Good day everyone!
On the blog today, we come to the
American League's top three home run hitters for the 1974 season in my
ongoing "expanded league leaders" thread, proudly shown on a 1975 card:
Leading
the way of course is Chicago White Sox slugger Dick Allen, who took
home the home run crown for the second time in three seasons with his 32
taters.
Two years prior Allen led the league with 37 homers,
along with his 113 RBI's, falling short of a Triple Crown with his .308
average to Rod Carew and his .318 clip.
Incredibly, though
still only 32 years of age, it would be Allen's last All-Star season in
the Majors, playing in only 119 games in 1975 for the Philadelphia
Phillies, then 85 in 1976 and only 54 games in 1977 with the Oakland
A's.
Right behind Allen with 29 homers is the 1973 Home Run
champ, Reggie Jackson, who would also share a home run crown the
following year in 1975 with his 36 "jacks".
For Reggie, he was
in his prime and well on his way to topping 500 homers, winning four
homer titles (oddly, sharing three of them with three different Brewer
sluggers), before calling it a Hall of Fame career after the 1987
campaign.
His 1974 output of 29 homers, 93 RBIs and a nice
.289 batting average would get Reggie a fourth place finish in the MVP
race after taking home the award in 1973.
In third place with
26 homers in the American League in 1974, a teammate of Jackson,
slugging catcher/first baseman Gene Tenace, who put in a solid year for
the three-peat Oakland A's with 73 RBIs to go along with the
aforementioned 26 homers, and a league-leading 110 base-on-balls helping
set the tables for the other A's batters.
The following year
Tenace would make his only All-Star team, enroute to hitting a
career-best 29 homers while once again topping 100 walks, while driving
in 87.
Not a bad set of A.L. sluggers right here!
Next week, we move on to the N.L. and their top-three RBI men. Stay tuned.