Sports history: Players who led the league in batting average and RBI but not homers in the same season, Hart runner-up Ray Bourque, the "valuable" in MVP, "fat and lazy" Charles Barkley

Monday 3/23/26

I'm intrigued by players who have led the league in runs batted in and batting average in the same season but not home runs. It's an unlikely feat and has happened rarely throughout the game's history. I've been thinking of players who did it off the top of my head. Stan Musial, Rogers Hornsby, Ty Cobb did it a bunch, Cap Anson, Todd Helton, Jimmie Foxx, Nap Lajoie, Honus Wagner, Tommy Davis.

There are probably others. Don Mattingly is guy who would seem like a likely candidate, but he didn't do it. Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, and Albert Pujols are others who didn't. Manny Ramirez, Kirby Puckett, and Larry Walker could have done it but didn't.

Tommy Davis is the least familiar name here to baseball fans with an interest in the sport's history (a bunch of these names, if not most of them, will be unfamiliar to the vast majority of people who watch baseball primarily so that they can do the parasocial thing and also post about it on Reddit), but if you're unacquainted with the monster of a year he had in 1962, look it up. Crazy, right?

How much differently would Ray Bourque be looked at if he'd won the Hart trophy as the NHL's MVP in 1989-90? He lost to Mark Messier by the narrowest of margins. In my view, Bourque is the second best defenseman in league history, but the defenseman with the most career value, as I wrote about for Sports Illustrated.

Okay, he's locked in where he's at and it isn't as if he'd be undermining Bobby Orr's position as hockey's best d-man with this glitzy hardware, but it would have been neat and added something. That era was thick with major stars at or near their primes. It's not as if you can have a problem with Messier landing the trophy either, though. The Moose was on a mission that season and he completed it.

I liked when the MVP award in all the sports leaned into the actual definition of that second word valuable, which doesn't necessarily mean the best player as well. As I've written in these pages, Kirk Gibson in 1988 and especially Willie Stargell in 1979 are among the most deserving MVP winners in baseball history, when just about everyone else says the opposite. But what everyone else is doing is going by WAR and advanced metrics, whereas I'm going by that word "valuable," as in, who meant the most to their team.

Gibson caused the attitude of that Dodgers team to do a 180, and for all the people who say that Darryl Strawberry should have won the NL MVP that year, Gibson's WAR was higher, too, so take that! Stargell was the heart and soul of a team that played as if they were a family, as the song they adopted as their personal anthem attested.

Michael Jordan complained about not winning the MVP in 1992-93, but Charles Barkley was the most valuable player. Barkley himself said he was better that year, which itself misses the point, but whatever (and he wasn't better).

Speaking of Barkley: It's interesting to hear him talk about Moses Malone and note the gratitude that he plainly has in his voice. Barkley wasn't a star when he first got into the league with the 76ers, a team that had recently been a wagon of a squad and was still pretty good. Barkley asked Malone--who numbers among the most underrated inner circle Hall of Famers in NBA history; this guy was a titan up there with nearly anyone--why he was struggling, and Malone point blank told him he was fat and lazy.

I liked when people were more inclined to be honest with each other. It's like we never tell anyone what they are anymore. These millions of pretend writers should be told, yeah, sorry, you are not good at this, do something else, unless you just want to do this for fun in your private time. But what happens instead? We lie, either so that people will lie back to us, or because we're cowards, or both. It's usually both.

You're not doing anyone any favors when you act and speak like this. Moses Malone did Charles Barkley a favor. Barkley was so good that he dominated in college at a weight that wouldn't allow him to be a dominant player in the NBA. He needed to drop fifty pounds, and Moses Malone--that's three-time MVP Moses Malone personally worked with Barkley for as long as it took until the fifty pounds were shed.

You know who has the most offensive rebounds per game in NBA history? That would be Moses Malone, though Barkley wasn't exactly a slouch in that area. People talk about "comparables" so often--and most publishing people rely on it so that they don't have to be open to anything new--that it's as if they can't allow anything to be its own thing and thus miss out on the wonderful things that are, but Barkley didn't have any of these. No one was like him. No one could do the things he did at his height.

It's weird to think that Moses Malone played into the mid-1990s. Like, he was active when Oasis' Definitely Maybe came out. Great big men tended to have long careers back then. They were just so valuable even when they couldn't score like they used to. Wilt Chamberlain became a defensive master for the Lakers, and look how long Robert Parish played for.

Moses Malone and Julius Irving on the same team and both near their best was pretty cool. Bird and Magic had in effect rescued the league, but there were these other high wattage stars and teams in the early 1980s in the lead-up to the Michael Jordan years.

To bring this full circle: Tommy Davis had 230 hits in 1962, 27 homers, 153 (!) RBI, and a .346 batting average, in case you were too lazy to look it up. Not only didn't that win him the MVP, he wasn't even the runner-up! That was some guy named Willie Mays (Davis's teammate Maury Wills won the MVP that year, and I don't object to that, if we're going to make use of that word "valuable"). But yeah, don't be lazy. Doesn't do you any favors.