Top Five Single-Season Offensive Performances in Athletics' History
Starting with the Reggie Jackson-Joe Rudi-Sal Bando teams that debuted in Oakland after a shift from Kansas City and moving on to the powerhouse teams of 1988-92, 1999-2002 and 2018-19, the A’s have put together some offenses to be admired in the half century Major League Baseball has been played in the East Bay.
There have been some huge individual performances along the way, including five hitters who have been name the American League’s Most Valuable Player – Jackson in 1973, Jose Canseco in 1988, Rickey Henderson in 1990, Jason Giambi in 2000 and Miguel Tejada in 200 – and five more who have finished second in the voting – Bando in 1971, Rudi in both 1972 and 1974, Henderson in 1981 and Giambi in 2001.
The list includes two AL RBI champions in Jackson in 1973 and Canseco in 1988 and eight times when an A’s hitter either won the AL homer title outright or finished in a tie – Jackson in 1973 and 1975, Tony Armas in 1981, Mark McGwire in 1987 and 1996, Canseco in 1988 and 1991 and Khris Davis in 2018.
It’s extraordinarily difficult to rate the quality of such individual seasons against one another, but here are five single-season performances by Oakland hitters that stand out.
Rickey Henderson, 1990
.325/.439/.557, 119 runs, 61 RBI, 33 doubles, 3 triples, 28 homers.
In their time in Oakland, the A’s have never had a batting champion. The closest they would come was with Henderson in his MVP season with the A’s. Henderson came into the final day of the season at .325. George Brett of the Royals was at .328. With the Indians playing at Cleveland and having a three-hour head start on the A’s, who were playing the Angels in the Coliseum, manager John Wathan held Brett out of the KC starting lineup. Once Rickey struck out against the Angels’ Mike Fetters, Wathan used Brett as a fifth-inning pinch-hitter to get a sacrifice fly, then left him in for a seventh-inning single that secured the batting average title for the Royals’ third baseman at .329. Still Henderson led the league in runs, steals (65), on-base percentage, OPS (on-base plus slugging) at 1.016 and OPS plus (which is adjusted to the players’ ballpark) at 189.
Jose Canseco, 1988
.307/.391/.569, 120 runs, 124 RBI, 34 doubles, 0 triples, 42 homers.
Canseco had some monster years with the A’s, including 1991’s career best 44 homers, but 1988 was the year he broke into the national baseball conversation when he became the first player in Major League history to hit 40 homers and steal 40 base in the same season – Willie Mays had reached 40 in both, but not in the same season. He got steals No. 39 and 40 on a cool, wet Friday night in Milwaukee, stealing second in the first and fifth innings. He’d reached the 40-homer plateau on Sept. 18 in Oakland, and he capped the two-steal game with his 41 homer, a three-run shot in the eighth inning. Manager Tony La Russa lifted Canseco in the bottom of the ninth inning with the A’s up 8-3, in part to give Canseco time to get ready for a post-game media storm. But relievers Greg Cadaret and Dennis Eckersley combined to blow the lead, the game went 14 innings, lasted five hours and there would be no quotes from Canseco on the accomplishment in newspapers anywhere except the West Coast, and not many there. Still, the A’s won 104 games and Canseco was the MVP, so that’s not nothing.
Jason Giambi, 2000
.333/.476/.647, 108 runs, 137 RBI, 29 doubles, 1 triple, 43 homers
You could make a case – a powerful case – that Giambi’s best year offensively with the A’s was a year later in 2001, when he scored more runs (109), hit more doubles (47) and hit for a better batting average (.347) while leading the AL with a .477 on-base percentage. But the A’s best offensive season in Oakland was 2000’s 947 runs scored – the only time since moving to the East Bay that the A’s have scored 900 or more runs (they’d done it three times in four years 1929-32 in Philadelphia). The A’s in 2000 had 104 RBI from Ben Grieve and 115 RBI from Miguel Tejada. And five A’s hit 20 or more homers, adding Eric Chavez and Matt Stairs to the first three. But it was Giambi who set the pace. The homer and RBI totals were the best of his career, and he was so feared, even in a loaded lineup, that he was walked a career-best 137 times.
Reggie Jackson, 1969
.275/.410/.608, 123 runs, 118 RBI, 36 doubles, 3 triples, 47 homers
The 1969 A’s didn’t know how good they were going to eventually become. Two years before the A’s started their run of five straight American League West titles that saw Oakland win the World Series in 1973-73-74, Oakland was just hoping to be competitive. Their pitching was decent, and their offense was respectable, mostly due to Jackson, who scored one out of every six runs the A’s tallied all season long. A case can be made for Jackson’s 1973 season, which saw him named the MVP for the first time while leading the league in runs (99), RBI (117) and homers (32) in helping Oakland to the second of its three straight World Series wins, to be sure, but his output in all three of those categories was better in 1969.
Mark McGwire, 1987
.289/.370/.618, 97 runs, 118 RBI, 28 doubles, 4 triples, 49 home runs.
In some ways, McGwire’s best year in Oakland would come almost a decade later, when he hit 52 home runs in 1996 and hit over .300 (.312) for a full season. But the sheer audacity of the first baseman’s breakthrough Rookie of the Year season in 1987 has few equals. He was supposed to be in a platoon with the left-handed hitting Rob Nelson and to back up at third base in addition to playing first. Nelson was actually the opening day starter at first base; McGwire, who had hit three homers in 18 games as a late-season callup in 1986, didn’t get a start until Game 2. He homered. But he only started five of the first 10 games that season and was loping along with a sub .200 average almost three weeks into the season. By that time Nelson, hitting .167 was no longer around – he’d be traded to the Padres in August as part of the Storm Davis pickup. McGwire would hit 15 homers in 25 games in May, and suddenly he was part of the baseball conversation. Before the season was over, he’d trample Frank Robinson’s three decades old record for home runs by a rookie (39) and drive in 118 runs.
Other contenders
Khris Davis 2018
.247/.326/,549, 98 runs, 123 RBI, 28 doubles, 1 triple, 48 homers
Davis never has hit for much of an average but his 48 homers led the American League and led to him getting the eighth-most votes in MVP balloting.
Miguel Tejada, 2002
.308/.354/.508, 108 runs, 131 RBI, 30 doubles, 0 triples, 34 homers
Tejada was already a proven RBI man coming into 2020, averaging 114 RBI each of the previous two seasons. This would prove to be his best season – and his only MVP season – with the A’s and his 131 RBI would be his best until driving in 150 his first year in Baltimore in 2004.
Marcus Semien, 2019
.285/.369/.522, 123 runs, 92 RBI, 43 doubles, 7 triples, 33 homers
Semien played in all 162 games for the first time and led the AL with 747 plate appearances, and it was his persistent productivity that led him to finish third in the MVP voting. He scored at least 15 runs each calendar month and drove in double digit runs five times in six months, missing out only in May (nine).
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