Norm Cash Marquee

In 1961 he led the American League with 193 hits, hit 41 home runs, drove in 132 and batted .361. He never batted .290 in any other season of a seventeen-year career. He admitted years later that he had used a hollowed-out bat filled with cork and rubber that summer, which is either the explanation or a joke he kept telling.

The rest is a good career on its own terms: 1,820 hits, 377 home runs, 1,103 runs batted in, 1,043 walks and a .271 average, almost all of it for Detroit, where he played fifteen seasons and won the 1968 World Series. Four All-Star selections.

He was among the more popular players in the club's history and one of the few to hit a ball out of Tiger Stadium. He drowned in 1986, at fifty-two, having fallen from a dock in Michigan. The writers gave him six votes of 385 in 1980.