Joe Posnanski: Mad Dog 20-20

Posnanski continues his BJIP series by profiling the forgotten Bill Madlock, a.k.a. the 2nd greatest right-handed hitter since World War II, measured by batting titles won (a stat which people cared about in olden times). Many anecdotes.

There’s a great line from Citizen Kane that probably fits here — the line goes, “Well, it’s no trick to make a lot of money, when all you want to do is make a lot of money.” I suspect nobody in baseball history wanted to win batting titles more than Bill Madlock. It’s all he wanted to do. He wanted to win batting titles so much that he would become despised for it by other players and joked about in the press boxes (they would have pools, according to Bill James, to pick the exact date that Madlocks hamstring would flare up).

Now, before we go too far, let me say the guy had a career. Madlock hit .305 for his career and got 2,000 hits, and he wasn’t one dimensional either. His career 123 OPS+ is quite solid. He walked more than he struck out. He had a more than respectable .442 slugging — better than Carew, almost the same as Boggs. He hit as many as 19 homers in a season, stole as many as 32 bases, he hit .375 in his one World Series appearance and he even played a respectable third base for a while (after a rough start).

And when he retired, he did so to no fanfare, no retired jersey ceremonies, no “Remember Mad Dog” days. He got a miserable 19 votes his one year on the Hall of Fame ballot, though his numbers are startlingly similar to Hall of Famer George Kell: ....

Posnanski’s newest book project is about the 1975 Reds, and his best resource to date is a book written by none other than Joe Morgan. Billy Beane doesn’t write books.