TODAY’S SPORTSTAT — Brewers Braun joins elite group
By JERRY TAPP
With a three-run pinch-hit home run on April 19, Ryan Braun collected his 1,000th career RBI. He became the first Milwaukee Brewers player to collect 300 HRs and 1,000 RBIs with the team and the 138th player in baseball history to reach those numbers in his career.
Of the 138 players with 300 home runs and 1,000 RBIs in their careers, Braun is also currently one of only 21 players who amassed those numbers with only one team for their entire career. Whether or not that remains the case for Braun as he winds down his career in the next few years, for the time being, he is among this select group.
The 21 players who had/have 300 home runs and 1,000 RBI in their careers, all with only one team in their entire career are:
Ryan Braun (Milwaukee), Ryan Howard (Philadelphia), Edgar Martinez (Seattle), Johnny Bench (Cincinnati), Todd Helton (Colorado), Jim Rice (Boston), Mickey Mantle (New York Yankees), Jeff Bagwell (Houston), Joe DiMaggio (New York Yankees), Willie Stargell (Pittsburgh), Al Kaline (Detroit), Mike Schmidt (Philadelphia), George Brett (Kansas City), Chipper Jones (Atlanta), Ernie Banks (Chicago Cubs), Cal Ripken (Baltimore), Ted Williams (Boston), Carl Yastrzemski (Boston), Mel Ott (New York Giants), Stan Musial (St. Louis), Lou Gehrig (New York Yankees).
As you might expect, the New York Yankees are the franchise with the most players who reached 300 home runs and 1,000 with their team. The Milwaukee/Atlanta Braves and the Boston Red Sox franchises have had five players each who reached 300 HRs and 1,000 ribbies in their tenure with those teams.
Following are the number of players each of the 30 franchises have had reach 300 HRs and 1,000 RBIs.
6: Yankees
5: Braves, Red Sox
4: Cubs, Giants, Tigers
3: Orioles
2: Astros, Cardinals, Dodgers, Mariners, Phillies, Rangers, Reds, White Sox
1: A’s, Blue Jays, Brewers, Pirates, Rockies, Royals, Twins
0: Angels, Diamondbacks, Indians, Marlins, Mets, Nationals, Padres, Rays
One final note on Braun: As of games through April 20, 2018, Braun has career numbers of 307 home runs, 1,002 runs batted in, and a .301 batting average. He is currently one of only 28 players in baseball history to have 300 career HRs, 1,000 career RBIs and a career batting average of .300 or higher.
Follow Jerry on Twitter @StatsonTapp
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.