Major League Baseball Triples Records

In 1912, John Owen "Chief" Wilson hit 36 triples for the Pittsburgh Pirates and nobody in Major League Baseball since has come close to eclipsing that total in a single season. Wilson's feat is one of those strange quirks of the sport, much like Earl Webb's 67 doubles for the 1931 Red Sox, that cannot be rationally explained. The all time leader in three-baggers is Detroit's Sam Crawford with 306, and trust me when I tell you that this number will stand forever. The active leader in triples right now is Steve Finley, who has 124, so you can see that Crawford's mark is beyond reproach. for as long as the game is played.

His name implies that he was a Native American, but "Chief" Wilson, who hailed from the Lone Star State, was not. His manager, Fred Clarke, said that Wilson was "the chief of the Texas Rangers" and the name stayed with him. In 1912, playing in cavernous Forbes Field for Pittsburgh, Wilson collected one triple after another, his last on the season's final time up when he tried to stretch it into an inside-the-park homer and was thrown out at the plate. The dimensions of Forbes Filed certainly aided Wilson's cause, as it was 360 feet to the left field line, 376 to right, and 462 feet to dead center field. Yet Wilson was not the only Pirate to have the advantage of lots of room in the outfield to place his triples, but he was the only one to even come close to hitting 36. At one point that year, Wilson hit a triple in five consecutive games, yet he never again hit even as many as 15 in any other campaign. He was a lifetime .269 batter that knocked in over one hundred runs just once.

In the modern post-1900 era, the next highest amount of triples in a single season is the 26 that were accumulated by "Shoeless" Joe Jackson in 1912, Crawford in 1914, and Kiki Cuyler in 1925. No player since 1945 has belted more than 22, but another Tiger, Curtis Granderson, is on the verge of snapping that skein. Curtis has 21 as of this writing with more than 20 games to go in 2007, and he is a good bet to get a couple more playing in Comerica Park, another big pasture.

Career wise, Crawford averaged 20 triples per season for 19 years to get to a number that even Ty Cobb could not overcome. Cobb played for 24 seasons and he hit 23 or more triples three times, but left the game in 1928 14 triples short of tying Crawford, his teammate for many years in Detroit, who had called it quits back in 1917. Third on the career triples list is another Hall of Famer, one of the five originals- Honus Wagner. This Pirate shortstop collected 252 in his 21 years in Major League Baseball, with the most in one campaign being his 22 in 1900. Fourth and fifth place for triples finds pre-1900 players Jake Beckley and Roger Conner, with the fabulous Tris Speaker in sixth with 22. Ironically, Clarke, Crawford's future manager with the Tigers, had 222 of his own, good for seventh place on this triples inventory.

To show you how safe Crawford's triples mark actually is, just two current ballplayers have as many as one hundred- Finley of the Rockies at 124 and Kenny Lofton of the Indians at 114, and they are both on the wrong side of 40. Johnny Damon of the Yankees has 87, Ray Durham of the Giants has 79, and Jimmy Rollins of the Phillies has 78. The youngest active player in the top two dozen for most career triples is the Mets' Jose Reyes. Jose has sped around and stopped on third 51 times, and he is only 24 years old. However, this still means that he needs to make 25 triples every year for the next ten to get into a tie with Crawford, and Jose has never hit more than the 17 he had in the two seasons prior to this one.