Friday, September 4, 2020

Newly discovered "triple threat" triple crowns using XBT%

I have posted before on this. The idea is to find players who led their league in a speed stat, a power stat and an on-base stat in the same year. A few weeks ago I did a post that combined all the posts I have done on this. See Triple Threat Triple Crowns.

There you can see all players who have accomplished this feat. One issue is who qualifies for the SB% title. How many attempts or SBs does a player need? After my first list, I found that if we change the criteria that Hank Aaron, Joe Morgan and Mike Trout had "triple threat" triple crowns. A list of the first group of players I found is at the end of the post.

These are the stats I used:

Speed (triples, SBs, SB%)

Power (SLG, ISO, HRs, TBs, extra-base hits)

Getting on base (OBP, times on base)

Recently I searched for leaders in XBT% who might qualify. XBT% is the percentage of times a runner advanced more than one base on a single or more than two bases on a double. Baseball Reference has this back to 1916. Here are the three new players I found:

Tris Speaker 1916 (led in XBT% (78%), OBP (.470), SLG (.502))

George Brett 1980 (led in XBT% (72%), OBP (.454) , SLG (.664))

Larry Walker 1997 (led in XBT% (70%), OBP (.452), SLG (.720))

Also, Ty Cobb (1917) and Chuck Klein (1932), who already had "triple threat" triple crowns, also led their leagues in XBT% in addition to their other speed stats their years.

I sorted by XBT% and then looked for the first guy listed who had at least 3.1 PAs per game (that might not be the best way to do it since that is not a measure of base running opportunities but it was easy and it does limit it to full-time players).

Here is the first group I found. Some of them did it more than once.

Honus Wagner
Ty Cobb
Rogers Hornsby
Paul Waner
Chuck Klein
Enos Slaughter
Stan Musial
Snuffy Stirnweiss
Minnie Minoso
Mickey Mantle
Jim Rice

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