Batting Triple Crown Winners in the Major Leagues

Triple Crown winners have been rare in the history of professional baseball, both in the traditional Major Leagues and in the Negro Leagues. A player wins the Triple Crown (an unofficial honor for which no actual award is given) by leading his league in three major batting categories in the same season: batting average, home runs, and runs batted in. Although more precise statistics have been developed to measure a player’s worth, leading the league in these three categories leaves no doubt about the player’s exceptional, well-rounded batting skills.

In his 1878 Triple Crown season, center fielder Paul Hines of the Providence Grays also led the National League in slugging average, OPS, and total bases. In 1879, he again led the league in batting, with a .357 average, and in total bases with 197.

Hines is credited by some sources for making the first unassisted triple play in major league baseball, in a game on May 8, 1878. There is no doubt that Hines initiated a remarkable triple play in the eighth inning of the game, but whether the play was unassisted has never been conclusively settled.

Hines compiled a lifetime .302 batting average in his 20-year professional baseball career (1872–1891). (For the first four of those years, he played in the National Association, which the MLB does not recognize as a major league.) He is one of only six Triple Crown winners who are not in the Hall of Fame, although an excellent case can be made that he should be included.

Canadian Tip O’Neill played in three major leagues over ten seasons from 1883 to 1892. In his spectacular 1887 Triple Crown season for the St. Louis Browns of the American Association, the left fielder also led the league in hits, doubles, triples, total bases, slugging average, runs, and on-base percentage.

No other player has ever led his league in all three types of extra-base hits—doubles, triples, and home runs—in a single season. But O’Neill never led the league in any of these categories again. He did win the batting title again in 1888, with an average that was 100 points lower than his 1887 average at .335.

O’Neill’s lifetime batting average is .326, good for 42nd best on the major league leaderboard. He is a member of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame but has not been elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

After five seasons with the Philadelphia Phillies in the National League, second baseman Nap Lajoie moved to the Philadelphia Athletics in the new American League in 1901 and promptly won the Triple Crown with his new team. He also led the major leagues that season in hits, doubles, slugging average, total bases, and runs scored.

In his 21-year baseball career (1896–1916), Lajoie hit over .300 in 17 seasons, including 9 seasons in which he hit better than .350, and he won four more batting titles (although the 1902 and 1910 titles were contested). When he retired after the 1916 season, his 3,243 career hits were second only to Honus Wagner among active players.

Lajoie’s .426 average when he won the Triple Crown in the American League’s first season remains an American League record, and his lifetime batting average of .338 puts him in a tie for 22nd place on the all-time major league list. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1937.

In 1909, Detroit Tigers center fielder Ty Cobb not only won the American League and major league Triple Crowns but also led the majors in hits, on-base percentage, slugging average, OPS, and total bases. He also led the American League in runs scored.

Cobb also led the majors that year with 76 stolen bases—by far the most stolen bases in a season by a Triple Crown winner. Cobb’s Tigers finished first in the American League, but they lost the World Series.

In Cobb’s 24-year Hall of Fame career (1905–1928), including 22 years with the Tigers, he won a record 11 batting titles. He hit over .400 three times (including 1922, when he lost the AL batting title to George Sisler despite hitting .401), and hit over .300 in 23 consecutive seasons.

Cobb won the American League MVP award in 1911. His .366 career batting average ranks first in baseball and is unlikely to be surpassed.

Chicago Cubs infielder Heinie Zimmerman won the 1912 National League Triple Crown with a .372 batting average, 14 home runs, and 104 runs batted in. (His Triple Crown win was disputed for many years because of possible inaccuracies in the league’s RBI totals. RBIs were not yet an official statistic.)

He also led the league that year with 207 hits, 41 doubles, a .571 slugging percentage, .989 OPS, 170 OPS+, and 318 total bases. Although the Cubs finished with an excellent 91-59 record, it was only good enough for third place in the NL.

Zimmerman’s mammoth season was his best in every one of these categories, although he did lead the league in RBIs again in 1916 and 1917. In 13 seasons with the Cubs (1907–1916) and the New York Giants (1916–1917), Zimmerman hit for a .295 average with 58 homers and 799 RBIs.

Unfortunately, Zimmerman’s career came to an ignominious end in September 1919 with accusations that he participated in fixing games. Although he was not officially banned from the game, he never played again.

Oscar Charleston has the distinction of being the only man to win a Triple Crown in three seasons and the only one to do it in two different leagues.

He won his first crown in 1921 with the St. Louis Giants of the Negro National League, hitting .433—the highest average in any league that year—with 15 home runs and 91 RBIs. He also led the league in runs scored, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage.

Charleston won his second and third Triple Crowns in 1924 and 1925 as the player-manager of the Harrisburg Giants in the Eastern Colored League. In 1924, he hit .405 with 15 homers and 63 RBIs. He bettered each of those marks in 1925 with a .427 batting average, 20 home runs, and 97 runs batted in. As in 1921, he again led his league in runs scored, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage. He also led the league in total bases in both years.

Charleston played for seven different teams in five different Negro Leagues in the course of his 18-year playing career. He was primarily a center fielder in the 1920s, switching to first base in the 1930s as he got older. He played in three Negro National League II East-West All-Star games (1933–1935). In 1935, as the Pittsburgh Crawfords’ player-manager, he hit .308 with three home runs and five RBIs in the Championship Series against the New York Cubans to power the Crawfords to the pennant.

Charleston’s lifetime batting average of .365 puts him in second place behind Ty Cobb. His career home run and RBI totals are 143 and 853, respectively. He was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1976.

St. Louis Cardinals second baseman Rogers Hornsby is the only player to win the National League Triple Crown twice. In 1922, he also led the majors in hits, runs scored, slugging, and total bases.

As the Cardinals’ player-manager in 1925, Hornsby won the major league Triple Crown and the National League MVP award. The following year, he led the Cardinals to the World Series Championship. In 1929,  he hit .380 with 39 home runs and 149 runs batted in for the Chicago Cubs and was again named MVP.

In Hornsby’s 23-year Hall of Fame career (1915–1937), he won seven National League batting titles, including six consecutive crowns from 1920 to 1925. Among his many other league-leading performances, he led the league in on-base percentage nine times and in OPS+ (on-base percentage plus slugging, adjusted to the player’s ballpark) 12 times. His lifetime .358 batting average is third-best in baseball history. behind Ty Cobb and Oscar Charleston.

Outfield Oscar “Heavy” Johnson of the Kansas City Monarchs had career highs in just about every offensive category when he won the Negro National League Triple Crown in 1923. His .406 batting average duplicated his average of the previous year, when he also won the batting title. But he almost doubled his home run and RBI totals with 20 (tied with Candy Jim Taylor) and 120, respectively. He also led the league in hits, runs, doubles, slugging percentage, and total bases.

Johnson spent three years with the Monarchs (1922–1924), helping them to first-place finishes in each of those seasons. In 1924, they won the first Negro World Series, beating the Hilldale Club of the Eastern Colored League in nine games. Johnson hit .296 in the series with two doubles and two RBIs.

Johnson’s professional career was relatively short, with the bulk of his playing time coming in the eight seasons from 1922 to 1928. Although he played in a handful of professional games in 1920, he spent most of his early years in the military, and he was 27 years old when he debuted with the Monarchs in 1922. He again played a few games in 1930–1932.

Johnson retired with a career batting average of .370, along with 57 home runs and 424 runs batted in. (He did not have enough plate appearance to qualify for Baseball-Reference’s list of career batting average leaders.) He has not been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

In 1926, St. Louis Stars first baseman/outfielder Mule Suttles won the Negro National League Triple Crown with a .425 batting average, 32 home runs, and 130 runs batted in. His 32 home runs are the single-season record for home runs by a Negro Leagues player against Negro Leagues opponents.

In addition to winning the Triple Crown, Suttles led the NNL with 152 hits, 19 triples, a .472 on-base percentage, and 314 total bases. His batting average, slugging percentage, OPS, and OPS+ were tops among all Major League players.

Suttles had an outstanding 21-year career from 1924 to 1944. He won a second batting title in 1928 and was a five-time All-Star, three times as a member of the Chicago American Giants (1933–1935) and twice more with the Newark Eagles (1937, 1939). In four postseason series, he hit .309 with 5 home runs and 19 RBIs.

Suttles’s lifetime batting average of .339 puts him 21st on the Major League career leaderboard. He had 180 career home runs and 883 RBIs. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006.

Shortstop Willie Wells of the  St. Louis Stars won the 1930 Negro National League Triple Crown with a .411 batting average—tops in the Major Leagues—17 home runs, and 114 runs batted in. His batting average was 2 points better than his teammate Mule Suttles’s average that year. Wells also led the league in runs, hits, doubles, total bases, and stolen bases.

The Stars, featuring three future Hall of Famers in Wells, Suttles, and Cool Papa Bell, finished first in the NNL. They then beat the Detroit Stars in the NNL Championship Series, 4 games to 3. Wells led all regular players on both teams with a .419 average in the series.

Wells played in the Negro Leagues for 21 seasons (1924–39, 1942, 1945–48) and was a 10-time All-Star. He compiled a career .330 batting average (37th all-time) with 140 home runs and 873 RBIs. In addition to his prowess with the bat, he was an excellent fielder, leading his league eight times in fielding percentage.

Wells is the only shortstop to win the Triple Crown. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1997.

In 1933, both the American League and the National League had Triple Crown winners, and both were in Philadelphia. In 1932, Athletics first baseman Jimmie Foxx had narrowly missed the American League Triple Crown, finishing second with a .364 batting average while leading the league with 58 home runs and 169 RBI and winning the MVP award.

But in 1933, Foxx won the Triple Crown, leading the league with a .356 batting average and leading the majors in home runs, RBIs, and total bases. He was again named American League MVP and was selected for the first-ever Major League All-Star Game.

In his 20-year career, Foxx was selected to nine consecutive American League All-Star teams and won a total of three MVP awards. He compiled a .325 lifetime batting average, hit 534 home runs, and drove in 1,922 runs. When he retired in 1945, his 534 career home runs ranked second to Babe Ruth’s lifetime total.  Foxx was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1951.

Chuck Klein, right fielder for the Philadelphia Phillies, won the National League Triple Crown in 1933. His .368 batting average was tops in the majors, as were his 223 hits, and he also led the National League in doubles, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and total bases.

Klein won the National League MVP Award in 1932, when he led the league in multiple offensive categories, including home runs, but finished second in RBIs and third in batting average. 

Klein was a two-time All-Star (1933 and 1934). He retired after 17 seasons with a .320 career batting average and 300 home runs. He was elected to the Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee in 1980.

The American League had a Triple Crown winner for the second consecutive year in 1934. Lou Gehrig, the Yankees’ first baseman, won not only the AL but also the major league Triple Crown, while also leading the majors in home run percentage, slugging percentage, and total bases.

Gehrig played 17 seasons with the Yankees until his career was cut short by illness early in 1939. He put together a streak of 2,130 consecutive games played (June 2, 1925, to April 30, 1939), earning him the nickname “The Iron Horse,” and hit over .300 for 12 seasons in a row. He won three American League home run titles and five RBI titles.

His lifetime totals include a .340 batting average, 493 home runs, and 1995 RBIs. He was a two-time MVP and a seven-time All-Star and was elected to the Hall of Fame in a special election in 1939, the year he retired.

Catcher Josh Gibson became the third player to earn more than one Triple Crown when he won the award in the Second Negro National League in both 1936 and 1937.

Interestingly, he accomplished the feat for two different teams in those two consecutive seasons, hitting .389 with 18 home runs and 66 RBIs for the Pittsburgh Crawfords in 1936 and topping each of those totals the next year with a .417 average, 20 homers, and 73 RBIs as a member of the Homestead Grays. His batting average in both seasons was tops in the Major Leagues.

Gibson won three batting titles, ten home run crowns, and seven RBI titles in his 14-year career. Besides winning the Triple Crown twice, he came close in at least three other seasons, finishing first in two categories and second in the other. In 1933, his rookie season, he hit .395 but lost the batting title to Jabbo Andrews by three points. In 1939, his 46 RBIs were two short of Buck Leonard’s 48. And in 1943, he lost out on the Triple Crown despite hitting .466, five points lower than Tetelo Vargas’s league-leading .471.

Gibson was selected to 12 All-Star games. He finished his career with a .373 lifetime batting average, 166 home runs, and 733 runs batted in. He is considered one of the best hitters in the Negro Leagues as well as the best catcher. Were it not for baseball’s segregation, he could have been a top player in the traditional Major Leagues. Gibson was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972.

Boston Red Sox left fielder Ted Williams won the American League Triple Crown in both 1942 and 1947. In his 1942 season, he not only won the Triple Crown but also led the majors in runs scored, bases on balls, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and total bases. When he won his second crown in 1947, he again posted the best stats in the AL in the same categories. He was the first, and to date, the only American Leaguer to win the Triple Crown twice.

Williams was formerly credited with a Major League Triple Crown for 1942, but after the Negro League statistics were added to the official Major League records, both Ted Strong and Bonnie Serrell of the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro American League topped Williams in batting average. (In both cases, they had significantly fewer plate appearances.)

One of the best hitters in baseball history, Williams had a remarkable 19-year career with the Red Sox despite missing almost five complete seasons in his prime while serving as a Navy pilot in World War II (1943–1945) and the Korean War (1952–1953).

He hit well over .300 in all but one season in his career and won six American League batting titles. His .406 batting average in 1941 marks the last time to date that an American League player has hit over .400 in a full season. (Several Negro League players accomplished the feat in the next several years.)

Williams’s lifetime stats include a .344 batting average, 1,839 RBIs, and 521 home runs. A seventeen-time All-Star and two-time MVP, Williams was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1966.

He was an All-Star for six seasons in each league. His lifetime stats include 586 home runs, 1,812 RBIs, and a .294 batting average. Robinson was the first African-American player to win the Triple Crown in a league other than one of the Negro Leagues, and he became the first African-American manager in Major League Baseball with the Cleveland Indians in 1975. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1982.

Winning the Triple Crown is a special achievement because it requires excellence in three aspects of hitting: consistency (batting average), power (home runs), and timely hitting (runs batted in). It is difficult for a hitter to excel in all three categories, and especially to lead the league in them all in the same year.

Miguel Cabrera’s achievement in 2012 was all the more historic and exciting because so many years had gone by since the previous Triple Crown. Between Carl Yastrzemski’s American League Triple Crown in 1967 and Cabrera’s AL crown in 2012, 44 seasons passed without a batting Triple Crown winner in any Major League. The last National League winner was Joe Medwick, way back in 1937. What’s more, besides these 22 players, only a handful of others have even come close.

Is there a current player or a future star who will join the ranks of batting Triple Crown winners? Each season brings new candidates, but since Cabrera, no one has yet to break through.

In any case, this remains one of the most exclusive and elite clubs in Major League Baseball.