A Glance at Baseball Slugging Percentage Records

In Major League Baseball circles, the statistic called slugging percentage isn't really a percentage, but more of an average. Slugging percentage is calculated by taking the total bases a player has accumulated and dividing them by the number of at-bats he has had. This number will give baseball fans an excellent idea of how much of a power hitter a player is, as the more extra base hits he has banged out, the higher his slugging percentage will be. The record for the highest career slugging percentage belongs to Babe Ruth, while the Bambino and Barry Bonds dominate the single season slugging percentage list.

No player will ever again approach Ruth's slugging percentage of .6898 for a career; the second highest is possessed by Ted Williams at .6338. Ruth had a total of 5,793 total bases on the strength of his 714 home runs, 506 doubles, and 106 triples, plus all his singles. He had 8,398 at bats in the majors, giving him the final number that must seem like two Mount Everests on top of one another to today's sluggers. For example, even Bonds, who has three of the top five single season best slugging percentages in the history of the sport, lifetime owns a .6071 slugging mark. Third all-time behind Ruth and Williams is Lou Gehrig at .6324, while Albert Pujols, at 27 years old and currently in the midst of his own Hall of Fame career, is fourth at .6194, followed by Jimmie Foxx at .6093.

In case you were curious as how the slugging percentage of a classic singles hitter compares to a basher like Bonds, look at Seattle's Ichiro Suzuki. Ichiro has a slugging percentage of .437 for his seven seasons in which he has garnered 1,578 base hits, all but 299 of them being singles. Pete Rose was another singles specialist, as reflected by his .407 slugging percentage; Ruth had 41 more total bases than Rose despite being up almost six thousand fewer times! Even the great Hank Aaron, who surpassed Ruth in 1974 for the most home runs until Bonds broke his record, has a slugging percentage that pales in comparison to Ruth. Aaron is at .5545, 26th career-wise, even though he is ranked number one in total bases with 6,856.

Bonds comes in at numbers one, four, and five on the roster of top single season slugging percentages, with his .8634 in 2001 easily outdistancing Ruth's 1920 mark of .8490. As a matter of fact, Bonds has four of the top twelve best single campaign slugging percentages, but Ruth has seven of the premier eighteen. Ruth stand at numbers two, three, six, eight, fourteen, fifteen, and eighteen, so it is easy to see why he is the career leader in the stat. Besides Bonds and the Babe, only Gehrig, Rogers Hornsby, and Mark McGwire are in the top ten for single season slugging average.

Among current players, Pujols and Bonds are one-two for their years in baseball, followed by Manny Ramirez, Todd Helton, and Vlad Guerrero. Alex Rodriguez is sixth, the only active player on this inventory in the top nineteen that plays on the left side of the infield. A-Rod is thirteenth on the all-time list as of today, with every single one of the dozen batters ahead of him either outfielders or first basemen. Right behind Alex for career slugging percentage is Rogers Hornby, who played the vast majority of his games at second base, the only other non-first baseman infielder in the top twenty-nine for slugging percentage. The first catcher to show up on this slugging roll-call is Mike Piazza, tied at number thirty with Atlanta's Chipper Jones at .5458; you won't find another full-time catcher until you get to Roy Campanella at number ninety-five.