Rogers Hornsby: The Right-Handed Hitter Who Hit .424

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 9 min read

A career profile of Rogers Hornsby, the second baseman who hit .424 in 1924, won two Triple Crowns and retired with a .358 average, with the numbers in context and the limits of the record noted.

Rogers Hornsby hit .424 in 1924, and no one in the National or American League has hit higher in a season since Nap Lajoie's .426 in 1901, the first year of the modern era. He was a second baseman with 2,930 hits, 301 home runs and a career batting average of .358, which is second to Ty Cobb among players with 3,000 at-bats in the historical record. He won two Triple Crowns, in 1922 and 1925, and he did most of it for the St. Louis Cardinals in a stretch of six seasons when he averaged almost .397.

He was also, by most accounts, a hard man to be around. He argued with owners, did not hide his low opinion of teammates, and was dismissed as a manager more than once. Both halves of that reputation are part of why he is remembered as he is: as a hitter who may have been better than almost everyone, and as a person whom the game was never entirely sure how to celebrate.

This profile uses the historical record through 2025 for every number, narrates the career in phases, and explains what the statistics meant in the 1920s, when baseball was changing around him.

From Winters, Texas to the Cardinals, 1915 to 1919

Rogers Hornsby was born on April 27, 1896, in Winters, Texas, and died in Chicago on January 5, 1963. He stood 5 feet 11 inches and weighed about 175 pounds, bat and throw right. He debuted with the Cardinals on September 10, 1915, at the age of 19, and hit .246 in 18 games that fall, 14 hits in 57 at-bats.

The next four seasons were the education. He hit .313 in 1916 over 139 games, .327 in 1917 with 171 hits, .281 in 1918 and .318 in 1919. These are good numbers, and they were achieved in the Deadball Era, when the ball was soft and often discolored and the home run was a rare event. In those four years Hornsby hit 27 home runs combined (6, 8, 5 and 8). The pitching he faced was Deadball Era pitching, whose standard-bearer is described in our profile of Christy Mathewson, whose major-league pitching career ended in 1916.

What the 1916 to 1919 numbers do not show is a hitter about to become the best in the league. At 23 he was an established regular, not yet a star. The change came in 1920, and it came with the baseball itself.

The peak, 1920 to 1925

In 1920 the sport began to change. The spitball was banned (with an exception for pitchers already using it), the practice of using one ball until it was ruined faded, and Babe Ruth began to show what home runs could do to a lineup. Hornsby responded differently from Ruth. He was a line-drive hitter who used the whole field, and accounts describe him standing deep in the box and striding into the pitch. His power grew with the livelier ball without his swing changing.

The table gives the six seasons.

Over those six seasons he had 1,296 hits in 3,268 at-bats, a .397 average, with 153 home runs and 692 RBI. The averages in three of the seasons are above .400. His 250 hits in 1922 were the most he ever had in a season. He led the National League in batting average in 1920, 1921, 1922, 1924 and 1925 by any measure. Reference books credit him with seven batting titles in all, six consecutive from 1920 through 1925 and a seventh in 1928, but in 1923 he played only 107 games, so a strict modern qualifying rule would give that year to someone else, and counts differ.

The 1924 season in detail

The 1924 season is the one on which his reputation rests. Hornsby played 143 games and had 227 hits in 536 at-bats, a .424 average. To see how large that is, compare it with a very good hitter. A .300 hitter with the same 536 at-bats gets about 161 hits. A .250 hitter gets about 134. Hornsby got 227, which is 66 more hits than the .300 hitter in the same number of at-bats.

He also won by a distance. The next best National League average was .375, by Zack Wheat, a gap of 49 points. Babe Ruth led the American League in 1924, hitting .378. The league-wide numbers show the setting: teams scored 4.76 runs per game and hit 0.36 home runs per game, so the game was still built on singles and doubles, the style of hitting at which Hornsby was best.

The odd fact about 1924 is that he did not win the Most Valuable Player award. The Cardinals finished sixth at 65-89, and the National League award went to Dazzy Vance, a Brooklyn pitcher. Hornsby won the award in 1925 and 1929.

Two Triple Crowns

A Triple Crown requires leading the league in batting average, home runs and runs batted in, and Hornsby did it twice. In 1922 he hit .401 with 42 home runs and 152 RBI. The next best home run total in the National League was 26, by Cy Williams, so Hornsby won that category by 16, and his 152 RBI were 20 clear of Irish Meusel's 132.

In 1925 he did it again, with a .403 average, 39 home runs and 143 RBI. He led the league by 15 home runs over Gabby Hartnett, who had 24, and by 13 RBI over Jack Fournier, who had 130. The margins in both years are the margins of a hitter playing a different game from the men around him.

Hornsby and Ted Williams are the only players to have won two Triple Crowns. Hornsby's came in the decade of Ruth's greatest seasons in New York, which drew much of the national attention.

Player-manager, the 1926 title and the trade

In 1925 the Cardinals made Hornsby their manager in midseason, and in 1926 he led the club to the pennant and then to the World Series, which the Cardinals won in seven games over the Yankees. It was the first world championship in the franchise's history. The cost was personal. His own average dropped to .317 in 1926, the lowest since 1918, and he and owner Sam Breadon fell out over his contract.

After the season the Cardinals traded him to the New York Giants. He hit .361 with 26 home runs and 125 RBI in 1927 and then moved on to the Boston Braves in 1928, where he hit .387, led the league and was the player-manager. He changed clubs again, to the Chicago Cubs, in 1929.

The last years, 1929 to 1937

His 1929 season with the Cubs was his best after 1925. He hit .380 with 39 home runs and 149 RBI, won his second MVP award and helped Chicago to the pennant. The Cubs lost the World Series to Philadelphia. Hornsby's postseason numbers across 1926 and 1929 are modest: 12 hits in 49 at-bats, which is a .245 average, with no home runs and five RBI.

After that, the record shrinks. He played 42 games in 1930, 100 in 1931 and 19 in 1932, when he was also managing the Cubs. He moved to the Cardinals and then the St. Louis Browns in 1933, mostly as a pinch hitter and part-time player, and played his last game on July 20, 1937, at 41. He batted .321 in 20 games that season.

As a manager Hornsby won 701 and lost 812 over 15 seasons. That is a losing record, though it includes the 1926 title and several weak clubs, and by most accounts his blunt style cost him jobs.

How thin the line to .400 is

It helps to see how little room a .400 hitter has. A batting average is hits divided by at-bats, so in 1922 Hornsby's 250 hits in 623 at-bats gave him .4013. Had he made one hit fewer, 249 in 623, he would have finished at .3997, which rounds to .400 but is not over it. In 1921 the arithmetic went the other way: 235 hits in 592 at-bats is .397, and he needed 237 hits, two more, to reach .400.

The same arithmetic explains why a .400 pace is so fragile in April and so durable by September. A hitter with 40 hits in his first 100 at-bats is at .400, and one 0-for-10 stretch takes him to .364. At 500 at-bats, the same 0-for-10 costs only about 8 points, from .400 to .392. Hornsby finished above .400 in three different seasons, each with more than 500 at-bats, so the line held for months rather than weeks.

This is also the reason the 1924 average is so far outside the normal run. To finish at .424 over 536 at-bats, a hitter can fail to get a hit only 309 times. Hornsby did exactly that, since 536 minus 227 is 309, while a .300 hitter fails 375 times. Over a 143-game season the difference works out to about one extra hit every second game, which the box score of any single day will hide.

A difficult man

The personality is a theme of every account of him. The facts that are well documented are these. He did not drink or smoke, a rarity in his playing days, and by most accounts he avoided reading and movies in order to protect his eyes. He bet heavily on horse races and did not hide it, which brought him trouble with owners. He argued about money, he criticized teammates in public, and he fell out with Breadon in St. Louis and with others later. None of that changed the fact that opposing pitchers feared him.

What the record does not show is how he felt about the game. The historical record is a database of events, and it has nothing on temperament. A reader who wants the human side should rely on biographies rather than on a statistical summary.

What the numbers meant, and what they miss

Hornsby's career line is 2,259 games, 8,173 at-bats, 1,579 runs, 2,930 hits, 541 doubles, 169 triples, 301 home runs, 1,584 RBI, 135 stolen bases, 1,038 walks and 679 strikeouts. The batting line is .358, .434 on base and .577 slugging, an OPS of 1.010.

Three things stand out. First, he walked more than he struck out, 1,038 to 679, once every 12 at-bats on average, at a time when teams struck out only 2.70 times a game. Second, he hit 301 home runs while playing mostly second base, a position that in his time rarely produced power. Third, his .358 is not alone near the top of the list: Jud Wilson of the Negro Leagues, at .357, and Shoeless Joe Jackson at .356. Our article on the all-time batting average leaders shows the full list.

The limits are real. The historical record has no WAR and no Statcast, so claims that he was the best second baseman ever cannot be tested against modern value measures from this data alone. It includes Negro Leagues statistics only for 1920 to 1948 and only partially, so comparisons with the best Negro Leagues hitters of his time are incomplete. And a batting line says nothing about how well he fielded. What the numbers do show is a hitter whose rate statistics, in his own league and in his own era, stand out more than almost anyone's.

The Hall of Fame vote

Hornsby was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1942, not on his first try. The historical record of the baseball writers' ballots follows.

His vote total fell sharply in 1937 and 1938, and the data cannot say why; early ballots were split among many candidates. In 1942 he received 182 of 233 ballots, 78 percent.

Common questions

Who was better, Hornsby or Ty Cobb? Cobb's career average of .366 is higher over 11,436 at-bats to Hornsby's 8,173, and he finished with 4,189 hits to 2,930. Hornsby had more power, 301 home runs to 117. The honest answer depends on whether you value longevity or the peak.

Did Hornsby hit .400 more than once? Yes. He did it three times by the numbers on the table: 1922 (.401), 1924 (.424) and 1925 (.403). In 1921 he missed it by three points at .397.

Why did the Cardinals trade him? After the 1926 title Hornsby and Breadon disagreed about his contract, and the trade followed. The historical data records the move, not the reason, and accounts differ in detail.

How does he compare with the next generation of hitters? Jimmie Foxx and Mel Ott, who was a Giants teammate in 1927, finished with far more home runs, 534 and 511, but neither matched Hornsby's average.

Where to go next

To see today's leaders and compare any season with Hornsby's, visit the leaders page and the stat calculator. For the broader story of the Hall of Fame, the history and Hall of Fame topic page collects more articles.