Repetitive Player Batting Lines

Back in the day, the newspaper boxscore listed each batter and their position, along with four main offensive stats: at-bats, runs, hits and runs batted in. You’d peruse the paper to see that your player went 4-0-0-0, and pretty assuredly know it wasn’t his best day.

Now the Internet has allowed the boxscore to become so much more detailed. However, we here at the VORG are still interested in those “old style” individual batting lines. But we want the “repetitive” ones. Those are the ones that feature at least three columns with the same total. Furthermore, we want to know the highest total in the column that doesn’t match the other three. In other words, we’re looking for batting lines in the form of X-X-X-Y, X-X-Y-X, X-Y-X-X or Y-X-X-X, with the highest Y possible.

So, with the Baseball Reference Play Index warmed up, we went searching for the those batting lines. We’re presenting them in order of highest RBI first, then highest hits, runs and at-bats. Of course, its impossible for a player to have more hits than at-bats, so don’t go looking for that. There has also never been a game in which a player has had at least seven in three different categories, so we’ll end there. Here then are the results: