B-R Blog & Stat of the Day

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I wrote about winning 1-0 and some of the limits in the Play Index in searching for such games (such as the 1954 limit.) Loyal reader DavidRF pointed out the Situational Reports tool on the site, something I am embarrassed to admit I never knew about before.

What a cool toy! The first thing I did was figure out how the margin of victory has broken down since 1900. (A quick reminder that below where I talk about 1-run margins of victory, I'm not referring to only 1-0 games like yesterday but rather all games with a 1-run differential.)

Here are the percentages of games won by a particular number of runs since 1900:

As you can see, for most of baseball history, 1-run victories have been the most common. That's not too surprising--given that both teams start with zero runs and one run is the smallest margin that can decide a game, it makes sense that it is the most common outcome. I'm curious to see what type of 1-run margin is the most common but I'd assume it's probably 2-1 or 3-2. (I'll post that tomorrow, OK?) There have been just a few times when all victories of 5 runs or more were more frequent than 1-run wins: in the early 1900s, some of the 1930s, 1948, and, ho hum, the Steroids Era. I think we're beating a dead horse on that one, but suffice it to say--scoring lots of runs leads to big wins sometimes.

In some periods, run-scoring was so low that 2-run victories actually became more frequent than all wins of 5 or more runs. That happened in 1917 and 1968. The low overall scoring in 1968 caused the mound to be lowered, giving batters a little assistance against pitchers.

I find it interesting how consistent 2, 3, and 4-run victories have been. For the last 100+years, you can bank on the fact that 4-run victories would comprise 11 percent of all games, plus or minus a small fraction. Three-run games have been nailed at 15% and 2-run games have been fairly consistent around 18%. I did not show the broken-out data above, but victories of exactly 5 runs have been very consistent at 8-9% and 6-run wins have been right at 6%. I would imagine that even larger wins show more variation due to being increasingly rare events.

Some facts about winning by a score of 1-0, all post-1954:

• No team, since 1954, has ever won 3 straight games by a score of 1-0. I found this out by looking at the team batting streak finder.
• The last team to win 2 straight 1-0 games was the 2006 Red Sox, who did it in games 92 and 93 of the year. The winning pitchers were Lester and Beckett.  Prior to that, it was the 2000 Dodgers. Prior to that, it was the 1996 Cardinals. Prior to that, it was the 1991 Angels. All of these cases were against the same opponent. Within the limits of the PI I was unable to find the last time it happened against two different opponents in consecutive games.
• Each year there are roughly 20 to 50 games that end 1-0. Since 1993, the number has been between 26 and 42 each season. Here is a plot showing the percentage of games each year that end up as a 1-0 victory for one of the teams:

Fascinating. Here is yet another plot that clearly shows the Steroids Era, right there starting in 1993. Over the entire period, the fraction of such games has gone up and down quite a bit, often as much as a full percentage point from one year to the next. Suddenly, starting in 1993, the number has stayed almost perfectly constant despite it being a fairly rare event. It's no surprise that the overall percentage of such games has dropped--with offense coming more easily it's unusual for two teams to be limited to one total run in a game. However I'm not exactly sure why the amount of fluctuation has dropped off so much, again given how rare the event has become. Perhaps the fluctuation hasn't dropped off so much when considered as a percentage of the overall frequency. (What I mean is when the percentage was 3-4%, a variation of 1% was about 30% of the nominal value. Now that the percentage is hovering near 1.5%, a 30% variation is only about half a percentage point--however it seems that the actual fluctuation is even less than that.)

Let's here your theories on why 1-0 games vary so little nowadays.

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