Brilliant Reader Challenges: "Simpsons" Redux, Browns Quarterback Rankings and More

OK, time for this week’s Brilliant Reader Challenges! You guys outdo yourself every week, and this edition is a monster. We’ve got some “Simpsons” in here. We’ve got some Cleveland Browns quarterbacks in here. We’ve got some Royals in here. I’m exhausted.

Brilliant Reader Rob challenges me to come up with the best partial seasons in baseball history — that is to say, seasons cut short by injury, labor dispute or anything else.

OK, I put 81 games as a limit for a hitter and 15 games as a limit for a pitcher. And, for the purposes of this challenge, I did not include Negro Leagues seasons, because if I had, all 10 would have been Negro Leagues seasons — Josh Gibson in ’43, Oscar Charleston in ’21 or ’25 or ’29, etc. I left off 19th-century seasons as well.

No,. 1: Jacob deGrom, 2021 (key stats, 1.08 ERA, 146 Ks, 11 walks in 92 innings).

I think the whole purpose of Rob’s challenge was to get me to celebrate, again, Jacob deGrom’s utterly nuts 2021 season. It’s hard to compare pitchers in this limited-pitches era to any other time, but I would have to say that there has never been a pitcher who was harder to hit than deGrom in 2021.

The man gave up 3.9 hits per nine innings.

His WHIP was 0.554.

These numbers barely even seem real. I’m going to write a little something about deGrom and the Hall of Fame in the next little while — been discussing something interesting with Tom Tango — but for now I’ll just say how sad it is that we have not gotten to see more of deGrom, because when he was right, it was like looking directly into the sun.