By: Reed Weiser
Stepping away a moment from our traditional examination of the baseball rules and the management of the game, it has been an exciting year in terms of individual achievements.
During the course of the baseball season, I periodically scan over the League Leaders in what we used to consider traditional statistics as opposed to all these new various permutations and combinations of what “They” feel are germane measuring sticks nowadays, e.g., OPS+ and WAR, to name a few.
As we start the last weekend of the season it is still entirely possible that for the first time EVER, we could have four TRIPLE CROWN winners in the same Season!!
That’s right!!
For the batters it is a more remote possibility, but on the pitcher side it appears that both NL and AL hurlers are potential shoe-ins for achieving their triple crowns. For batters it is more commonly known that earning a Triple Crown consists of leading your respective league in batting average, home runs and runs batted in (RBIs). The lesser know pitching Triple Crown includes the leader in earned run average (ERA), wins and strikeouts.
It appears that the batter triple crown category will come down to this last weekend.
Aaron Judge has commanding leads in HRs and RBIs and only trails Bobby Witt, Jr (.332) and Vladimir Guerrero (.326) for the AL lead in batting average with his own currently standing at .325.
Shohei Ohtani also has a safe lead in home runs and RBIs, and is only marginally behind NL leader Luis Arraez (.314) to his own .309 average in the batting race.
In the pitching Triple Crown pitching race, Detroit’s Tarik Skubal has the Wins category wrapped up with 18 on the season and has a firm hold with his ERA of 2.39, while the next closest is Ronel Blanco of the Royals at 2.80. The only statistic that could trip up Skubal would be strikeouts, as he only has a five strikeout lead over Cole Ragans (Houston), of 228 as compared to 223. Ragans is scheduled to pitch this weekend and it is possible that Skubal could pitch on Sunday, so the AL pitching Triple Crown appears to come down solely to strikeouts.
In the NL, Chris Sale of the Braves has a lock on the top spot with wins at 18, and holds a comfortable 2.38 to 2.56 edge over Zack Wheeler of the Phillies in ERA. Again, similar to the AL the only statistic that Sale could be overtaken on would be strikeouts, since he currently has a lead in K’s of 225 to 213 against Wheeler. It is not out of the realm of possibility that Wheeler could surpass Sales this weekend, but he would have to throw 13 strikeouts to surpass him and he has not thrown more than 11 strikeouts in a game this year. It should be noted that Sale is not scheduled to pitch this weekend, so his statistics are set at this point for the year. In addition, Dylan Cease of the San Diego Padres currently is only one strikeout behind Sales, but is not scheduled to pitch again for this regular season.
Therefore, this could prove to be a VERY historic season where two batters and two pitchers could claim the coveted and rare Triple Crown in their respective leagues.
Interestingly enough, there were several occasions where NL and AL pitchers won the Triple Crown in the same year, yet it only transpired once in the batting category.
In chronological order the pitching Triple Crown winners in the same year were:
| Year | NL | AL |
| 1905 | Christy Mathewson (NY Giants) | Rube Waddell (Philadelphia Athletics) |
| 1918 | Hippo Vaughn (Chicago Cubs) | Walter Johnson (Washington Senators) |
| 1924 | Jazzy Vance (Brooklyn Dodgers) | Walter Johnson (Washington Senators) |
| 2011 | Clayton Kershaw (LA Dodgers) | Justin Verlander (Detroit Tigers) |
The batting Triple Crown only occurred once in history in 1933, when Chuck Klein of the NL Philadelphia Phillies and Jimmy Foxx of the cross town AL Philadelphia Athletics both won that honor.
Baseball Purist 
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