Well, I've been pursuing my researches, in case you want to descend into the rabbit hole with me. Campanella's 1953 season has more rivals than just Yogi Berra in 1950. I think I suffer a bit from the tendency to idealize a golden past when giants bestrode the earth.
How about Johnny Bench, whose rookie card I still own? As a 22-year-old in 1970, he batted .293 with 45 homers, 35 doubles, 148 RBI, 97 runs scored, and an OPS of .932. His career stats are a testament, perhaps, to the toll associated with catching every day, for his production tailed off in the years when players tend to be in their primes—the season he was 29 (1977), for example, Bench drove in 107 runs, but after that his biggest RBI year was 80.
At least I knew enough to suspect that Bench might have had years to rival the best of Campanella and Berra. To google Mike Piazza, I first had to google "hall of fame catchers" and then methodically check them out one-by-one. Maybe it's because, being a Twins fan, I know more about American Leaguers of the past 50 years; or maybe my self-diagnosis about romanticizing the more distant past explains it; but Piazza!—consider, say, his 1997 season for the Dodgers: batting average of .362 [sic], 40 home runs, 32 doubles, 124 RBI, 104 runs scored, and an OPS of 1.070. And that was not his only monster year. For offensive production over a 10-year period, Piazza is Berra's equal. Exhibit A in the brief for Piazza might be that four times his OPS exceeded 1.000, and the last time he did it was 8 seasons after the first time he did it. Or try this: from 1993 through 2002—that's 10 big league seasons—Piazza's average OPS was .969. He was selected by the Dodgers in the 62nd [sic] round of the 1988 draft.
Retreating into the dim past, it's easy to account for the tendency to overlook Bill Dickey (pictured). He played his entire career—from 1928 through 1946, not including 1944 and 1945, when he was in the service—with the Yankees, a circumstance resulting in a predictably low profile as he was never without either Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, or Joe DiMaggio as a teammate. (For his first seven seasons, both Ruth and Gehrig were his teammates.) But Dickey, in the 1936 season, hit for a .362 average, with 22 homers, 107 RBI, 99 runs scored, and an OPS of 1.045. He followed that up in 1937 by hitting a mere .332, but with 29 homers, 133 RBI, 87 runs scored, and an OPS of .987.
Interesting sidebar. Dickey played himself in the movie Pride of the Yankees, about Lou Gehrig, and later had a part in The Stratton Story, a 1949 movie. The script for Stratton Story called for him to take strike three, which he could not abide, and the result was a tedious sequence of retakes. When the ordeal was ended, Dickey said he had struck out more times that morning than in his entire career—a quip that caused me to notice that, over his 17 seasons in the majors, he struck out a total of 289 times: an average of exactly 17 per season. Since he had some part-time years at the start and end of his career, it might be a fairer representation to divide career plate appearances (7065) by career strikeouts (289), which yields the result that he struck out about 1 time out of every 25 that he came to bat. Things have changed. Five times Babe Ruth led the American League in striking out but he never whiffed 100 times in a season. The Twins' Miguel Sano struck out 90 times in the Covid-shortened 2020 season. In 2019, he struck out 159 times. Joe Mauer had a reputation for being "tough to fan," but over the course of his career he struck out 1 time out of every 7.7 plate appearances. That's more than three times as often as Dickey did.
The games would be more entertaining, and blessedly shorter, if two or three times per inning someone put the ball in play.
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