I don't watch horse racing much, but I did tune in to see Big Brown fall short of his attempt to win the first Triple Crown since Affirmed in 1978, just as I watched Street Sense, Smarty Jones and Funny Cide do the same. It was history in the making. But baseball hasn't had a Triple Crown winner since 1967, when Carl Yastrzemski in 1967, the year after Frank Robinson did the trick. There have been eleven horses to win the Derby, Preakness and Belmont since 1919, an impressive feat, as these are races of three different lengths in a five-week period, and the distances are typically more than the horse has ever run.
Since 1878, baseball has seen 14 batters win 16 Triple Crowns, an unofficial award given to the hitter who leads the leagues in average, homers, and RBIs. This is an accomplishment spanning an entire six-month season, covering one ratio and two counting statistics, meaning the player must be both consistent and durable. For whatever reason--perhaps a greater parity in talent among players--we're currently in the greatest drought of TC winners ever, our forty years easily beating the previous ten-year gap between Mickey Mantle in 1956 and Frank Robinson in 1966.
The thirties, on the other hand, were the heyday for triple-threat batters, with four TC winners as well as the only year (1933) in which there were Triple Crown winners in both leagues (Jimmie "Double X" Foxx and Chuck "The Rifleman" Klein). No other decade has had more than two. Frank Robinson's .316 is the lowest average that won it, while winner Paul Hines' measly 4 HR, 50 RBI totals in 1878 speaks volumes about how much the game has changed.
One question that contemporary sports fans might ask is whether this accomplishment matters: home runs are certainly lauded in today's game, but batting average has fallen somewhat out of favor in recent times (with on-base percentage considered a more reliable measure of a batter's ability and eye), and RBIs are as much about the team around you as your own performance--without guys on base to knock in, RBIs just aren't going to be there.
Peering a little farther into the Triple Crown numbers, however, will show that these guys are no slouches, even by modern standards. Each TC winner since Hines has had a .400 on-base percentage or better (and he played before walks became standardized as four pitches outside the strike zone that didn't count as either an out, a hit, or an at-bat), with Hugh Duffy's 1894 .440 leading the way. Except for Ty Cobb's 1909 season, every other hitter has had a slugging percentage of .600 or better, meaning all of the TC winners have reached the difficult plateau of .300/.400/.500, and all but Cobb have reached .300/.400/.600, a mark of greatness in combined hitting and slugging. By any standard, these players have all had excellent years behind the plate.
Perhaps a more surprising trend is the fate of the TC winner's teams. Of the 16 winners, only five have played for pennant winners, and three of those were the most recent winners (Yaz, Robinson and Mantle). Rogers Hornsby's two crowns in the twenties ('22 and '25) were both for fourth-place Cardinals teams. Here, too, we see that one player having an exceptional year can't carry a team in baseball the way he can in, say, basketball.
And it should tell us something about this year's Triple Crown contenders. Chipper Jones has a shot because of his .400-plus batting average (currently at .420), but his 15 HRs and 41 RBIs are trailing the leaders in those categories (21 HRs by Utley and 56 RBIs by Utley and Adrian Gonzalez). That average is going to be hard to reach, but Chipper's tendency towards injuries large and small mean he will likely continue to trail in the counting stats.
A better NL candidate is Lance Berkman, whose .374, 17 HRs and 48 RBI are making a strong case, although those fifty points of batting average look like a long ways to reach, even if it is only June. He'd be the only switch-hitter other than the Mick to win, too, another interesting Triple fact. Berkman, like Chipper, is prone to nagging injuries of late, so it's possible that he might not make it, either.
Josh Hamilton of the Rangers got all the talk going with his strong start to the season, when he shot out of the gate with a .330 average with 6 homers and 32 RBIs. He continued to hit for power, and currently leads the league in homers and RBIs, but his batting average has tapered off to a relatively tepid .315. Even his 17 homers are barely outpacing Carlos Quentin. Hamilton is currently complaining about a virus, so it's possible his decrease in production may be temporary, or it may be a case of statistics reverting to the norms.
One thing Hamilton has shown us last year, with his incredible comeback from personal and substance abuse problems, is that he defies predictions, and he is the youngest of the bunch, meaning he might not wear down over the season the way Berkman and Chipper might.
Stil, history tells us that (1) any of them winning the Triple Crown wouldn't bode well for their team's chances at a pennant, and (2) as strongly as these have all started, they're likely to go the way of Big Brown. That equine favorite was pulled up short by his jockey, who felt he was either injured or just didn't have the giddyap to place and didn't want to injure him. None of these guys is going to finish last in these categories--as BB did at Belmont--but they may find their seasons cut short by injury.
No matter what happens, we're not likely to see a Triple Crown in either horse racing or baseball anytime soon. But if I had to put money on it, I'd bet on a horse winning those three hallowed races before a hitter sweeping all three categories in today's major leagues.
