Intro

When a player leads the league in a statistic, they have burned bold that season’s number. 13 sacrifice hits for Francisco Lindor in his rookie season, followed by 15 sacrifice flies the year after. Chase Headley leading the NL with 115 RBI in 2012. With the mark tallied in bold, it thus happened, with everything else being undone, blackwhite, though, we like our more telling figures like OPS, HRs or Batting Average.

There likely exists a huge deal of mistrust towards my statement or promotion of league leading being a criteria of analysis. Who’s we? Everything else undone? Sacrafice flies? And the optional utter dismisal of RBIs. Such are appropriate responses from a well-tuned reader and obervant of the Baseball PabstTime, or oldthink---likely still too possessed by knowledge acquired from study and participation in that world, lost like a passed thyme. They’d continue, that who leads a league is potentially arbitrary and while it should be taken in context, whether a player “lead the league” isn’t as important as what their actual numbers were. An agreement exists between this writer and every opinion that could exist; though, practitioners of the PabstTime would commend a player that outpaces the league by a wide margin over somebody who barely scapes ahead, and in such exists our un-friending. A plusungood indeed. We can agree that no one would ever think like that.

In elaboration’s fabrication, true stardom is not evidenced by the heights achieved by fuzzy numbers, but instead their adherance with those that any unit could produce. And it is here, at the 3rd paragraph, as is customary, that the outline of this journalism newsblast is struck.


Therefore, in what year was such a muted stardom of the palest fire achieved? When did Major League Baseball’s OPS and OPS+ leaders record the lowest totals in history?

Surely it was sometime like 1968, when the humans pitched from such high acid-mounds, so as to stymy hitters---or in the deaball era, when wars were fought on the very field of play? Instead, the solution to my ill-fated question lies in the 1980s, before the Homerun escalation of the 90s stood as pre-proof to the overwhelming empowerment unlocked through our century of mass-televised free choice.

1984 was the year - (Hover)


  • OPS
  • OPS+
  • WAR