Cody Bellinger gets the Dropo on Braun

♦ August 13, 2017 ♦ Leave a comment

Cody Bellinger hit his 34th home run last night and tied Ryan Braun and Walt Dropo as he sets his sights on Hal Trosky and Mike Piazza.  Cody is also only one behind Aaron Judge who has hit his 35 home runs in eighty more plate appearances.

Cody now sits alone with the most home runs by rookie left handed hitter in the NL with his 34 and is just one behind the major league record of 35 by a left handed rookie set by Hal Trosky.

Trosky had an interesting career. When you look at his baseball reference page you see a player who started with a bang but stopped playing at age 28 in 1941. I thought the war interrupted his career but the baseball sabr bio says it was migraines.

his career reached its apex in 1936, when he led the American League in runs batted in with 162, yet he has largely been consigned to historical obscurity. This anonymity is not only due to the reality that his career overlapped a triumvirate of Jimmie Foxx, Hank Greenberg, and Lou Gehrig, a triumvirate of future Hall of Fame first basemen who held a virtual lock on the position on the American League All Star teams of the mid-’30s, but also because, at what should have been the peak of his career, Trosky was sidelined with two years of severe migraine headaches, pain so debilitating that he became unable to take the field for days in a row.

From age 21 – 28 Trosky hit 215 home runs. He tried to come back in 1944 and 1946 but it didn’t work out and he ended his career with only 5748 plate appearances and 228 home runs with an OPS+ of 130. He had a short but brilliant career. The man once hit 42 home runs, drove in 162 runs, had an OPS of 146, led the league in TB with 405 and finished 10th in MVP voting.

Player                        HR Year Age  Tm Lg  PA
Mark McGwire (RoY-1st)        49 1987  23 OAK AL 641
Frank Robinson (RoY-1st)      38 1956  20 CIN NL 667
Albert Pujols (RoY-1st)       37 2001  21 STL NL 676
Al Rosen                      37 1950  26 CLE AL 668
Jose Abreu (RoY-1st)          36 2014  27 CHW AL 622
Mike Piazza (RoY-1st)         35 1993  24 LAD NL 602
Ron Kittle (RoY-1st)          35 1983  25 CHW AL 570
Rudy York                     35 1937  23 DET AL 417
Hal Trosky                    35 1934  21 CLE AL 685
Aaron Judge                   35 2017  25 NYY AL 484
Cody Bellinger                34 2017  21 LAD NL 403

Ryan Braun (RoY-1st)          34 2007  23 MIL NL 492
Walt Dropo (RoY-1st)          34 1950  27 BOS AL 609
Jose Canseco (RoY-1st)        33 1986  21 OAK AL 682
Earl Williams (RoY-1st)       33 1971  22 ATL NL 550
Jimmie Hall (RoY-3rd)         33 1963  25 MIN AL 571

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Play Index Tool Used
Generated 8/3/2017.

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