A chronology of the best leadoff home run hitters.

Undoubtedly, the best beginning (from the batting team's perspective) to a baseball game is when the leadoff batter belts a home run. While the result is "only" one run, it is an instantaneous run which gives the batting team an immediate opportunity to win the game--"Ya can't win if ya don't

So, which players have performed the best in terms of hitting leadoff homers throughout the history of major league baseball? In this article the chronology of the best leadoff home run hitters is provided.

To ascertain the best leadoff home run hitters, a two-part evaluation process is used. In Part 1, the focus is on single-season leadoff home run performance. Part 2 focuses on career leadoff home run accomplishments.

Before providing the findings of my research, it is important to know how the data for leadoff home runs were obtained.

The primary source for information was The Home Run Encyclopedia, which covers all of the major league homers hit up through the 1995 season. For the 1996-2004 seasons, the SABR Home Run Log was utilized, thanks to the cooperation of David Vincent. Two independent steps were utilized for collecting (and verifying) the leadoff home run information.

First, I checked each player included in the hitter register of The Home Run Encyclopedia and recorded the number of leadoff home runs he hit in each season [from 1876 through 1995].

Next, I went through the "Yearly Home Run Totals by Team and League--Home Run Totals (by Hitter)" section and recorded the number of leadoff home runs credited to each team for each season from 1876 through 1995. Then, utilizing the complete player rosters available in The Greet Encyclopedia of 19th Century Major League Baseball and the Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball, I recorded the names of the leadoff home run hitters for each team for each season from 1876 through 1995.

These two (seemingly redundant) steps were carried out so as to have an independent verification of each search--to make certain that I didn't make any transcription errors and to make sure that the player-team information in The Home Run Encyclopedia was internally consistent. In other words, if the encyclopedia stated that the Red Sox had four leadoff homers in 1967, there has to be some number of Boston players with the same total of leadoff homers in 1967. And vice versa. As it turned out, there was only a handful of leadoff home run inconsistencies in The Home Run Encyclopedia (perhaps due to incorrect inputting at the publisher's end). Fortunately, these inconsistencies were readily cleared up by resorting to the SABR Home Run Log.