They other day when it was a slow news day and I was dredging up the corpse of Sammy Sosa's career for the umpteenth time, I was asked if there had been any players who did not "learn" how to take a walk (as I contended Sosa did), but rather who had a one-year walking renaissance and then went back to his old non-walking ways. Ergo, the Brady Anderson reference.

Anderson as you will recall famously hit 50 homers in 1996 after never hitting more than 21 in a season before that in his first eight seasons. In his six remaining seasons he would never hit more than 24.

So who was the base on ball's version of Brady Anderson?

Well, first I have to explain that the answer is not as easy as it sounds. In the early days, baseball kept redefining not only the strike zone but the number of balls required to draw a walk. From nine to eight in 1880, to seven the next year, to six in 1884, to five in 1886, and finally to the current four in 1889 (with the three-strike-yer-out rule coming the previous season).

So numbers fluctuated throughout the era. But for the heck of it we will include all seasons. What we will look for is the player season in which the player's walks per plate appearance ratio exceed his career ratio (minus the given season) by the most (400 PA minimum for the season and for the rest of the player's career).

Here are the tops of all time:

Aside from an odd Manny Sanguillen or two, most of those player seasons were byproducts of a base on balls rules change. But still, quadrupling one's walk ratio in one season?

Anyway, to determine who was the true Brady Anderson of the BB (and to avoid these rule-induced pretenders), I will look just at those players from 1900 on:

Gentlemen, I give you the infamous El Guapo, er, I mean, Clarence Huber. It's a bit anticlimactic, eh? Well, how about if we instead shot for Sanguillen? He did have a far more substantial career (four times as many plate appearances) than the three men ahead of him. And he had a stellar year in 1975 when he had his Brady-esque walk total. His .391 on-base percentage that year was almost fifty points higher than his season-high for the rest of his career and nearly seventy more than his career average.

Sanguillen stands out even more if you look at player seasons from 1970 on:

Manny's great 1975 season leads me to another question: Does a high-walk season improve one's batting ratios? I would think that it would have a direct bearing on one's on-base percentage and, therefore, a strong effect on OPS (since one of its two components is OBP). Let's test that theory.

Here are the OPS and OBP numbers for the three tables above. First, the all-time list:

Now, since 1900:

Finally, since 1970:

OK, so it does not appear that on-base percentage and OPS don't seem to improve with high-walk years. But maybe that's just what happens at the extremes. Let's see how well they correlate.

I ran the numbers for all qualifying player seasons, and here's what I found. Actually, they correlate not that well. The coefficient for walk improvement and OBP improvement was just 0.517. To OPS it was just 0.257.

So what does this mean? Not a whole lot, and that's meaningful. Let's say you have an epiphany and learn to walk one year, but the next year rolls around and you decide this walk thing isn't so hot. You would probably be right. That is, you probably didn't notice a tremendous change in your production in that year. Maybe it's the players who persist in this unproductive walking thing for one than a year that eventually reap the benefits.

OK, finally, here are the players who had the least Brady-like walk years. Alfredo Griffin makes a cameo: