Jimmie Foxx: Double X and the Power of the Thirties

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 10 min read

A career profile of Jimmie Foxx, three-time MVP and 534-homer slugger, from the Eastern Shore of Maryland to Philadelphia and Boston, with the numbers explained in the context of the 1930s.

Jimmie Foxx retired in 1945 with 534 home runs, a .325 career batting average and a .609 slugging percentage. At the time only Babe Ruth had hit more home runs. In the early 1930s he was among the most feared right-handed hitters alive, a thick-armed first baseman, catcher and third baseman from the Eastern Shore of Maryland whom writers nicknamed Double X and, for the muscle, the Beast. He won three Most Valuable Player awards and a Triple Crown, led his league in home runs four times, and did most of it before he turned thirty-two.

His story is also one of the more instructive cases of how a great hitter gets remembered. Foxx played in the shadow of Ruth, then Lou Gehrig, then Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams, and he did not reach the Hall of Fame until his sixth year on the ballot, in 1951. He died in 1967 at fifty-nine. This article follows the career in phases, explains what each season's numbers meant in the run environment of the time, and says plainly what the historical record can and cannot tell us.

A farm boy from Sudlersville

James Emory Foxx was born on October 22, 1907, in Sudlersville, Maryland, a small town on the Eastern Shore. He batted and threw right-handed and is listed at 72 inches and 195 pounds. Colorful childhood stories are attached to him, as they are to most players of his era, and they cannot be verified here, so I will leave them out.

What is well documented is how he reached the majors. Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics signed him as a teenager, and he is usually said to have come to Mack's attention through Frank Baker, the former Athletics third baseman known as Home Run Baker, who had Maryland roots. Foxx made his major-league debut on May 1, 1925, when he was just seventeen years old. He had nine at-bats that season and collected six hits.

That debut season is worth a moment because it shows the problem Mack faced. His lineup already had one of the best catchers of the era in Mickey Cochrane, and Foxx came up as a catcher. The solution was to move him around the diamond, and the reason he stayed in the lineup was obvious from the moment he got regular at-bats.

Waiting for a job: 1925 to 1928

The first four seasons were an apprenticeship. In 1925 he went 6-for-9 in 10 games. In 1926 he hit .312 in 26 games, and in 1927 he hit .323 in 61 games with 3 home runs. In 1928 he played 118 games, collected 131 hits, hit 13 home runs and drove in 79 runs with a .328 average. A young hitter who is not yet a regular can look better or worse than he is because of a few hundred at-bats, and the pattern here is one of steady improvement rather than a breakthrough.

The Athletics of those years were building toward something. Mack had assembled a club around Cochrane, the outfielder Al Simmons and the pitcher Lefty Grove, and the missing piece was a first baseman who could hit with them. Foxx became that piece in 1929. A 20-year-old who hit .328 as a part-timer was clearly worth a regular job.

The 1929 to 1931 pennants

When Foxx became an everyday player in 1929, the Athletics won the American League pennant and the World Series. He played 149 games, collected 183 hits in 517 at-bats, hit 33 home runs, drove in 118 runs and batted .354. They won the pennant and the Series again in 1930 and lost the 1931 World Series. In 1930 he hit .335 with 37 home runs and 156 runs batted in; in 1931, .291 with 30 home runs and 120 runs batted in.

Those figures need context, and the context is the run environment. The year 1930 is famous for hitting: the major leagues averaged 5.55 runs per team game that year, the highest of this stretch, and the American League batting title went to Al Simmons at .381. A .335 average was good that year but not distinguished, and 37 home runs was well behind Hack Wilson's 56 in the National League and Ruth's 49 in the American. Foxx was a very good hitter in a high-scoring year, and the rest of his peak comes in years when scoring fell.

In the three World Series for which the historical record lists him on the roster, he hit .344, with 22 hits in 64 at-bats, 4 home runs and 11 runs batted in over 18 games. The Athletics won two of those three Series. A club that won three straight pennants with a young Foxx hitting in the middle is the foundation of the legend.

The peak: 1932 and 1933

If you want one year to explain why Foxx is in the Hall of Fame, take 1932. He played 154 games and hit .364 with 213 hits, 58 home runs and 169 runs batted in. He led the major leagues in home runs, and the runner-up in the league, Ruth, hit 41. His 169 runs batted in led the American League, ahead of Gehrig and Simmons, who each had 151. He was named the Most Valuable Player.

The 58 home runs were the highest total since Ruth hit 60 in 1927, and they stood for a long time as one of the closest approaches to Ruth's mark. The Athletics won 94 games that year and finished second to the 107-win Yankees, a reminder that individual brilliance does not always produce a pennant.

A year later he was better by a narrower definition. In 1933 he hit .356 with 48 home runs and 163 runs batted in, leading the American League in all three categories, which is a Triple Crown. The league's second-best home-run hitter that year, Ruth, hit 34, and the second-best run producer, Gehrig, drove in 139. He was named Most Valuable Player again. Two seasons, two Most Valuable Player awards, and 106 home runs between them.

Why the numbers meant more than they look

A home-run total means something only against its era. In 1932 the major leagues hit about 0.55 home runs per team game, and in 1933 about 0.44, with scoring at 4.91 and then 4.48 runs per team game. Today's major-league figures are well above those, which means that a 48-homer season in 1933, when the league's second-best total in the American League was 34, was a bigger gap over the field than the raw number suggests.

The ratio is a useful way to see it. Foxx hit 534 home runs in 8,134 at-bats, one every 15.2 at-bats. His career slugging percentage of .609 and on-base percentage of .428 add up to an OPS of 1.038, a rate that is an easy way to measure the combination of getting on base and hitting for power. Players with that kind of figure are rare in any decade, and it was built across more than 2,300 games rather than a short hot streak.

The same exercise reminds us of what is missing. The historical record does not give park factors, so there is no way to say how much Shibe Park or Fenway Park helped him. It does not give league-adjusted figures such as OPS+. And it does not give wins above replacement, a modern estimate of total value that would also credit or debit his defence at a moving set of positions.

Comparisons are fair game as long as they are modest. For a contemporary standard, the profile of Rogers Hornsby shows what a right-handed hitter at the top of the sport looked like a few years earlier, and Mel Ott is the National League slugger of the same decade, elected to the Hall of Fame in the same year as Foxx.

The move to Boston: 1936 to 1941

After the 1935 season, the Athletics sold Foxx to the Boston Red Sox. In his last year in Philadelphia he had hit 36 home runs and shared the American League lead with Hank Greenberg, while driving in 115 runs with a .346 average. The terms of the deal I will leave aside; what matters here is the change of ballpark and club.

At Fenway Park he played seven seasons and hit .320 with 222 home runs and 788 runs batted in in 887 games for the club. His first Boston season, 1936, produced 41 home runs, 143 runs batted in and a .338 average. In 1937 he hit .285 with 36 home runs. Then came 1938, the best season of his Boston years: 50 home runs, 175 runs batted in and a .349 average. His 175 runs batted in led the major leagues, though Hank Greenberg's 58 home runs took the home-run title, and Foxx was named Most Valuable Player for the third time.

In 1939 he did something that does not always get noticed. At 31, in 124 games, he hit .360, and his 35 home runs led the major leagues. In 1940 he hit 36 home runs and drove in 119; in 1941 his average held at .300, but the home runs fell to 19. From 1939 on he shared the lineup with a young Ted Williams, who would take over as the club's great hitter as Foxx's numbers slid. The profile of Ted Williams covers that career.

The decline, and the pitching cameo

By 1942 the production had gone. He split the season between the Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs, hit .226 in 100 games and 8 home runs. He did not play in 1943. In 1944 he went 1-for-20 in 15 games with the Cubs, and in 1945, a wartime season in which rosters were thin, he signed with the Philadelphia Phillies and played 89 games, hitting .268 with 7 home runs.

The 1945 season also gave him a footnote that is not in most biographies. The Phillies used him as a pitcher, and in 22 2/3 innings he went 1-0 with a 1.59 earned run average and 10 strikeouts. His career pitching line across 10 appearances is 1-0 with a 1.52 earned run average, which is, for a career pitching total, one of the stranger lines among position players. It was a wartime curiosity and should not be read as more than that.

The drop from 1941 to 1942 is abrupt. Accounts of his later life mention injuries and drinking, but the data here cannot say which mattered or when, so I will state only what the numbers show: a steep fall in power and average from age thirty-four.

Waiting for the Hall

The Hall of Fame story is odd for a player with these numbers. In the first Baseball Writers' Association vote, in 1936, Foxx received 21 votes out of 226 ballots, with 170 needed. He appeared on the writers' ballot again in 1947, 1948, 1949 and 1950, with his support rising from 10 votes in 1947 to 50 in 1948, 85 in 1949 and 103 in 1950, when the threshold was 126. He was elected in 1951 with 179 of 226 votes, 170 needed.

Part of that history is procedural. In 1936 he was still an active player, and the historical ballot records show a special nominating vote in 1946 and a runoff in 1949 along the way, so the machinery of election was still being worked out. By the standard of the present day, a 534-home-run hitter with three Most Valuable Player awards would be a first-ballot lock, and the long wait is a good reminder of how much the process has changed.

After the game

Foxx's life after baseball was harder than his career. In 1952 he managed the Fort Wayne Daisies of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Accounts of his later years describe money trouble and failing health, though the specific stories vary and I will not repeat the ones that cannot be confirmed. He died in Miami on July 21, 1967.

His legacy has two parts. One is statistical: a 534-home-run, .325-hitting first baseman who led the American League in home runs four times and in runs batted in three times, and who was in the top three in home runs in other years. The other is that of a player whose career overlapped with the sport's most famous names and who is sometimes remembered after them. A reader who wants a measure of his standing should use the numbers, and the leaders pages let you rank any of them against the rest of the record.

What the historical record cannot answer

The historical record covers every major-league season through 2025, and its figures for Foxx are complete. What it lacks is worth listing. There is no WAR, so there is no way to say how many wins his bat was worth above a replacement player, or how his defence at first base, catcher and third base compared with his contemporaries. There is no Statcast, a tracking system introduced in the 2010s. Pitch-by-pitch data is not available for his career, so there is no way to say what kinds of pitches he hit. And although the historical record through 2025 now includes Negro Leagues statistics from 1920 to 1948, those records are partial, so any ranking of Foxx's era against all of its best hitters is incomplete in a way the numbers do not show.

Common questions

How many home runs did Jimmie Foxx hit? He hit 534 in his career, 302 of them with Philadelphia's Athletics and 222 with Boston, and the rest with the Cubs and Phillies. He was second on the all-time list when he retired.

How many Most Valuable Player awards did he win? Three, in 1932, 1933 and 1938. The first two came with the Athletics and the third with the Red Sox.

Did he win a Triple Crown? Yes, in 1933, with a .356 average, 48 home runs and 163 runs batted in, according to the historical award tables.

Did he really pitch in the major leagues? Yes. He made ten pitching appearances, mostly in 1945 with the Phillies, with a career record of 1-0 and a 1.52 earned run average.

When did he make the Hall of Fame? He was elected by the writers in 1951, in his sixth appearance on their ballot.

Where to go next

For a sense of the slugging landscape around him, read the profiles of Mel Ott and Joe DiMaggio, and for the first great October in Boston read the first modern World Series of 1903. The Hall of Fame itself is described at https://www.baseballhall.org/, and the Boston Red Sox team page follows the club he played for in the late 1930s.