The Sosa Society (Part 1)
Introduction: What is The Sosa Society?
In 2022, his first season with the Phillies, Kyle Schwarber hit a then-career high and National League-leading 46 home runs, joining Alex Rodriguez (2001), Ken Griffey Jr. (1998), Orlando Cepeda (1961), Babe Ruth (1930, 1929), Hack Wilson and Cy Williams (1927), Ken Williams (1922), George Kelly (1921), and Cy Williams alone (1920) as the league leader in either the American or National League in a season when someone else set a record for the other league in the live ball era.
The following year, Schwarber did himself one better with 47 dingers, but Matt Olson went and hit 54 for Atlanta to lead the National League. That made Schwarber the 27th player to be a league home run king, but not lead the league in the season he set his career high.
It might have been bittersweet for Schwarber if he thought about it, which assuredly he did not. Most likely, his thought process was "gonna try to hit even more." He didn't quite do it in 2024, dipping to 38 home runs, which was good for third in a National League led by Shohei Ohtani's 54.
If Schwarber paid attention to this stuff, the 2025 season would have completed an emotional arc, as he played his way off the list of 27 league home run leaders whose best home run seasons did not lead their league, and kept that list at 27 names by putting Ohtani on it. Schwarber's 56 longballs matched what had been Wilson's National League record from 1930 until Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa shattered it in 1998, and now it's tied for 10th.
Ohtani, for his part, made a bit of baseball history with what you might call homergami, if you're familiar with scorigami and the history of unique NFL scores. Before Ohtani in 2025, no major leaguer had ever hit exactly 55 home runs, even though every number in the fifties had been reached multiple times (Giancarlo Stanton joined 1921 Ruth at 59 in 2017 to make this true, and in 2025 Cal Raleigh joined 1927 Ruth at 60, now the highest number of home runs to be hit by multiple players). Every number up to Sosa's 66 in 1998 has now been hit, so future homergami will be pretty obvious: the only higher numbers reached are 70 and 73.
The single-season home run list is one anyone can look up easily. The list of 27 players to lead a league in home runs, but have their career high for home runs in a year where they did not lead a league, is not only more complicated from a word count perspective, it's a grab bag of the past century's power bats. There are seven Hall of Famers, a couple more who aren't because of steroids, some MVP-level players, some perennial All-Stars, and a few who only made one Midsummer Classic.
Sosa, in the second of those groups, is the only player with a hat trick of 60-homer seasons, and those are three of the top six home run seasons of all time, all from 1998-2001. Yet it was 2000, when Sosa hit a "mere" 50 homers, that he led the NL for the first time (he did it again with 49 in 2002). Calling it the Sosa Society is a loving tribute to one of the most fun five-year runs in baseball history. It's also a lot less of a mouthful than "the list of 27 players to lead a league in home runs, but have their career high for home runs in a year where they did not lead a league."
As the Society's namesake, Sosa is a good reminder that as much as it's obviously great to leave the Sosa Society with a new career high that leads the league like Schwarber did, joining it is pretty special. In a case like Ohtani's, coming up one homer shy of leading the league, the new career high is at least a consolation. The reverse scenario, hitting as many home runs as you'll ever hit, then backing it up by going on to lead the league, has to be as gratifying and validating as any achievement a slugger can have.
It was this way, leading the league after having established a career high, that the Sosa Society started with two record-setting sluggers of the 1930s, Mel Ott and Wally Berger. Ott set his career high of 42 in 1929, and tied for the NL lead in 1932 and 1934 before his first solo home run title in 1936. Berger's top dinger total came in 1930 with a then-NL rookie record 38, and he led the league in 1935.
In 1937, a trade brought Berger to New York, where he was the on-deck batter when Ott hit a historic, and historically unappreciated, home run. That was a bit of a habit for Ott, and the reason we'll give him the semantic distinction of being the first member of the Sosa Society.
1. Mel Ott
On August 12, 1937, against the Bees at the Polo Grounds, Ott hit a two-run homer to right field off Guy Bush. It was Ott's 299th career home run, passing Rogers Hornsby for the most in National League history, a record Ott would hold until 1966, when Willie Mays hit his 512th home run and got a 10-minute ovation at Candlestick Park for the achievement. Ott setting the record didn't even get mentioned in the newspapers.
Well, it did eventually. But more than a month after Ott passed Hornsby, there was still an Associated Press item in The Buffalo News on September 15, which read, "Rogers Hornsby, deposed manager of the St. Louis Browns, holds the National league record for most home runs. He has hit 301."
Ott hit his 302nd home run on August 28, and by September 15, he was at his season-ending career total of 306. It wasn't until December, when the official statistics for the year were published, that it could be reported: "Ott's 31 homers gave him a National League record total of 306 for his career." Granted, this was all well away from Ruth's major league record, already set at 714 (his 708 in the American League remain a record, as A-Rod fell just short of matching him, at 696). We also can cut a ton of slack for not having baseball-reference.com in the middle of the Great Depression, but the assertion of Hornsby having held the record at 301 really shows the era's accounting liabilities. Hornsby did hit 301 home runs in his career, but the final three were in the American League, with the Browns. Hornsby had hit his final homer on opening day of that season against the White Sox, off Vern Kennedy, who would stick around the majors through 1945, the year he gave up number 503 to Ott.
By then, everyone was well aware that Ott was the National League's home run king, a title he would hold for two decades after his own two-decade career was over. Ott led or tied for the Senior Circuit lead in homers six times from 1932-42, but his top season for trots came before any of that.
Ott debuted in 1926 as a 17-year-old with the New York Giants. the only team he'd ever play for. After leading the 1928 Giants with 18 home runs, Ott blossomed into one of the top players in the majors in 1929.
Ott matched his previous career high, beat it, and reached 20 home runs, all in one doubleheader on June 22 in Philadelphia. The Giants' single-season record, which would be Ott's until Johnny Mize hit 51 in 1947, fell on July 25. Ott surpassed Hornsby's previous mark (from the Hall of Famer's one season in New York) with his 27th dinger, at Wrigley Field, but he wasn't alone. That day Phillies right fielder Chuck Klein was blasting his 30th homer of the campaign in St. Louis, where Hornsby had set the National League single-season standard in 1922.
Klein maintained his lead through August, hitting his 35th homer on the final day of the month, a three-run shot that tied the game in the ninth inning in Boston. Klein got there two days later, and got even at 39-39 two weeks after that. Back at Wrigley on September 21, Ott joined Hornsby and Cy Williams as the third player in National League history to reach 40 homers by going yard against Charlie Root, who might have thought that would be the most historic home run he'd ever surrender. Babe Ruth would prove that wrong in the World Series three years later with the Called Shot (regardless of whether Ruth actually did call it).
On September 24, Ott homered in both games of a doubleheader against Boston, catching Hornsby to match the National League record at 42. The next day, Klein broke a two-week home run drought by also pounding out homers in each game of a twin bill, and two days after that tied Ott for the league lead and made it a three-way tie for the record. Hornsby stayed close in a bid to keep the record himself, but his 39th homer of the season, on September 29, was the last of the legend's final prime season.
Homers having gone dry and weather having gone wet, Ott and the Giants visited Philadelphia for a Saturday doubleheader on October 5, the first action for either team since the previous Sunday. The opener not only featured Klein setting the new National League record with his 43rd home run in the Phillies' 5-4 victory, Philadelphia fans also delighted in seeing Lefty O'Doul break another Hornsby mark by collecting his 251st hit.
The second game, won 12-3 by the Giants, included Ott setting a record of his own, but not the one he wanted. The Phillies, setting their own new benchmark in the field of hateration, made Ott the youngest player in major league history to receive five walks in a game. That record had belonged to Tris Speaker, who was 24 years old and the best player in the American League in 1912. Nobody since has even come within two years of Ott's record of 20 years, 217 days, the closest being Joe Morgan in a 12-inning game for the 1966 Astros, at 22 years, 256 days.
It's not an unbreakable record, but the only player who even could have done it, age-wise, in 2025, was Didier Fuentes, an Atlanta pitcher. Jackson Chourio and Jackson Holliday were the only major leaguers young enough the year before. And that's before you get to how rare a five-walk game is: the major league record for it happening in a full season is four times. From 2022-25, it's happened just once, when Freddie Freeman walked five times against the 2024 Rockies.
This record has been Ott's for nearly a century, and while it may last for another century, it's hard to imagine anyone matching the level of pettiness the Phillies achieved when they decided that Ott had hit nine home runs against them in 1929 and he would not be hitting a tenth.
Ott led off the second and sixth innings, and he walked both times. In the fourth, Ott came up with runners on second and third, and got a walk to load the bases. Harry Smythe did give Ott a strike in the third inning, and he hit a ball that struck Pat Crawford, the runner from first base. That's scored a single, so Ott was 1-for-1 in this game.
It was the final two innings when the Phillies got really silly. Phil Collins was pitching in mop-up duty, and got the first two outs in the eighth inning before issuing a walk to Crawford. And then he walked Ott, setting up Travis Jackson for an RBI single, but who cared, Ott was still at 42. That could have been the end of it, but Collins -- in since the fourth inning when Shanty Hogan's single brought home Crawford and Ott to make it 9-1 -- was out of gas, and allowed Ott's spot in the order to come up one more time, with two outs, the bases loaded, and the score now 11-3.
Let's turn it over to a Philadelphia Inquirer writer whose account sadly had no byline:
"The sign came from the bench to walk Ott, and Collins tossed three wide ones to the plate, which were called balls. This made Ott sore under the collar, for it meant he would not get a chacne to try for a home run and possibly tie up Klein again for boundary-belt wallops. So, when Collins tossed the next two wide, Ott aimed at them anyway, to bring the count to three and two. (Phillies second baseman Fresco) Thompson then raced in and argued with Bill Klem, stating that Ott was walked anyway, whether he struck at the pitches or not, that the balls were wide. The wrangle lasted for several minutes, finally ending in the ejection of Thompson from the game."
That's a pretty momentous detail of baseball history to be detailed in the 27th paragraph of a story, especially one whose 23rd paragraph read: "Nothing of interest in that second game outside of the fact that Donald Hurst and 'Spud' Davis hit for the circuit for two of their team's three runs. Davis lost his ball in the third inning, while Hurst socked his boundary belt in the fourth, his thirty-second of the season; while in the sixth the Shotton cohorts tallied their only other marker, that on Thompson's two-bagger."
Somewhat self-contradictorily, the 26th paragraph sets up the intentional walk to Ott by saying, "The only exciting incident in the nightcap affair was the ejection of Captain Fresco Thompson in the ninth inning of the battle by Umpire-in-Chief Bill Klem." Thompson was ejected for arguing balls and strikes, and not just that his team's own pitches should be balls, but that Ott's swings should not be regarded as swings, to enable his team to give up a run and lose 12-3 instead of 11-3. It's a man-bites-dog story centered on spite, which feels pretty foundational as a moment for Philadelphia sports.
To appreciate how far outside the bounds of normal baseball the Phillies went to prevent Ott from getting a chance to tie Klein, you need to understand how galactically unusual it is for an intentional walk to be given with the bases loaded in the first place. The move is called the ultimate sign of respect to a hitter, and it should be: a team conceding that the probability that you'll put four runs on the scoreboard is high enough that they're better off giving up just one and moving on to the next batter.
So, how rare is it? According to Stathead's database, it's only happened three other times in the live ball era. Including Ott's, the play represents 0.004% of the intentional walks issued, and 0.001% of plate appearances with the bases loaded. After Collins put Ott on base, the next 196,904 major league batters with the bases loaded were not given intentional walks.
What the Phillies did to ensure that Ott's career high wouldn't lead the National League was a level of baseball shithousery that may be impossible to top, considering not only the extreme rarity of pushing the self-destruct button, but the circumstances of the other times a manager pushed it.
You're not supposed to push the self destruct button unless you REALLY, REALLY MEAN IT!
Exhibit A: Barry Bonds
It took 69 years and the creation of something called the "Arizona Diamondbacks" after the Phillies' shenanigans for anyone to see a bases loaded intentional walk in the majors again. It's the example of the rare play that everyone remembers, because it's part of Barry Bonds' legend: the time Buck Showalter decided the best way to get a win was to throw four wide ones and let Jeff Kent score.
Showalter was vindicated by the result of what was an unprecedented strategic move in modern baseball, and it's a move that is somehow even more understandable and justifiable with the perspective of Bonds putting up a 73-homer season three years later. This was a unique set of circumstances.Driving stop-to-stop for Olson's career home ballparks would be a 7,456-mile trip...
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| Somebody should build the Gregg Olson High-Speed Rail Network. |
...and Olson was just 375 miles of Interstate 10 from ending his 14 year anti-cannonball run. What the clip of the historic moment lacks is the context that this is about where Olson was in this particular relief appearance as well.
Much like Collins to Ott, Olson did throw Bonds a couple of strikes -- just, not during the intentional walk, because Olson was trying to throw strikes to Bonds when he entered the game in the eighth inning. Brian Anderson had given Arizona a solid 6.1 innings, His 115th pitch of the night on May 25, 1998 was a Chris Jones homer to cut Arizona's lead to 7-3, but his 116th pitch resulted in a groundout by Brian Johnson, and that's when Showalter went to the bullpen, a dicey proposition for a team in month two of its existence.
Who could Showalter ask to protect this lead and get the game to Olson? There were five relievers who recorded a positive WAR for the 1998 Diamondbacks, just five guys above replacement level. Efrain Valdéz pitched the previous two nights. Willie Banks, Alan Embree, and Aaron Small all were on different teams at this point. The only other reliever worth a damn in this first Diamondbacks season was the guy they'd trade for Embree, Russ Springer, who had found a groove over the past couple of weeks as the eighth inning guy. There was, however, one more option. Two weeks earlier, the Diamondbacks claimed Amaury Telemaco off waivers from the Cubs, and the Dominican righty would go on to be worth 0.9 WAR in 18 starts and nine relief appearances, so he's considered a starter by the record books.
At this time, Telemaco had pitched three times for the Snakes, effectively mopping up in a blowout victory and blowout defeat, and earning a win a week earlier with three innings of work against the Marlins in which he entered in a tie game, got Mike Piazza out twice, and the only hit he allowed was a solo homer to Ryan Jackson but got enough support to hand off the game to Springer in the eighth and Olson in the ninth. He was the right guy for this job.
And he immediately walked the first guy he faced, Rey Sanchez. But Sanchez got doubled off first on a brutal baserunning mistake, as he never had a chance to advance on a foul pop that David Dellucci nabbed with a dive into the Candlestick Park on-field bullpen, and it was on to the eighth.
If you want to quibble with Showalter, it would be for staying with Telemaco over a fresh Springer for the eighth, but it was still a 7-3 game. Telemaco got Bill Mueller to ground out, but Kent and Charlie Hayes singled. The exchange of a run and 7-4 score for Stan Javier's groundout was fine, but also functionally ended any thought of Springer appearing before extra innings. Either Telemaco was going to get through the eighth, or Marvin Benard would reach base and bring the tying run to the plate, at which point Dusty Baker was sure to bring Bonds, given a rare night off after three games on Riverfront Stadium's artificial turf and a long flight back from Cincinnati, off the bench. If that happened, Showalter would have to go to Olson, his top guy in the bullpen. Benard singled home Hayes. 7-5. Here came Bonds. Here came Showalter. And here came Olson, as well as Andy Stankiewicz in a double switch for Telemaco and Andy Fox.
Bonds was off to a good start to the season, a .305/.440/.605 line with 13 homers in 52 games, and he'd been hot on the Giants' road trip, going 14-for-34 with three homers and 11 walks, posting a .412/.556/.794 line. This would be Bonds' seventh consecutive year leading the league in intentional walks. It would have been unorthodox, but not out of line, for Showalter to call for the intentional walk, put the tying run on base, and deal with literally anyone else in the batter's box.
Olson went after Bonds, at least to an extent. He fell behind 2-0, threw a called strike, fell behind 3-1, got another called strike, and then one more out of the zone and Bonds took his base. Olson then walked Brent Mayne, pinch-hitting for Johnson, but struck out Sanchez with the bases loaded to keep it 7-5 into the ninth. Importantly, Dellucci's solo homer in the top of the ninth made it 8-5 going to the bottom of the ninth, and Showalter's double switch proved wise, as what had been the pitcher's spot wound up coming up in the top half (Stankiewicz was left on base after drawing a two-out walk).
It seemed when Olson got his second straight three-pitch strikeout, getting Hamilton looking for the first out, that he'd found a groove. Then he walked Mueller on four pitches, gave up a double to Kent, and walked Hayes to load the bases. Again, the Diamondbacks found themselves happy to trade a run from their lead for a groundout by Javier. One out away from victory, one out away from avoiding a second encounter with Bonds, Olson now had a chance to end the game by retiring J.T. Snow, pinch-hitting in the pitcher's spot. Olson threw one strike in five tries, reloading the bases, bringing up Bonds.
Olson was a short reliever. He'd had longer outings than this, but he'd been Arizona's closer for a couple of weeks since Félix Rodriguez lost the job, and it's not like this outing was going amazing before the pitch count got to 41. He'd faced nine batters, walked five, gotten three outs, given up a double, and thrown a wild pitch. He'd also already pitched to Bonds, tried to get him out, and failed.
Showalter played to this point as well as could reasonably be expected, and now he was faced with a choice. Walking Bonds would make it an 8-7 game and bring up Mayne, who was at the peak of a really nice decade-and-a-half career as a journeyman catcher, but absolutely was not Barry Bonds. Meanwhile, a Bonds single would surely tie the game, and any kind of extra-base hit, not just a homer, would end it. Would you really want to take the chance, in this spot, of a tired pitcher, who's already struggling to hit the strike zone, trying to find it against a three-time MVP with a .599 slugging percentage for the last eight seasons?
Showalter's move was novel, but also one that was correct even if it hadn't worked out. Had Mayne gotten the winning hit against Olson after the walk, it would not have made for a good argument that Olson should have pitched to Bonds instead. And Mayne did not get the winning hit. Olson survived an eight-pitch at-bat with a lineout to right field. He got the save, and his 53-pitch outing with a weird bit of history -- the first intentional walk with the bases loaded in modern baseball -- paid off.
Exhibit B: Joe Maddon
It's probably fair to wonder whether, if Showalter hadn't handled Bonds with such care in 1998, we'd have ever seen another intentional walk with the bases loaded. Joe Maddon is responsible for the two times it's happened this century, and Maddon was much less of an innovator than a manager who got an edge by using whatever he'd picked up and stored away mentally over a life in baseball, whether it was odd motivational tactics or rarely-seen pieces of strategy.
What Maddon recognized with the Rays, and later the Cubs, is that when there's a history and expectation of failure, there's nothing to lose by trying something different. There's a lot less leeway for shtick like Maddon's when the expectation is to win, pushing the old buttons doesn't get the same results, and pressure builds. The story of Maddon's managerial is well captured by the intentional walks at either end of it.
First, with the 2008 Rays, Maddon was managing an actually good team for the first time since they came into the majors with the Diamondbacks in 1998. It was August 17, with Tampa Bay trying to win the rubber game of a series in Texas to go up by 4.5 games on the defending world champion Red Sox in the AL East, and the Rays' bullpen was humming along even with closer Troy Percival injured.
The Rays, on a tiny budget and trying to take down the twin titans of Boston and New York, famously needed to be creative to find a way to win. The Moneyball-inspired roster loaded with guys who were told that they couldn't cut it elsewhere, but really just needed an environment where they could thrive, resulted in a team ready and willing to break from their routines and try it Maddon's way. It's important that Maddon knew this, because the biggest thing that could go wrong is for the players to stop believing, and he did this in a situation where a whole lot more would have to go wrong to lose the game than a Brent Mayne line drive to right field not being caught.
Juan Salas began the ninth inning with a 7-2 lead, having thrown nine pitches to get the final two outs in the eighth. Seven-pitch battles with Jarrod Saltalamacchia and Chris Davis resulted in a single and a walk, so even though Salas rebounded by striking out Travis Metcalf, he was up to 27 pitches in his first major league outing after having spent the entire season up to this point in Triple-A. Suddenly in a higher leverage situation and having already used Chad Bradford and Trever Miller in relief of Scott Kazmir, Maddon called on Grant Balfour, the 30-year-old Aussie enjoying his first taste of success after having pretty disastrous major league results in his previous opportunities with Milwaukee and Minnesota. At this moment, he had a 1.21 ERA and 55 strikeouts in 37.1 innings, with just one home run allowed, to Gary Sheffield. But on this night, Balfour could not put the Texas hitters away.
Ramón Vázquez battled his way to a nine-pitch walk, and Balfour went to another full count on his second batter, Brandon Boggs, who finally did his best Stan Javier impression with an RBI fielder's choice that got the Rangers one run closer to tying the game, but the Rays one out closer to winning it. Balfour continued to struggle with his control, walking Michael Young on a 3-1 count, and here came Hamilton, representing the tying run, to face a pitcher with 11 balls and 10 strikes thrown.
Hamilton was in no way Bonds, but he was a former No. 1 overall pick by the Rays, backing up his came-up-too-late-to-be-Rookie-of-the-Year effort and on his way toward an MVP in 2010. A tying grand slam, against the organization where it had all started and all gone wrong for him, would be a lovely narrative touch to accompany the show that he put on in the Home Run Derby a month earlier in the Bronx.
In the month since the Derby, Hamilton had kept going, with seven home runs in 26 games, and a .270/.365/.530 line. That was entering this game, in which Hamilton had doubled home Ian Kinsler with the Rangers' first run, and added a fifth-inning single off Tampa Bay starter Scott Kazmir. He was, at this moment, legitimately Bonds-level dangerous if Balfour missed his spot in the strike zone instead of out on one of these pitches.
Rangers announcer Tom Grieve mused, "if you're Joe Maddon, you almost have to stick with Balfour, even though he's walked two out of the three batters he's faced."
Almost have to. Almost.
Judging from the first pitch of the intentional walk, it probably was a good idea not to have Balfour face Hamilton there (they'd never squared off before, Hamilton wound up striking out in their encounter their the next month, and going 2-for-12 with two homers and four strikeouts against Balfour in their careers."The one thing that can kill you right here is a home run," Grieve said, and he was right. Maddon wasn't going to take that chance, and while a home run by the next batter could then have lost the game for Tampa Bay, the intentional walk allowed Dan Wheeler to finish warming up in the bullpen to relieve Balfour, and Marlon Byrd was not a big home run threat at this point in his career, with eight so far in 2008, on his way to 10. Byrd had, however, homered against Wheeler when the reliever was on the Astros the previous season, and walked on four pitches the one time they'd seen each other in 2008.
Wheeler got a game-ending strikeout, and Maddon furthered his mythos as not only unconventional, but successful. And whatever anyone thought about it, Maddon's unrelenting Maddonity helped get the Rays an American League pennant, and then helped the Cubs win the World Series for the first and only time since 1908.
Maddon managed the Cubs for five seasons, with at least 92 wins and a playoff berth in each of the first four. Part of the reason that he lost the job after an 84-78 campaign in 2019 was that the act wore thin. There's a difference between what you need to do to shake off a franchise's reputation for futility, as Maddon did do with Tampa Bay and Chicago, and what you need to do to stay at the top. There was more to it than that, including poor roster management by the Cubs' front office, but Maddon was no longer the right man for the job, and it felt by the end like he was part of the problem. Still, "won the World Series for the Cubs" will get you another job, and Maddon did with the Angels.
You could brush off the under-.500 season in 2020 because it was only 60 games amid the pandemic. In 2021, the Angels went 77-85 with Mike Trout injured for the bulk of the year. In 2022, the Angels had Trout, had Ohtani, and no longer had the withering husk of what once was Albert Pujols. It was time to get serious, but Maddon was high on his own supply.
The first three times we saw a major league manager call for an intentional walk with the bases loaded, the move was made in the ninth inning, with two outs. The walk to Ott was for spite, yes, but it served the 1929 Phillies' goals that day: help Klein be the National League single-season home run king. Showalter in 1998 and Maddon in 2008 had come to situations where they were facing different varieties of legend -- all-time and short-lived -- and concluded that the best way to get from the 26th out to the 27th out was to let one run go on the scoreboard.
It was the fourth inning on April 15, 2022, in a game the Angels were trailing, 3-2, when Maddon made a move that visibly fried circuits in Trout's brain, calling for a bases-loaded intentional walk to Corey Seager. Trout could only watch as, thanks to the new rule, Seager took first base and all the runners advanced 90 feet without so much as a pitch being thrown.
This was the eighth game of the season for the Angels and the seventh for the Rangers. Seager was 9-for-28 on the season with one home run and one double, including an 0-for-2 start to this contest against Angels starter Reid Detmers. Maddon had just removed Detmers from the game, inserting Austin Warren, who immediately walked Marcus Semien to load the bases with one out. Nothing about the situation called for anything but pitching to Seager, whose career high in home runs at the time was the 26 he hit in his 2016 Rookie of the Year season with the Dodgers. Seager and Warren had faced each other once before, with Warren inducing a flyout to center field in the 2021 Freeway Series. The batters due after Seager also were no treat: Mitch Garver (.875 slugging percentage the previous season) and Adolis García (31 home runs the previous season).
Seager was by no means so much more dangerous than the subsequent hitters as to warrant an intentional walk, let alone in the fourth inning, let alone with the bases loaded, let alone to turn a 3-2 Angels deficit into 4-2.
Then 5-2 when Garver hit a sacrifice fly.
Then 6-2 when Warren committed a balk to score Semien.
Warren got García to foul out to end the Rangers' rally, but the damage was done. Maddon's move had worked out better than if Seager had hit a grand slam, but that was it. All the runners who were on base at the time of the walk wound up scoring. That the Angels scored five runs of their own in the next inning, and went on to make Warren the winning pitcher, 9-6, is irrelevant to whether Maddon made the right move. Unequivocally, his decision was phenomenally stupid, and Maddon was lucky that his team was playing a Rangers team that not only was on its way to losing 94 times, but was cobbling together a bullpen game with Matt Bush (36.2 innings pitched for Texas in 2022), Albert Abreu (8.2), Kolby Allard (21), Greg Holland (4.2), Nicklaus Snyder (1), Josh Sborz (22.1), and Spencer Patton (7).
It was Allard who was on the mound for the Angels' instant response to the five-run Texas rally driven by their own manager. After a flyout by Jack Mayfield, five straight Angels hits sent Allard to the showers, one of those being a monster Ohtani homer that left the reliever staggering,
That was followed by a Trout double and a Jared Walsh single, with Walsh coming in to score the tiebreaking run on Brandon Marsh's sacrifice fly off Holland.
Maddon's explanation afterward was that he wanted to get his team fired up, which... okay, you could argue that it worked because they scored five runs in the next inning, even if that doesn't really make sense. When a reporter suggested, "there's certainly other ways to fire your team up than giving up a run," Maddon replied, "right, then, but the possibility was giving up four."
But... the next two guys were also power hitters. The possibility was giving up any number of runs, many of them greater than four. That's the big difference between utilizing an extremely unusual strategy in the bottom of the ninth inning and pulling a bush league stunt in the bottom of the fourth. Even though he won the day, this episode made it clear that Maddon had lost the juice. The Angels surged briefly, but 12 straight losses cost Maddon his job in early June, after just 329 games at the helm.
It is entirely possible that Maddon called for the last intentional walk with the bases loaded that any of us will ever see. What's odd is that at the time Maddon did it, what the Phillies did to Ott had been forgotten. That night, when MLB stats guru Sarah Langs tweeted about it, she listed "Intentional walks with bases loaded, since 1950," and named Seager, Hamilton, and Bonds. Later that night, USA Today baseball writer Bob Nightengale posted, "LA #Angels Joe Maddon becomes the first manager to order an intentional walk with the bases loaded while trailing in a game since Jim O'Rourke of the Buffalo Bisons on Aug. 2, 1881." That's definitely wrong, because Burt Shotton's Phillies were trailing big when they walked Ott. But how do you wind up with such a specific stat that's so wrong?
Baseball Almanac's intentional walks record page lists seven players as having drawn an intentional walk, all-time, with the bases loaded. The top of the page reads, "NOTE: Intentional walks have only been an officially tracked statistic since 1955. Historical data found on Baseball Almanac prior to that year is based on box scores." The bottom of the page is where the record for intentional walks in a game with the bases loaded (1) is found. Bonds, Hamilton, and Seager are there, but so are Nap Lajoie in 1901, Del Bissonette in 1928, Bill Nicholson in 1944, and the walk that Nightengale referenced, Abner Dalrymple in 1881. All of these were before 1950, which is why Langs would have excluded them, but why wouldn't Ott be listed? And then there are three others from the 20th century, including two from the live ball era where Stathead has data?
Exhibit C: History's Mysteries
The 1881 incident that Nightengale cited was an intentional walk, confirmed by a Chicago Daily Tribune report: "At one time when the bases were full, (Jack) Lynch deliberately sent in seven bad balls rather than take the chances of a hit by Dalrymple, who was at bat, and in this way forced a run upon Chicago. But all to no purpose, for (White Stockings outfielder George) Gore followed with a terrific drive for two bases, and three men came in on the hit."
So, that one did happen, but also in a different sport where it took seven balls for a walk, which was actually down from nine in the 1870s. Let's focus back on the post-1889 implementation of four balls or three strikes as the maximum for a plate appearance.
Lajoie scans as reasonable, not just as a Hall of Famer, but as the most dangerous bat in the American League's inaugural season. Lajoie won the Triple Crown for the Philadelphia A's with a .426 average, 14 homers, and 125 runs batted in. On May 23 in Chicago, Lajoie represented the tying run when he came to the plate to face Zaza Harvey with the bases loaded in the ninth inning.
Harvey, in his sixth inning relieving Jack Katoll, was out of gas. Or, as the Chicago Daily Tribune put it, "The bases were full, with nobody out, and the plate was about the size of a liver pill in Harvey's eyes. Two batters walked to first, forcing two runs in, and Harvey had pitched one bad ball to Lajoie when Griffith came to the rescue."
That's Clark Griffith, the White Sox player-manager, and what he did makes for a very interesting question about how intentional a walk must be to be considered an intentional walk at a time when intentional walks did not exist as a statistic. The Tribune report continues:
"There was a margin of four runs left, with the bases full and nobody out, when Griff faced Lajoie, and it was an interesting proposition for anybody. The manager shrewdly opined that it would be better to have Lajoie on first and another run in than to give him a chance to hit a good ball, so he pitched three just outside the corner of the plate, although he evidently tried to sneak the third one over."
This reads more like a pitch-around situation than a true intentional walk, even if Griffith's intention was to issue the walk. But then there's the report of another Chicago newspaper, The Daily Inter Ocean:
"Griffith was confronted by an ugly problem. If he gave Lajoie four balls, he would force in a run, and would be taking desperate chances on the succeeding batters. If he put it right over, it was better than an even break that Lajoie would hit it to the far end of the field, and tie the score with one tremendous drive. Griffith deliberately decided to chance the force-in, and calmly sent four balls over, every one of them three feet beyond the Frenchman's farthest reach. ... The base on balls given the terrible Lajoie proved the saving of the game."
Lajoie's walk, fully intentional or not, and whether or not Griffith threw all the pitches, lines up well with Showalter walking Bonds. This wasn't just an expansion team, but the first year of a new league. Lajoie was easily the best player in that league. It was the ninth inning and the manager had exactly one relief option available that he could trust, in Griffith's case, himself. And Griffith did nail down the final outs for Chicago to get the 11-9 victory that day.
It was definitely the late 1920s before anything like that happened again, definitely involving the Giants, and definitely with Bill Klem as one of the umpires. Maybe it was Ott. Maybe, as Baseball Almanac claimed, it was Bissonette, the first baseman who was the 1928 Dodgers' best hitter. But it sure doesn't seem that way, as the Retrosheet page for the May 2 game at the Polo Grounds between Brooklyn and New York says, "There are unverified claims that this was an intentional walk with bases loaded."
In this case, even as dangerous as Bissonette was, the concept of the intentional walk does not make sense. In the first eight innings of the game, Larry Benton held Brooklyn scoreless on just two hits, a single by Dave Bancroft in the first and a double by Harry Riconda in the eighth. Brooklyn doubled that hit total in the ninth, on a bunt by Ty Tyson and another single by Harvey Hendrick, but Benton got Butch Henline and Babe Herman each to pop out in foul territory, so there was just one out to go.
Lee Scott, in The Brooklyn Citizen, wrote that at this point, "Benton then suddenly lost control and walked both (Rube) Bressler and Bissonette and forced in a run."
Importantly, the next batter, whom Benton struck out to end the game, was Riconda. Issuing an intentional walk to face the one guy with an extra-base hit all day would be a ludicrous move. And in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Thomas Holmes wrote, "Bissonette was treated with extreme care and finally drew a base on balls, forcing Tyson over the plate with Brooklyn's only run of the game." That does not come across as Benton throwing purposeful wide ones to cut his edge to 2-1 and get to a spot where another hit by Riconda could lose the game for the Giants.
Ott was there to see Bissonette's walk, but not in the lineup as John McGraw held the lefty teenager out against Brooklyn southpaw Jumbo Elliott. At the other end of his career, in 1944, Ott was very much a part of the game in which Nicholson drew his historically ambiguous walk. Not only was he still playing, going 3-for-3 with four runs scored and three RBIs in the Giants' 12-10 win over the Cubs in the second game of a July 23 doubleheader at the Polo Grounds, Ott was now the Giants' manager, too.
In the seventh inning, Nicholson hit his fourth home run of the doubleheader, and league-leading 21st of the season, to finally get the Cubs going again after they'd turned a 5-0 lead into a 9-5 deficit. Chicago trailed 10-7 to start the eighth.
"What doings then!" wrote Jack Smith in the New York Daily News. "The Cubs collected three runs without a hit, using five walks, a hit batsman and a forceout to compile the total as Ott used four hurlers in vain." Those would be Ace Adams, Ewald Pyle, Andy Hansen, and Bob Barthelson. It was Pyle who issued the walk to Nicholson, the last batter he faced, after also walking Phil Cavarretta, the first batter he faced, after Adams had walked the inning's first two hitters, Stan Hack and Bill Schuster. Would manager Ott really have ordered the fourth straight walk of the inning be intentional?
While Nicholson could have given the Cubs the lead with a grand slam for his fifth homer of the day, the on-deck batter, Ival Goodman, had a three-run homer of his own. And while that was Goodman's only homer of 1944 and the last one of his career, Ott would have remembered the player who was an All-Star in 1938 and 1939, and hit 17 of his 95 career homers at the Polo Grounds against his Giants. After his homer, Goodman had walked twice, and more walks were going to be dangerous to the Giants here, too. As was the case 16 years earlier with Bissonette, the irrationality of an intentional walk (worse here because it was the eighth inning), combined with the lack of any evidence from contemporary accounts, makes it hard to believe that it was an intentional walk.
Where could the idea that it was an intentional walk have come from, when it seems so clear that the Giants were trying to get someone to just throw a damn strike? It turns out that Pyle was the next day's starter, and did wind up issuing an intentional walk to Nicholson in that game. If reports or record-keeping got mixed up somewhere along the way, and we know it could be sloppy in that era, it's understandable.
Nicholson wound up leading the National League with 33 home runs in 1944, while Ott was second with 26. That brought Ott to 489 home runs for his career, extending his then-National League record, and only four shy of Lou Gehrig for third all-time behind Ruth and Jimmie Foxx in major league history. Ott became the third player in the 500 home run club in 1945, more than a decade after he became, best as we can surmise, the third player in the bases loaded intentional walk club with Dalrymple and (probably) Lajoie but not Bissonette.
As for post-Ott, we've also got three: Bonds, Hamilton, and Seager. Had the free pass to Nicholson in 1944 been intentional, its timing would have joined Seager in being monstrously stupid outside of the ninth inning, and the results would have been the same: two more runs after the one brought home by the walk, and it ultimately not mattering because of runs in the next half-inning. In 1944, it was Joe Medwick doubling home George Hausmann and Ott in the bottom of the eighth to give the Giants a doubleheader split and a 12-run outburst in the nightcap, just like New York had on that penultimate day of the 1929 season.
Ott finally did take ball four after all the commotion that day in Philly, and he couldn't get one over the fence the next day in Boston, while the Phillies got rained out in Brooklyn to end the season. Still, the Phillies got their allotment of 154 games, with stats from a five-inning, rain-soaked tie at Wrigley Field counting as official, including one of O'Doul's hits. Ott, too, got to keep a homer from a game that got rained out after 11 innings in May, but the Giants only wound up taking the field 152 out of the 154 scheduled times. That would be an additional little what-if for Ott, as Klein ended up with the National League record... until August 26 of the following year, when Hack Wilson hit his 44th home run on the way to 56.
Because it was less than a year later that Wilson set a single-season NL record that would stand for decades, and because Ott was at the top of the home run charts so many times on his way to setting his own decades-strong career record for a National Leaguer, it was easy to forget the way the 1929 race played out. That's too bad, both because it's interesting to have another thing to tie Ott and Bonds together through Giants history, and because the Phillies deserve to revel in reaching a level of shitheel antibaseball that could hardly even be contemplated, before or since.
Neither Klein nor Ott would ever hit as many homers again as they did in 1929, but they tied for the National League lead with 38 apiece in 1932. Klein led by himself in 1931 (31 homers) and 1933 (28), while Ott snagged solo crowns 1936 (33), 1938 (36), and 1942 (30), plus ties with Ripper Collins in 1934 (35) and Joe Medwick in 1937 (31).
That means from 1926-38, there was only one season where Klein, Ott, or Wilson didn't at least tie for the National League home run lead. It was 1935, and that was the year Berger joined the Sosa Society with 34 homers -- his third time hitting at least that many, but finally enough to claim a dinger title.
Author's note: We'll take a closer look at Berger in the next Sosa Society post. Since this post began with the intention of simply making a list and adding a few notes and observations before it spun out into what you just read, here's the full list of Sosa Society guys, and we'll get to more details for all of them, maybe not so extensive as trying to sort out the historical record on bases loaded intentional walks: Henry Aaron, Dick Allen, Wally Berger, Jose Canseco, Rocky Colavito, Tony Conigliaro, Nelson Cruz, Darrell Evans, Juan Gonzalez, Frank Howard, Reggie Jackson, Mickey Mantle, Fred McGriff, Dale Murphy, Graig Nettles, Shohei Ohtani, Mel Ott, Carlos Peña, Albert Pujols, Manny Ramirez, Hank Sauer, Sammy Sosa, Vern Stephens, Mark Teixeira, Jim Thome, Rudy York, and Gus Zernial.
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