TODAY’S SPORTSTAT– Altuve already ranks among the all-time greats
By JERRY TAPP
Houston’s Jose Altuve leads the American League (and all of baseball) with a .345 batting average. Should the Astros’ second baseman finish atop the A.L. batting leaders at the end of this season it would be his third consecutive batting crown and his fourth in five years.
Altuve, with three batting title already, is among some pretty elite company. He is one of only 20 players to win three or more league batting titles. If he gets his fourth, he would become the 12th player to do so.
Following are the players who have won three or more league batting titles (includes from 1901 to current season).
12: Ty Cobb
8: Tony Gwynn, Honus Wagner
7: Rod Carew, Rogers Hornsby, Stan Musial
6: Ted Williams
5: Wade Boggs
4: Miguel Cabrera, Roberto Clemente, Harry Heilmann, Bill Madlock
3: Jose Altuve, George Brett, Nap Lajoie, Joe Mauer, Tony Oliva, Pete Rose, Larry Walker, Carl Yastrzemski
Altuve could also become the ninth player in MLB history to win three straight batting titles. Both Tony Gwynn and Ty Cobb won three of more batting crowns twice in their careers.
Here are the eight players who won three or more consecutive batting titles.
Wade Boggs: 1985-88
Miguel Cabrera: 2011-13
Rod Carew: 1972-75
Ty Cobb: 1907-15 and 1917-19
Tony Gwynn: 1987-89 and 1994-97
Rogers Hornsby: 1920-25
Stan Musial: 1950-52
Honus Wagner: 1906-09
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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.