MLB 2014 season thread

Correct. My mistake. American League record for homers in the month of May.

 

He'd have to really go off the next two days to set the all-time record for any month.

Sosa hit 20 in June 1998.

And the AL record is 18 by Rudy York in August 1937 (his rookie year, by the way).

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/recbooks/rb_hr3.shtml

 

Rudy York was juiced to the gills.

 

What makes me think they began pitching York differently from September 1937 on?

 

I'll never forget that. He wasn't on anyone's radar for the HR chase until all of a sudden in mid-summer he went insane. I think at one point he hit something crazy like 22 in 23 games.

 

Went ahead and looked it up.

From May 25 to June 21, 1998, Sosa hit 21 HRs in 22 games.

 

I fell down an Internet rabbit hole trying to look it up, but I'm pretty sure the Royals had the best start of any MLB expansion team in 1969. The Rockies might've topped it.

 

Seemed that the expansion of the 90s the other owners didn't want the expansion teams to suck as much. Not sure what the rules for the expansion draft were at both times, but the Rockies/Marlins seemed to start out with better teams than the 62 Mets. Same in the NFL, the Panthers and Jaguars got good quickly.

 

They allowed the post-1977 expansion teams to draft from every team in MLB, rather than just their own league. That was one major difference.

 

I'll answer my own question. The Royals perhaps had the best inaugural season, but the D'backs winning the World Series three years after their founding in 2001 trumps everything else in North American sports.

 

Weren't the Diamondbacks and Rockies allowed start their farm systems before the actual team started playing? That makes a huge difference.

 

I know they allowed the Rockies and the Marlins to start minor league systems a year or two before their big-league clubs made their debuts.

There was actually a really huge fuss in Denver when the first rookie league team affiliate from, I think, Oregon?, started their season. TV cameras and newspapers were all over the story for a few days.