TODAY’S SPORTSTAT-Yankees’ Stanton, Judge look to join elite home run group
By JERRY TAPP
Last baseball season, Miami Marlins’ Giancarlo Stanton and New York Yankees’ Aaron Judge each hit more than 50 home runs … Stanton had 59; Judge had 52. (These two are now teammates with Stanton’s trade to the Yankees in the off-season.) It was the first time since the 2007 season that two players hit 50 in a season; that year Alex Rodriguez had 54 and Milwaukee’s Prince Fielder had 50.
Stanton and Judge became the 44th and 45th players to hit 50 in a season. Of the 45 times it has happened in MLB history, there have been 29 different players who have reached the 50-HR milestone. Here are the nine players who have hit 50 or more home runs in multiple seasons:
4: Mark McGwire, Babe Ruth, Sammy Sosa
3: Alex Rodriguez
2: Jimmie Foxx, Ken Griffey, Jr., Ralph Kiner, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays.
Stanton and Judge will look to become only the sixth and seventh players to hit 50 HRs in consecutive seasons. The five players who have consecutive seasons with 50 homers: Rodriguez (2001 and 2002), Ruth (1920 and 1921, also 1927 and 1928), Griffey (1997 and 1998), McGwire (1996, 1997, 1998 and 1999) and Sosa (1998, 1999, 2000, 2001).
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Jerry Tapp
Jerry Tapp is a freelance writer from Racine, WI with a major concentration on sports statistics and numbers that define sports teams and players. He began his foray into sports stats-focused writing as a regular contributor to the “Numbers” column in Inside Sports magazine in the mid-1980’s and then began writing a weekly “Stats on Tapp” column for the Racine Journal Times. That column was eventually nationally syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate. He later wrote sports stats items for the Washington Post under the “Stat of the Day” heading. After launching his blog, www.statsontapp.com in 2011, Jerry turned his sports stats attention to sports websites. He wrote regularly for Bleacher Report, BallHyped, football.com and Heavy.com. Today he keeps busy writing weekly columns of stats-centric articles for three sports websites, Today’s Pigskin (NFL), Today’s Knuckleball (MLB) and Today’s Fastbreak (NBA), and as a monthly contributor to the Milwaukee Brewers “GameDay” publication that is distributed to fans attending games at Miller Park.