hen it comes to individual accomplishments during the 2022 Major League Baseball season, our attention has mostly been trained on Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees and his pursuit of 61 home runs and Albert Pujols of the St. Louis Cardinals and his advance toward 700 career home runs. Now, though, it's time to spend some bandwidth on Pujols' teammate Paul Goldschmidt and his designs on winning the Triple Crown. 

1. It's been a very long time since a National League player pulled it off

For the uninitiated, the batter's Triple Crown is achieved when a player leads his league in batting average, home runs, and RBI in the same season. It's an exceedingly rare feat, as you might expect.

As you can see, just 12 times across the sprawl of MLB history has a batter won the Triple Crown, and just 10 individual hitters have done it. The last was Miguel Cabrera in 2012, but in the National League it's been much longer. The last to do it was Medwick, himself a Cardinal, 85 years ago. That's a serious drought – significantly longer than the AL dry spell Cabrera ended in 2012. Goldschmidt's bid comes 100 years after Hornsby authored the very first Triple Crown season in 1922. 

On a team level, the Cardinals are tied with the Red Sox for most Triple Crown seasons with three. If Goldbird is able to make good on his efforts, then the Cardinals will stand alone atop that particular heap with four TCs. 

As for what we'll call the Ultimate Triple Crown – we'll define that as leading both leagues, or all of MLB, in the three categories of note – only one player has done that. That was Mantle in '56. Goldschmidt has almost no chance at joining him, thanks largely to Judge's huge lead on the MLB home run leaderboard.