before finding myself in the 40s again. Now that I had reached the 40s, I decided to give my brain a rest from the monstrosity that was the upper 30s and work from the top down. I felt content with that being the final answer but obviously couldn’t stop there. 41 hit that same number of home runs in 1955 for the Milwaukee Braves. I finally reached the 40s and came upon Hall of Fame third baseman Eddie Mathews. I trudged my way through the upper 30s, passing names like Chipper Jones, Frank Thomas, Joey Gallo, and former Chicago Cub Hack Wilson, who hit 56 home runs in 1930 before the Cubs used uniform numbers! Let’s just say that there are a good number of players who hit 37 home runs or more in a season. I can read the comments now: “Why didn’t you just work your way from the top to the bottom?” Maybe I was curious, hindsight is 20/20, and boy do I need an eye exam after this endeavor. In hindsight, this is not the easiest way to go about this process. ![]() But I thought for sure that there needed to be someone higher than the 20s.Īt first, I decided that the best way to go about this was to take the top 500 home run seasons and work my way up from the bottom. You then enter slightly higher jersey number territory: Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Giancarlo Stanton, Willie Mays, Jim Thome, etc. 99 will forever leave him off this list as well. You also have the obvious new-age player in Aaron Judge, whose No. They have plenty of home runs to those names, but they will not be winning this award (nor will a No. Immediately, guys like Babe Ruth, Hank Greenberg, Mickey Mantle, and Jimmie Foxx are crossed off the list. What should have been no surprise to me, considering the history of the sport in general, is that the players who wore low numbers generated a lot of the top home run seasons. Look up the single-season home run leaders and simultaneously look up their jersey numbers. On the surface, it feels like a simple task. Which MLB player has hit the most home runs in a single season in which their total matched their jersey number? I wanted to answer a unique and seemingly useless baseball question. But for this article, I took off the blinders and let myself dive into the unknown. I’ve come to the conclusion that the combination of Google and baseball numbers is a blessing and a curse, which now that I think about it, is hardly a conclusion at all. ![]() It can feel like an endless pit if you aren’t too careful. But as winter slogs along in the anxious anticipation for spring training, your baseball mind can sometimes take you to strange places.Īt the core of baseball are numbers, stats, and records. Some journeys were never meant to happen. ![]()
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