Table of Content
Albert Pujols batted .326 with 469 home runs in 12 seasons as a Cardinal. As of end of 2022 seasonBold denotes still active with the team. There’s nothing quite like watching a player arrive at the exact same number in consecutive years while doing so in completely different ways.
St. Louis hasn’t won a game in the NL Championship Series since 2014, and fans have grown weary after seeing the franchise lose nine of its last 10 playoff games. When he arrived in 2000, Edmonds hit 42 home runs and followed that up with another 30 in 2001. After hitting 39 in 2003, he came back and tied his single-season career-high mark with 42 in 2004. Stan Musial never led the league in home runs during his 22-year MLB career.
Team Yearly Batting Stats
The 1922 season was the most powerful of Hornsby’s career, as it included a league-leading 42 home runs. His 152 RBI were the most in baseball, giving him his first Triple Crown (he’d win it again in 1925). He also led the league in doubles , runs scored , and hits . It was the first time he finished with a batting average higher than .400 (he checked in at .401). Notable players have defined, in part, the Cardinals' success and history.
He paced the league in runs scored five times, total hits six times, doubles eight times, triples five times, and RBI twice. A career .331 hitter, Musial also won seven Batting Titles and three MVP Awards. But when specifically looking at his home run production, the sweet-swinging left-handed hitter slugged at least 10 homers every season of his career, except once. That’d be his rookie season, when he hit just one in 12 games played during the 1941 campaign.
Data Notes
Johnny Mize won the 1939 batting title and hit .336 with a .600 slugging percentage as a Cardinal. Tip O'Neill won the first batting Triple Crown in franchise history in 1887. Play-by-play data prior to 2002 was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet.
1,397 is followed within this ranking by Albert Pujols with a total of 1,397 RBI. Of course, Pujols began his career in 2001, which is when Barry Bonds began his streak of winning four straight NL MVP Awards. In 2003, Pujols finished second behind Bonds, while he finished third behind Bonds and Adrian Beltre in 2004. Some tough luck for sure, but the first baseman certainly hasn’t had any issues when it comes to making his own mark on the game. With his final regular season campaign coming to a close Wednesday, Pujols ends up with 703 home runs in the record books, the fourth-most in MLB history. Many historical player head shots courtesy of David Davis.
Team records
However, The Machine is heavily featured on the franchise’s single-season home run leaderboard. We’ve spilled a lot of digital ink on Pujols throughout this website. It makes sense when you’ve hit the fifth-most home runs in MLB history. But still, it’s hard to fathom the production he put together between 2003 and 2004.
That wasn’t the only time Boyer had repeatable homer production, either. Between 1961 and 1964, the right-handed hitter slugged exactly 24 homers in each campaign. The separation between Musial, Pujols, and the rest of Cardinals hitters on the career home run leaderboard is large. That’s probably the understatement of the century, as nearly 200 home runs separate Pujols from Ken Boyer, who is sitting in third place.
More Cardinals Pages
From one look at his Baseball-Reference stat page, the majority of his individual accomplishments came in St. Louis. He never finished a year with fewer than 10 homers and surpassed 20 on eight different occasions. Musial took home one of his three MVPs within this stretch, and he finished within the top-10 of voting in each of these 10 seasons. Six of those times, he finished in the top five. We’ll detail the Cardinals’ top five before listing out which players make up the top 20. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
He did hit an overwhelming number of his dingers on the road, though . In 1998, the majority of his home runs came at home , and the split between his first-half and second-half performances was much more lopsided. He hit at least six homers four different times. This included hitting exactly six dingers in April, May, and September, while hitting seven in June.
For years, St. Louis has operated like a small-market team with its big-market bullying combined with lofty expectations . This offseason, however, the Cardinals haven't closed the significant financial gap on the teams that continue to knock them out of the playoffs. Have the Cardinals done enough this offseason to avoid suffering a similar fate in October?
Jim Edmonds began his career with the Angels and didn’t land in St. Louis until his age-30 season. From the standpoint of offense, though, he saved his best work for the Cardinals. Boyer spent 11 of his 15 years with the Redbirds.
Out of all the Cardinals hitters within this top five, Ray Lankford is probably the most surprising to me. Now we get to appreciate just how good he was over the span of his 14-year MLB career. Staying within the theme of consistency, Edmonds had his own way of producing repeatable power numbers. He slugged 30-plus homers in consecutive seasons on two different occasions. In each of these sequences, the outfielder slugged 42 dingers in one year before dipping below 40 for the second season.
Stan Musial owns the most career batting records with 22. Rogers Hornsby owns the most single-season records with 11. Bob Gibson owns the most career pitching records with 18. Silver King owns the most single-season pitching records with nine. Musial is followed within this ranking by Lou Brock with a total of 1,427 runs.
As you’ll see below, the hitters in first and second place each have slugged 400-plus home runs during their respective tenures in St. Louis. Nobody has hit more than 260 homers while playing for the Cardinals yet. Pujols slugged 24 home runs this season, his personal-best since 2017. His season total ranked in the Top 50 among MLB hitters. It was also larger than the home run leader on eight teams this season.
In “late and close” situations, his OPS was .939, but it was above 1.000 in all others. This includes with two outs and runners in scoring position, a tie game, and if the score was within four runs. It also didn’t matter if St. Louis was ahead (1.022 OPS) or behind (.995 OPS), Mize was just as productive at the plate.
No comments:
Post a Comment