How Good Was Mattingly in 1985-6?

He certainly had a couple of good years. His HRs-RBIs-AVG were

35-145-.324
31-113-.352

He had 211 & 238 hits. He had 48 & 53 doubles. In a more refined stat like offensive winning percentage, which is supposed to tell us the winning pct a team would have if all 9 guys in the lineup were identical and you gave up an aveage number of runs, he was good, but not great. He was 4th in 1985 with .739 and 2nd in 1986 with .742. But I am not writing this to cast sabermetric shadows on Mattingly. I want to look at his two year total in total bases (TB). He had 370 & 388. Those were the two highest single season totals from 1979-1993 (I wonder how many guys could say they had the two best in any 15 year period-if you figure it out, let me know).

I wondered how good that two year total was. So I tried to find the best two year totals by first realizing he had 758. The best year ever was 457 by Ruth. So even if Ruth had only 301 in the year before or after, his two year total would be 758. So I found all seasons with 300+ TBs using the Lee Sinins Complete Baseball Encyclopedia. Then I sorted them out and found the best two year totals. Where did Mattingly's 758 rank? 35th. Below is the top 50:

Ending year means the second year of the two year period. So Klein's years were 1929-30. You might say, big deal, 35th. But notice that only 3 players are on the list after 1938 and before 1985 (Musial, Mays, and Rice). The next one is not until the late 1990's, when baseball was in a big power surge.

If you go to the Retrosheet site, you can see that Mattingly slugged better at home those years (.590 vs. .551). The normal home SLG advantage in baseball in those two years was .016 (and .014 in 1984 and .019 in 1987). We could perhaps lower his home SLG to .567. If I recalculate his TBs, he would have a 2-year total of 742. That would only drop his rank to 49th. Notice that if we look at the period from 1939-1995, only 5 players still make the list: Musial, Snider, Mays, Rice, and Mattingly. And he is the only one I have park adjusted. So a pretty impressive two years. The 5th best 2-year TB total over a 57 year period. And the best in a 40 year period.