B-R Blog & Stat of the Day

It seems we cannot generate a list of walk-off balks (meaning balks that were the last play of the game, allowing the winning run to score) using the Play Index, so I thought I'd beseech you, the readers, to help me generate a list. Perhaps someone has already compiled one?

Please provide links below to box scores for games that ended on a balk or to a list on an outside website that has a full list.

I'll get us started.

There was this 2000 game where John Rocker balked in the winning run.

The Braves were on the winning side of a walk-off balk in this 1993 game.

Just as I was writing this, Raphy mentioned that he thinks Sean might have posted a complete list of walk-off blogs on the old B-R blog before the merge with the 'Stat of the Day' blog, but we can't seem to find it. Anyway I'll see if Sean still has it but in the meantime let's see what our readers can find.

Here's a little follow-up for you. The plot below shows both the percentage of walks each season that were bases-loaded walks (blue line) as well as the percentage of all bases-loaded plate appearances each season that resulted in walks (red line).

We see that all the way back in 1956 was the high point (post-1954) for percentage of bases-loaded plate appearances that turned into walks, with 8.6% of those PAs turning out that way. The behavior of the stat has been weird ever since. It declined fairly steadily through 1968 until suddenly jumping way up in 1969. That change was probably due to the lowering of the pitcher's mound--with pitchers having less of an advantage they probably nibbled a little more, hence the increase in walks. The rate remained steady for a while until suddenly falling sharply in 1982 and then regaining step-wise in 1983, 1984, and 1985. There was another huge drop in 2001 and an increase in the last 4 seasons. The values for 2000 and 2009 are the highest since the 1959 season.

The percentage of all walks that were bases-loaded walks tracks very similarly to the first stat we discussed. It might appear to vary less but that's just because the data is more compressed at the bottom of the graph. The only significant difference is that the 2009 figure of 2.36% of all walks coming in bases-loaded situations is a post-1954 high, and this means an underlying shift in the frequency of walks and/or the frequency of bases loaded situations.

I have a knee-jerk response to argue that more bases-loaded walks is a bad thing. Nobody likes to watch their team issue a based-loaded walk to the opponent. But as was pointed out my a commenter on the previous post, giving up a bases-loaded walk beats the heck out of giving up a 3-run double. In periods of high offense, it may make sense in specific batter-pitcher matchups to keep the ball off the plate and hope the batter makes an out. In the "worst" case a run is walked in.

Incidentally, you don't need to use the Play Index to get the data used for these plots. The total number of walks as well as the number of plate appearances and walks with the bases loaded can be found on the ML Batting Splits pages.

Since 1954, there have been 328 hitting streaks of 20 games or more. (You can find them here, here, here and here.) As a group, the players accumulated 12,060 hits in 30,830 at bats for a batting average of .391. For some players, their streaks were a combination of hot hitting combined with a little luck. For others, the streaks appear to almost be a coincidence.

Here are the players with the highest batting averages during their hitting streaks.

Musial's batting average during his streak was so high, that even if you remove the 20 hits and at bats used to extend his streak, he still hit .382.

Conversely, here are the players with the lowest batting average in a streak of 20 or more games:

Tommie Agee hit in 20 straight games and only managed to get 23 hits in those games. If you take out his 20 streak extending at bats and hits, Agee hit a whopping .050 during that streak.

Agee's performance made me wonder about the longest hitting streaks in which a player had exactly 1 hit in each game. Here are the leaders since 1954.

A silly little list via Baseball-Reference.com's Play Index Batting Season Finder...members of the Hall of Fame (Cooperstown) with 3 or more seasons where they qualified for the batting title and had an OPS+ less than 100:

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These guys at the top of the list made the Hall for the love of glove, eh?

I did a quick batting event finder to find a list of all the bases loaded walks in 2009. I was surprised to see that there were 392 such walks, meaning that on average each team received 2 such free passes per season. Just as a check, in 2008 there were 372 bases loaded walks and in 2007 there were 351. Going back further there were 319 in 2006, 271 in 2005, and 329 in 2004. So at least as far as recent history goes, the bases loaded walk has become a lot more common.

A few of the interesting things we can learn from the 2009 results are that 8 of the bases loaded walks were game ending:

Wow, the Dodgers were all over this, winning 3 games and losing another by walks with the bags full. Also Juan Pierre must be one of the most unlikely guys to make a list like this, having drawn only 27 walks all of last season.

Among individual players, the 2009 leaders in bases loaded walks were:

Adam Dunn

and Geovany Soto

each with 5. Interestingly, though, Dunn had 116 total walks as compared to just 50 for Soto.

I won't show all the games, but the pitchers to give up the most bases-loaded walks were Carlos Marmol with 6, and Daniel Cabrera, Manny Parra, and Jeff Suppan each with 5.

I was stunned to learn that 2009 featured not only a game with 4 different bases-loaded walks, but another game with 5!

The 4-walk job is this one, where 4 out of 5 consecutive batters walked with the bases loaded. Three of Suppan's such walks came in that game.

The 5-walk job is this one, a memorable game for Phillies fans. After the Braves drew a bases-loaded walk in the top of the 7th inning to go ahead 10-3 in the game, the Phillies roared back in the bottom of that inning with 8 runs, including 4 bases-loaded walks coming from 2 different pitchers. The Phils held on to win that game.

I didn't have to go back too far to find the last example of a game with 5 bases-loaded walks. In fact in happened in 2008, memorably, when Jack Hannahan himself walked twice with the bases loaded in the same game.

This is the first post in a new regular feature on the Baseball-Reference.com blog. Each Saturday I will post a baseball card along with some stats and commentary about the card itself. Please feel free to make any suggestions in the comments below.

Despite having a rookie baseball card in the 1979 Topps set and finishing 3rd in the NL Rookie of the Year voting in 1980, Lonnie Smith didn't get a card in the 1980 set itself. However, after playing in 9 post-season games with the champion Phillies that post-season, Smith got cards in the 1981 sets, including this one in 1981 Fleer. This year was a big one for baseball cards, with Fleer and Donruss coming out with sets to challenge Topps, who had been the sole company on the market for numerous years (and is again in 2010, for the first time since 1980.)

Although this is not an action shot of Smith, I still love the card. It's a good shot of him, mutton chops and all, and there's a lot to see from his index finger outside the glove to his cool Phillies wristbands. I also enjoy cards that contain some evidence of when or where they were taken. In the background appears to be a Padre player, wearing the brown and yellow of the day. As Smith's jersey is an away one, this picture was probably taken in Jack Murphy Stadium, perhaps in June of 1980 when the Phillies visited San Diego.

Smith was, in my opinion, an underrated player. He hit for average, got on base well, had excellent speed, and was a decent base-stealer. The thing that really sticks out about his career, though, was the degree to which he was in the right place at the right time.

Check out the leaders for most post-season games played in the 1980s:

Lonnie's on top,and that's not even considering his post-season games with the Braves in the early 1990s. In fact, from 1954 to 1994 (stopping short of the wild card era) Smith has the 3rd-most playoff games, behind only Reggie Jackson and Pete Rose.

As a recap, Smith started with the Phillies and played on their 1980 championship team. During the 1981 off-season he was traded to the Cardinals and won another World Series with St. Louis in 1982. He was still on the Cardinals in 1985 but was traded mid-season to the Royals, only for both teams to make it to the World Series and Kansas City to come out on top. (As an aside--can you name any other players to play for both World Series teams in a given year?) Eventually the Royals dumped Smith and he was picked off the scrap heap by the Braves, one of the worst teams in baseball. Lonnie was an instrumental part of the rebirth of that franchise, appearing in two World Series in 1991 and 1992 with Atlanta before moving on to Pittsburgh in 1993. He played in 5 World Series with 4 different teams and was on the winning side three times. That's pretty remarkable.

In 2009, there were a total of 276 instances of a player hitting at least two homers in the same game. This counts some games twice when more than one player did it in the same game. In 210 of those games, the player's team won while in 66 of them, his team lost (including this September game in which Chris Young homered three times.)

Anyway, that means that in 2009, teams won 76% of the time when one of its players hit at least 2 homers. That's pretty good. Let's take a look at historical values:

I'm surprised that the win percentage hasn't changed all that much over time. Since 1954, it's been between 70% and 80% most year except for some isolated spikes, particularly in 1966, 1972, and 1979. I would have expected that in the Steroids Era, the win percentage would have gone down a little bit since more overall scoring means additional homers gives a team a little less of an advantage than it used to.

Perhaps if we could plot this data all the way back to 1900, we'd see that win percentage was consistently higher when homers were quite a bit less common.

For what it's worth, I also calculated the ratio of instances of 2+ HR games each season to the total number of games that year. It's not quite right to call it a straight percentage of games with 2+ HR performances since some games feature two or more such performances by individual players. However, the ratio was right around 10% in the late 1950s, dropped to 8% by the late 1960s, then leveled around 7% by the late 1970s and through the 1980s (save the 1987 spike to almost 13%.) In 1993 it jumped to 9.5% and in 1994 it was 12.5%. Eventually it peaked in 1999 just shy of 15% and has slowly dropped since then, down to 11.4% in 2009. Still, given how much more common it is today than in, say, the 1970s, I would have expected the overall win percentage to be a little lower today, but it is not.

We get a lot of requests for fielding leaderboards, but not many people realize they can actually create their own using tools we already have on the site. With that in mind, today we're going to take a look at some questions you can answer using the fielding stats pages we have for each league.

To get to a fielding stats page, first start at a league's main page. Underneath the banner ad, there's a navbar with tabs that will drop down to give you more options when you roll your mouse over them (denoted by "[+]"). One of them is for fielding, so roll over "Fielding [+]" and click on "Standard Fielding". This page has traditional fielding stats for every team and player in the league across all positions, and you can sort the tables by clicking on the header of the column you want to order the teams/players by. If you want to see a breakdown of games by position for the league, mouse over Fielding [+] again and click "Appearances". And if you want to break down player and team fielding stats by position, mouse over Fielding [+], then click the position you'd like to see. There you'll find traditional stats again, but also advanced categories that use play-by-play to dig into a deeper level of detail.

Now that you're armed with this knowledge, here's a quick quiz to test your ability to find specific pieces of information on the fielding pages:

(See more Baseball-Reference Tutorials here.)

As I promised yesterday, here is the breakdown of 1-run wins since 1900.

I decided to group decades together because there was a lot of year-to-year fluctuation that made the graph hard to read with so many data points.

Three notes on how to read this graph:

• The legend tells you how many runs the winning team scored. Therefore the "1" line represents games that were 1-0 while the "5" line represents games that were 5-4.
• I have grouped each decade's data at the first year of that decade. So, data at 1900 is the sum of all the data from 1900 to 1909, and the data at 2000 is the sum of all the data from 2000 to last season.
• The calculation is the fraction of such games out of all 1-run wins over the given period. In other words, you can see that in the 1900-1909 period, roughly 21% of all 1-run victories had the final score of 2-1. This graph does not include any consideration of the total number of games played.

We can see that the decade just completed (shall we start that debate again?) yielded more 4-3 games than any other type of 1-run victory, and only the 1930s can also boast that same leader. In fact, the overall breakdown is quite similar between the 2000s and the 1930s.

The trends over the last 5 decades mirror the general increase in scoring in the games. One-run victories with 1, 2, or 3 runs have been in steady decline since the 1960s while one-run victories with 4 runs have been pretty almost totally flat. The one-run wins with 5, 6, and 7 runs have been significantly increasing over the same period, as generally have been the wins by even larger margins  (at least until the 2000s.)

The data from this graph was generated using the Situation Record tool.

In the 2009 season, 752 different major league players combined to collect 43,524 hits. Some players collected their hits in bunches, while others were more methodical in compiling their hit totals. Here's a chart listing the way that every player arrived at their hit totals for 2009. ( To do this, I combined the search results for the season finder for hits with the game finders for players with games in which h=1, h=2, etc.. To find an individual player's total, you can simply use the PI batting event finder.) 1HG refers to the number of games in which a player recorded exactly 1 hit. The percentages are out of total games played. Click on the column headings to sort.
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