Top 25 MLB batting seasons of all time

There is no shortage of greatness in the top-25 batting seasons in MLB history

Baseball is a game that has been around longer than any of the four major professional sports in the United States of America. Its history is long, and has many twists, turns, evolution, and permutations.

In the early days, slap hitters sprayed the ball all over the diamond, but rarely homered. MLB livened up the ball in the 1920s, made it too lively in the 1930s, and then raised the mound to give the pitchers an advantage until that got too far out of hand. Performance-enhancing drugs changed the course of the game in the late 1990s. The league got tough on drugs, swinging things back to the pitchers, but the rise in full-season travel ball has given MLB younger stars putting up historic numbers before the age of 25.

Picking out the top-25 offensive seasons in MLB history is a difficult task. The game has changed so much over the course of the last 150 years. Comparing past seasons to today is impossible. Pitchers throw harder, and with sharper break than in the glory days of Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle, but the limits of the human eye remain the same.

There are a few great metrics like WAR and OPS+ that attempt to strip away the passage of time and create fair cross-generational comparisons. Babe Ruth holds seven of the top 12 single-season spots for position-player WAR. There is a small chance that he was an alien sent from outer space to teach the rest of us how to hit. However, in the interest of sharing more history, other considerations were taken when making this list, so as to keep it from turning into an all-Ruth post. Read on for the top-25 batting seasons in MLB’s lengthy history.

25. The Great Home Run Chase of 1998

We know now that everything that unfolded in the great summer of 1998 was a work of fiction. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were juiced to the gills as they raced to take down the single-season record of Roger Maris that had stood for almost 40 years.

McGwire had been building up to the chase for several years, having hit 58 home runs in 1997 and 52 in 1996. It seemed only a matter of time before he would take down Maris. Sosa was an unexpected entrant into the pursuit of history. His spot was supposed to be occupied by Ken Griffey, who had hit 56 home runs in 1997. Griffey would finish a distant third to McGwire and Sosa in 1998 with another 56-homer season.

It was too easy to turn a blind eye to the fact that McGwire and Sosa were no longer fully human in appearance by the time they both blew past Maris and his record. We were all having too much fun falling in love with baseball again after the 1994 strike. Sosa, with his bubbly personality, brought the fun side out of the shy McGwire, making for must-see television all summer.

It is not a stretch to call this summer the one that saved the future of MLB. The 1998 chasae is viewed through a different lens in hindsight, but is historical importance for baseball cannot be overlooked.