Taking advantage of the fact that Major League Baseball is in a kind of limbo due to the lockout that threatens the start of the next season, I will write about records established by Dominican players that have lasted for years and seem destined to remain untouched in time. Of those marks, the best known are the one set by brothers Felipe, Mateo and Jesús Rojas Alou when they defended the San Francisco Giants’ outfield at the same time on September 15, 1963, the two grand slams connected by Fernando Tatis of the St. Louis Cardinals, in the same inning and in front of the same pitcher, Chan Ho Park, of the Los Angeles Dodgers, on April 23, 1999 and Sammy Sosa’s 3 seasons with 60 or more home runs. Today I am going to refer to feats that are less known, but that still seem unbreakable or very difficult to overcome.
Three Dominicans lead batting –In the 1966 campaign, a unique event occurred when the first three places in the National League’s best hitters box were occupied by players from the same nation other than the United States. The authors of this feat were the brothers Mateo and Felipe Rojas Alou, and Manuel Mota, a trio of native baseball players from the Dominican Republic, who finished the aforementioned season as first, second and third, respectively, in the fight for the batting crown of the old circuit. Mateo finished as the leader with an average of .342, followed by Felipe with .327 and Mota with .326.
Power and speed –In his first 4 seasons in the Major Leagues (1984-1987), second baseman Juan Samuel, of the Philadelphia Phillies, finished with double figures in tubes, triples, homers and stolen bases. He is the only one in history to accomplish that feat.
Felipe Rojas Alou-In his career as manager, Felipe Rojas Alou reached 1,033 victories and in his role as a player he had 2,101 hits. Those figures place Felipe as the winningest manager in Major League history with that many hits fired. That combination of victories as a foreman and hits as a player will be very difficult to match with the current trend of hiring managers with little or no experience as a Major League player.
@megkrantz