Bill Madlock

November 20th, 2009 @ 04:59pm

Bill “Mad Dog” Madlock looks pretty happy here, and why shouldn’t he? In 1981, he’d won his 3rd batting title with a .341 average and got on base at a .413 clip!

Expectations were high when the ’82 season began, but through June 4th, he was only batting .277 with a sorry .333 OBP, and the Pirates were wallowing 10.5 games out of 1st place at 21-28. Things weren’t looking good.

Mad Dog’s season would turn at that point though, and the Pirates season would follow right along (they went 63-50 after June 4th, tied for 3rd best record in the NL over that span).

From June 6th to 26th, Madlock was hot. Really hot. He hit .379 and had a .456 OBP, while scoring 14 runs in 18 games. The Pirates went 9-5 during this stretch, totally turning from a sub-.500 club back into the solid Pirates team that was always a threat to win the division back then.

For the next month after that, Bill struggled again, batting just .282/.314/.436 through July 29. The team kept winning though, going 18-11. Interestingly, the team was winning when Madlock scored at least 1 run, but when Madlock didn’t score…the Pirates weren’t anything special. They went just 8-8 in the games Madlock didn’t score. When he did score though, their record was 10-3. Pittsburgh had a 1-1 record when Madlock wasn’t in the game.

Of course, that’s all kind of subjective since he needed teammates to drive him in, but it shows how integral Bill Madlock was to the Pirates offense in ’82. If he wasn’t in the middle of the action, then the team struggled to get beyond mediocre.

Madlock got hot again on July 30 at Shea Stadium, with the Pirates now just 3 1/2 games out. Bill went 3 for 4, collecting 3 RBI’s, partly due to a 2-run HR in the 5th that put the Pirates ahead 5-1. From that night onward, Mad Dog hit .353/.395/.563 with 10 HR’s. His .353 average was tied with Al Oliver for the best in the NL from July 30 onward (150 PA’s). The only player who hit for a higher average during that span was a young future Hall of Famer named Wade Boggs (.354).

The Pirates only gained another 1/2 game on the division lead before drifting out of the race and settling for 4th in a 6 team division. They finished the season going 31-33, despite Madlock’s hot bat. During that stretch, the team was 20-9 when Madlock scored, but just 11-23 when they couldn’t drive him in. They just weren’t the same team. For the season as a whole, Pittsburgh was 48-26 (.648) in games when Madlock scored, but 36-52 (.409) when he didn’t score. Now that’s what I call an interesting split.

Even though Madlock fell short of winning another batting championship, he reached career highs in runs scored (92), runs created (103), HR’s (19), and RBI’s (95). If he hadn’t started off so slow for 2 months, he might’ve captured the NL MVP. The next year, he’d win his final batting crown.