By @jacobbeckett22

Records are fun. Recognizable numbers like 56 (game hitting streak - baseball), 100 (points in a game - basketball), 2,000 (rushing yards - football), 61 70 73 (home runs - baseball) give everyone something to root for and an easy way to track the greatest games or seasons of all time.

For a long time, MLS had 27. In the inaugural 1996 season, Roy Lassiter scored 27 goals, and no one was able to match it for a decade and a half. But then a man named Wondo hit the figure in 2012, Bradley Wright-Phillips did it again in 2014, and a seemingly very angry young man named Josef Martinez obliterated the mark with 31 goals last season.

So if we’re going with the one recognizable number like 56 or 100 or 73, Josef is the owner of the most impressive season in all of MLS history...for at least a couple more months, depending on whether or not anybody can stop Carlos Vela’s finishing kick.

But there are more stats than just goals! What if we add some context and think about some other ways to measure best seasons in MLS history? After all, plenty of literature on this site has shown that goals are hardly the be-all end-all of determining who’s best. Let’s widen the scope from just 27 and 31 to see what other historic accomplishments in MLS have long been discounted or under-publicized. We’ll do this in the format of a conversation with ourselves, mainly because I can’t think of another simple and straight-forward way to organize this column. And we can re-visit next year when the answer to half of these will include, if not start with, “2019 Carlos Vela.”

Quick housekeeping notes: to qualify for the list this column is based on, a season had to meet one of the following criteria: 20+ goals, 15+ assists*, 10+ goals and 10+ assists, 100+ shots, or the league leader in any one of those categories during a given season. As far as I can tell, the old-school shootout goals from the first few years of the league are not included in MLS’ record keeping, but I’ll admit I’m not entirely certain about that.

*Using MLS’ official record book here, so secondary assists are counted. Sorry, it wasn’t up to me.

Alright, so Josef scored the most goals in a season last year. What if I’m interested in efficiency - who scored the most goals per minute played in a season?

Josef Martinez. But not last year! In an injury-shortened 2017 season, Josef actually had a higher goals:minutes ratio, averaging 1.12 per 90 minutes played. Last season he was at a paltry 0.96 when he set the total record with 31.

A couple others to note: two more guys eclipsed a goal per 90 minutes - Stern John (more about him later) and some guy named Wolde Harris in 1998 - though he only played 1,133 minutes.

Okay so Josef is good, this has been established. Wasn’t there some stuff about him scoring lots of penalties last year?

Yeah. 8 of his 31 goals were penalties, which is the most of any of the seasons I gathered. Still, 23 non-penalty goals is hardly something to sneeze at.

Sure, but is it THE MOST?!

No! If we want to look at who scored the most non-penalty goals in a single season, the mystical number isn’t 31, or 27 for that matter. Instead, it’s 25. This was hit in Stern John’s magical 1998 season for the Crew, as well as Mamadou Diallo’s 2000 campaign with the Tampa Bay Mutiny. Both of those guys only added one penalty though, so their season totals of 26 have been sadly overlooked for many years.



Wow, who knew? Alright, enough with scoring goals, I’m more of a facilitator anyway. Who has the assists record for a season?

This isn’t even close. Carlos Valderrama had 26 in 2000 (conceivably with lots of them to Mamadou Diallo), and only one other guy has broken 20 (Sacha Kljestan in 2016).

That’s quite the season, but Valderrama almost never scored, right? How about a combination of goals and assists, who stands out there?

Correct, El Pibe had one goal in that season, a penalty. If you want the most goals + assists, your king is our dearly departed mighty mite Sebastian Giovinco - he had 22 goals and 16 assists in 2015. Before you ask me to strip out the three penalties he scored, it doesn’t impact the bottom line - his season still comes out on top in non-penalty goals + assists with 35 total. For the record, Seba also took an MLS record 181 shots that season.

That seems like a lot of shots. Is that a lot of shots?

That is a lot of shots. The three highest shot volume seasons in MLS history are: 2015 Sebastian Giovinco (181), 2016 Sebastian Giovinco (177), and 2018 Sebastian Giovinco (167). A weird fact is that of 53 100+ shot seasons in MLS history, only 17 of them happened before 2012 (32%). So I guess somebody in the last handful of years figured out that shooting more is good. #analytics

Okay okay, but remember I think volume is overrated and I like production on a per minute basis. Who had the most goals + assists per 90?

That standard was set by Diego Serna of the 2001 Miami Fusion. 15 goals and 15 assists in just under 2,000 minutes for a total of 1.37 G+A per 90. Not even padded by a single penalty. Cobi Jones also had quite the 1998 with 1.35 G+A per 90 (19 goals, 13 assists).

Wow, those are some truly fun and ultimately useless factoids. What other weird or interesting things did you learn from this dataset?

I thought you’d never ask. In bullet point form, to keep this history lesson from rambling on for too much longer: