Ernie Banks: Mr. Cub and the Joy of the Game
Ernie Banks hit 512 home runs and won back-to-back MVP awards for Chicago Cubs teams that finished below .500; this profile follows the career from shortstop to first base, with every number sourced.
Ernie Banks played 2,528 major-league games, hit 512 home runs, drove in 1,636 runs, and never appeared in a postseason game. All of that is true, and it is why his career is both easy to summarize and hard to weigh. The Chicago Cubs he played for from 1953 to 1971 finished above .500 only in 1963 and again in the last five seasons of his career, and even then they won no pennant. Banks was an All-Star in 11 seasons, won two Most Valuable Player awards, and was elected to the Hall of Fame on his first ballot in 1977 with 321 votes, 83.8 percent of the 383 cast. He did all of it on teams that, in his two MVP years, won 72 and 74 games.
This profile follows the career in phases: where he came from, how he rose at shortstop, the three seasons at the top, the move to first base and the long decline. The numbers come from the historical record through the 2025 season, and the article says plainly where that database stops being useful.
Dallas, the Monarchs and a September call-up
Ernest Banks was born on January 31, 1931, in Dallas, Texas. He stood six feet one inch tall and weighed about 180 pounds, a slight build for a man who would hit 512 home runs. Before he reached the Cubs he played for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League, and he served in the Army. The historical record does not carry his Monarchs seasons in the figures used here, so the career below starts when he reached the majors. That omission is worth stating: the Negro Leagues statistics the historical record includes cover 1920 to 1948, and his time there came after that window.
The Cubs brought him up in September 1953. His debut was on September 17, and he played 10 games that month, getting 11 hits in 35 at-bats for a .314 average and 2 home runs. He and Gene Baker were among the first Black players in Cubs history, and shortstop would be his position through 1961. Banks was a shortstop who hit like an outfielder, and that combination would define everything that followed.
What a shortstop was expected to do in 1954
Context matters for reading the early seasons. In the mid-1950s the shortstop was a glove-first position. A club wanted a player who could catch what was hit to him, turn the double play and bat eighth. Plenty of regular shortstops of the era hit fewer than ten home runs in a season.
Banks did not fit that description. In 1954, his first full season, he played 154 games, collected 163 hits in 593 at-bats for a .275 average, hit 19 home runs and drove in 79. Those are respectable numbers for a young player at any position and unusual for a shortstop. In 1955 he took a step that is easy to underrate: he hit .295 with 44 home runs and 117 runs batted in. That is a total that would have been big at any position in the National League. He finished third in the league in home runs that year, behind Willie Mays with 51 and Ted Kluszewski with 47, and he earned the first of his 11 All-Star seasons.
| Year | Games | Hits | Home runs | RBI | Average |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1954 | 154 | 163 | 19 | 79 | .275 |
| 1955 | 154 | 176 | 44 | 117 | .295 |
| 1956 | 139 | 160 | 28 | 85 | .297 |
| 1957 | 156 | 169 | 43 | 102 | .285 |
The 1956 season was a step back in power and a step forward in average, and it is a reminder that Banks was never a pure slugger. The home run count slid to 28 and the batting average reached .297. In 1957 he moved back to 43 home runs. Over the four seasons from 1954 to 1957 he hit 134 home runs and drove in 383 runs, and the Cubs finished seventh, sixth, eighth and seventh, with a losing record each time.
1958 to 1960: three seasons at the top
The peak of the career is three consecutive seasons.
In 1958 Banks hit .313 with 193 hits, 47 home runs and 129 runs batted in. He led the National League in home runs and in runs batted in, and he won the Most Valuable Player Award. The Cubs went 72-82 and tied for fifth.
In 1959 he hit .304 with 179 hits, 45 home runs and 143 runs batted in. He led the league in runs batted in again, 143 to Frank Robinson's 125 and Hank Aaron's 123, and he won his second MVP Award. The Cubs went 74-80 and tied for fifth again.
In 1960 he hit .271 with 41 home runs and 117 runs batted in, led the league in home runs, and won the Gold Glove at shortstop. The Cubs finished 60-94 and seventh.
Add the three seasons together and the line is 133 home runs and 389 runs batted in in 465 games. The same stretch gave him two MVP awards and one Gold Glove, and all three came for teams that never contended. That last fact is the unusual one. Most MVP winners play for winners, because voters look for players who help win pennants. Banks won twice on teams that finished below .500, which says how far ahead of his teammates the voters thought he was.
A word on how to read the 1959 number. Leading the league with 143 runs batted in reflects partly the hitter's skill and partly how many runners are on base when he bats. A team that wins only 74 games gives a cleanup hitter fewer of those chances than a pennant winner does, so a league-leading total for a fifth-place club is a stronger argument for his hitting than the raw number suggests. That is a reasoned inference, not something the database can prove.
Why he moved to first base
By the early 1960s the glove work was becoming a burden. In 1961 the historical fielding record shows him at shortstop for 104 games, in the outfield for 23 and at first base for 7. From 1962 he was at first base for good, with 149 games there in that season and about 1,259 games at the position over the rest of his career, compared with about 1,125 at shortstop.
The reasons are worth separating from the numbers. The record shows that he played only 138 games in 1961, down from 156 the year before, and that he spent time at three positions. Beyond that, the database cannot say why. Accounts of the move often point to his knees, and the timing is consistent with that, but a stat line cannot confirm a cause. The clean statement is that the Cubs moved their best hitter to first base when he was 31 and he continued to hit.
He hit 37 home runs in 1962 with 104 runs batted in and a .269 average, which is a high-quality first-base season. In 1963 the line fell to .227 with 18 home runs in 130 games, his lowest average in a full season. In 1964 he was back to .264, 23 home runs and 95 runs batted in over 157 games. He played 163 games in 1965 and hit 28 home runs with 106 runs batted in, and in 1967 he hit .276 with 23 home runs and 95 runs batted in.
The long second act, 1961 to 1969
If a player's career is divided at the move to first base, the second half has the sort of numbers that would make a good career for most players. From 1961 through 1969 Banks hit between 15 and 37 home runs each year, drove in at least 64 runs every year, and hit .262 overall (1,298 hits in 4,957 at-bats). It is a long, steady run of good seasons on teams that stayed near the bottom of the standings.
That changed in 1967. The Cubs won 87 games and finished third, their best record since 1945. In 1968 they won 84 and finished third again. In 1969 they won 92 games and finished second in the division, the best Cubs team of his career. Banks hit 23 home runs and drove in 106 runs that year, matching his 1965 total. He was 38 and in the first real pennant race of his career.
The Lou Gehrig Memorial Award, given for character and sportsmanship in the way Gehrig lived, came to him in 1967. He was selected to the All-Star team that year and again in 1969, his 11th and last time. The 1969 Cubs, who led for much of the summer, did not win the division. Banks never played in the postseason.
The decline and the last years
The end came quickly once it started. In 1968 he hit .246 with 32 home runs, a power season on a low average. In 1969 he hit .253 with 23 home runs and 106 runs batted in. In 1970 he played 72 games, hit 12 home runs and drove in 44, a pace of about 25 home runs per 150 games at the age of 39. He hit his 500th career home run that year. In 1971 he played 39 games, batted 83 times, hit .193 with 3 home runs and 6 runs batted in, and played his final game on September 26.
Add it up and the career line is .274 average, .330 on-base percentage and .500 slugging percentage, for an OPS of .830, with 407 doubles, 90 triples, 512 home runs, 763 walks and 1,236 strikeouts in 9,421 at-bats. One home run for every 18.4 at-bats is a very high rate for the era, and the slugging percentage of .500 is the number that most clearly marks him as a power hitter. The walk total is the number that does not: 763 walks in 19 seasons is modest, and his on-base percentage of .330 is good without being elite. His value came from hitting for power and, for the first half of his career, doing it at a premium position.
What the numbers cannot tell us
The historical record gives home runs, runs batted in and averages. It does not give wins above replacement, so there is no single figure for how much more valuable a shortstop with 44 home runs was than a first baseman with the same total. It carries no Statcast data, so we cannot say how hard he hit the ball or how fast he ran. It also does not carry park factors in the player figures used here, and Wrigley Field changes how a hitter's totals should be read: the wind off Lake Michigan can send fly balls out or hold them in, depending on the day.
There is also an honest limit on the Negro Leagues side. The historical record through 2025 includes Negro Leagues statistics for 1920 to 1948 as major-league data, but Banks played for the Monarchs after that window, and his seasons there are not in the figures here. When people say Banks was a complete player, they are partly relying on what they saw and partly on records this article does not have.
The player people remember
Banks is remembered less for a number than for a manner. The nickname Mr. Cub and the line "Let's play two," which he is famous for saying, came to stand for a player who loved the game when the team around him was losing. That reputation survives because the record backs it up: he played at least 150 games in 12 different seasons. He was at the park, he was at shortstop or first base, and he was hitting.
After baseball he stayed attached to the franchise as an ambassador. The Cubs retired his number 14, a statue of him stands outside Wrigley Field, and in 2013 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died in Chicago on January 23, 2015, at the age of 83. A comparison with other great players of the period is useful here: Frank Robinson won an MVP in both leagues and played in pennant races; Roberto Clemente reached 3,000 hits. Banks's case is different because he had no October at all. He had power at a premium position, for a club that did not reward it with wins.
Common questions
How many home runs did Ernie Banks hit? 512 in his career, with 47 in 1958 as his best single season. He hit 44 in 1955, 45 in 1959 and 41 in 1960 as well.
Did Ernie Banks win a World Series? No. He never appeared in a postseason game. He played 2,528 games, which puts him among the players with the most games who never reached October.
How many MVP awards did he win? Two, in 1958 and 1959, both in the National League and both for a Cubs team below .500. He also won a Gold Glove in 1960 and the Lou Gehrig Memorial Award in 1967.
When did he move to first base? In 1962, when he played 149 games there. He had played 7 games there in 1961, a year spent mostly at shortstop and in the outfield.
Was he a Hall of Famer? Yes. He was elected in 1977 in his first year on the Baseball Writers' ballot, with 321 votes out of 383, where 288 were needed.
Where to go next
If this profile interested you, read about Yogi Berra, whose ten rings make the opposite point, or about Bob Feller and Warren Spahn, whose careers overlapped Banks's early years. To learn how to read the lines in the table above, the box score guide walks through a game line by line. You can also compare the all-time leaders on the site's leaders page or browse the history topic page at history and the Hall of Fame.