Baseball Remembers: Ted Kluszewski

Here’s some insight into how things happen around here.

A while back, during all of the talk about this year’s Hall of Fame ballot and whether Carlos Beltrán deserved to be elected, I noticed the sheer volume of postseason plate appearances he had. His teams made the playoffs seven times and in five of those years they advanced past the opening round, so Beltrán was able to rack up 256 career postseason plate appearances.

It should be no surprise that nearly all of the guys with the most career postseason plate appearances are from the last 25 years or so. If the top 50, the only ones who didn’t play sometime from 2000 onward were:

• #21 - Reggie Jackson, 318 PAs

• #24 - Pete Rose, 301 PAs

• #25 - Yogi Berra, 295 PAs

• #32 - Mickey Mantle, 273 PAs

• #50 - Mark Lemke, 257 PAs

How’s that for a list that should be framed and hung on a wall somewhere in the Lemke household?

Anyway, Beltrán’s total is short of the top-50 by one plate appearance. It’s a lot, but it’s not an insanely high number. The reason it caught my attention, though, is because Beltrán was so damn good in the postseason. He had a career OPS of .837 in 20 seasons, but his playoff OPS was nearly 200 points higher than that at 1.021. And that’s the part that got me wondering if he had the most playoff plate appearances of anyone whose postseason OPS exceeded 1.000. So I checked.