Van Fossen wins Pitching Triple Crown; batting title winners; the Year of Chun!
Casey Van Fossen, the 23-year old ace of the Jacksonville Wolf Pack starting rotation, certainly made his mark during the 1986 season and will almost surely win the Harris/Lee award for the season he just had. In being the only pitcher in all of the WPK to win 20 games, and having easily led both leagues in strikeouts with 267, and also leading the SJL in ERA (2.94, just slightly higher than MGL ERA champ Matt Greene's 2.91), Van Fossen becomes the first WPK pitcher to win a Triple Crown since Aaron McNally did it in back-to-back seasons in 1974 and 1975.
His 267 strikeouts is the second highest single season total in WPK history, after Joel Travino's 285 in 1977.
The SJL batting title for 1986 goes to Boston's Kyle Adams, who is also a favorite to win the league MVP award this season. Adams not only had a slash line of .355/.431/.581 but with a pair of homers a few days before the end of the season he got to 30 (his 4th season with at least 30 homers), and he finished the season having scored 108 runs, driven in a league best 121, and with the highest WAR among SJL batters with 8.3.
The MGL batting titlist is San Francisco left fielder Ryan Frommeyer. The most impressive thing about this accomplishment is that Frommeyer plays his home games in one of the best pitcher's parks in the MGL. Surprisingly, his home/road splits were nearly identical: he hit .342/.375/.425 at home and ..348/.382/.448 on the road. He is a solid fielder too, with 8.5 ZR in left and 12 outfield assists.
But ultimately it was the Year of Chun! As in, Phoenix rookie phenom Hyeong-uk Chun. Chun absolutely shattered the WPK single-season home run mark with 70 (previous high was 54), including hitting a pair in the final regular season game for Phoenix. And in case one might be inclined to think that this might have been in the context of a rabbit-ball season, no other player in the WPK even got to 40 home runs this season. (Granted, Chun does play in a great hitter park that favors power hitters, but even on his own team the next best HR total was 30, by former MVP Luis Olivez.)
Chun also set new single-season highs in SLG (.741, previous high was .667 set by Bud Lindsay in 1979), OPS (1.145, previous high was 1.126 by Matt Van der Heyden in 1980), and Total Bases (435, previous high was 417 by Jesus Casiano in his Triple Crown season of 1970).
