B-R Blog & Stat of the Day

Although I was primarily known as  a ferocious #3 hitter, my game was at its best from the 2 hole. In fact, over a 3 year period I batted second 105 times and put up these gaudy numbers:

Translated into 162 games those numbers would look like this:

Who am I?

Tom Ruane sent out this note to the RetroSheet mailing list. Sometime this winter we'll have boxscores for every game from 1920-1939, and we are really close to having a complete run of box scores from 1920-2010. This will mean complete career game logs for Gehrig, Grove, Ott, Greenberg, Foxx, Dickey, DiMaggio, Williams. We'll be able to compute Williams' longest on base streaks or Gehrig's best RBI games, or Foxx's home/road splits.

As we wrap up the 1930s and turn our attention to the 1940s, I would like to mention that we are always looking for volunteers to help digitize the Hall of Fame player dailies. Depending upon your skill with a spreadsheet, a team's worth of batting dailies should take you anywhere from 5 to 20 hours of work. I won't lie to you - it can be pretty tedious stuff, but the end product (box scores, player dailies/splits, top performance pages, and so on) hopefully makes it all worthwhile.

If this sounds like something you might be interested in, please let me know (off-list at tjruane who has email at gmail.com).

Thanks.
Tom Ruane

A recent comment on another post about Luis Castillo made me look into this. Here are qualified seasons where the player's SLG was less than 90% of his OBP (meaning that if, for example, his OBP was .400, his SLG was at most .360.)

Those are the 20 most recent such seasons out of 396 since 1901. Guys made it on here for different reasons. For Luis Castillo, it's because he doesn't hit for extra bases very often. For Rickey Henderson and Tony Castillo, it's because they walked so much that their OBPs were very high.

From the last 50 years, Walt Weiss' 1995 is the most extreme example. He posted a .403 OBP and a .321 SLG, a ratio of 0.797.

Much more to come on the Hawk in the coming days.

Just a few quick hits on Randy Johnson's career:

Here are the guys who faced him the most:

Ouch, that's a painful line for Rickey Henderson. The 26 walks is nice, but everything else is ugly.

Here are the guys struck out most often by Johnson:

Now let's relive some of Johnson's best career starts, ranked by Game Score:

Why did I show the first 27? Number 1 on the list is Johnson's perfect game with an almost unbeatable score of 100. His other no-hitter is all the way down at #27 on the list with a game score of "only" 89. That's right--this guy threw a no-hitter but also threw 26 other games that were even better. Just think about that. Is there any pitcher with an official no-hitter ranking lower on his own game score leader board? I doubt it. The list also features Johnson's 20-strikeout game as well as one of his two 19-strikeout games. (I was at his other 19-K game, the one that featuring a booming home run by Mark McGwire that nearly touched the roof of the Kingdome.)

And let's not forget some of his post-season accomplishments, including:

• Two post-season shutouts in 2001
• He got the win in relief in Game 5 of the 1995 division series against the Yankees, when Ken Griffey Jr. scored the winning run in the 11th inning
• He pitched a complete game victory earlier in 1995 in the last game of the regular-season, a one-game playoff to give the Mariners their first playoff appearance.

Randy Johnson was truly one of the greats. It was my honor to see his career from start to finish.

In comments on a recent post, the question came up for leaders among players with lots of home runs but not too many strikeouts.

There are 5 guys in history with at least 300 HR and no more than 1.5 strikeouts per HR hit.

It's easy to see that among this group, Joe DiMaggio has the closest ratio, with just 8 more strikeouts than HR.

Over a career, pretty much nobody has had fewer strikeouts than homers. Here are the post-1913 leaders:

I chose post-1913 since strikeouts were not recorded for some years before then in each league.

If we look for just the top single seasons that qualify, here they are:

It had escaped me that Barry Bonds accomplished the feat in 2004. I checked and the next-best such performance in the last 20 seasons was Jason Lane in 2003 with 4 homers and 2 strikeouts.

Finally, here are all the guys with minimum 100 career homers and no more than 2 strikeouts for each homer.

Pujols is the only active player to qualify.

Here are the players in 2009 to have less than 5% of their plate appearances result in extra-base hits (minimum 400 PAs):

These are among the least productive players at the plate, at least in terms of slugging. Many of them still had good OBP, although it's beyond me why any team would let certain players play a full season. (Hello Willy Tavarez, Edgar Renteria, Cesar Izturis, and Emilio Bonifacio.)

To give you an idea, here are guys who finished their career with less than 5% of their PAs going for XBHs.

There are lots of good players on there, but they generally were leadoff batters who played middle infield positions during eras in baseball when those positions tended to produce little offense. In other words, these guys were never expected to produce lots of extra-base hits, and these are among the best such players since they amassed the most plate appearances.

Following are the active leaders for the same calculation (less than 5% of PAs are XBHs.)

Same deal with this list, in the sense that most of these guys are leadoff hitters and not expected to hit for a high SLG. But when a pitcher sneaks onto a list like this (see #9), it's telling you that the rest of the guys are in trouble.

Since 1954, there have been 18 occasions when a team has featured as many as 4 pitchers who appeared in a game for 1 batter or less. In 4 of those games the pitchers pitched consecutively.

April 29, 1981 - Cardinals at Cubs - 8th inning

August 26, 1987 -  Dodgers at Mets - 8th inning (Matt Young is listed as facing 0 batters. I assume he suffered an injury before he could complete a batter.

September 27, 1995 - Tigers vs. Red Sox - 9th inning

August 21, 2007 -  White Sox vs. Royals - 8th inning (The only 1 of these streaks that didn't end the game.)

During the regular season, a lot of my posts are of the so and so has a chance to do such and such variety.  Most of these don't come to fruition and are often not worth revisiting. However, there is one in particular that seems worth mentioning.

On August 28th, we looked at Joel Pineiro's push to become the 8th pitcher since 1954 to finish a season with at least 200 innings pitched without allowing a SB. At the time, Pineiro had 170 IP and was driving hard. In fact Pineiro made it to 200 innings and beyond. However, on the last day of the season, in what would be his second to last inning, Alex Alcides Escobar stole 3rd base with Pineiro on the mound and Pineiro's name was banished from the list. The 2009 leader in IP without a SB allowed was Dallas Braden with 136.2.

One of the projects that I've wanted to do since I started to work with the PI was to break down every starting pitcher's line and see how often pitchers with various innings pitched and runs allowed stats won their starts. The recent addition of the CSV option in the PI results has made it particularly easy to grab the information and import it into a spreadsheet. Therefore, the time has come to address the issue. I am going to present the info for the 2009 season and if there is enough interest (please let me know in the comments), future posts will contain information for a larger sampling of years. To do this, I simply used the PI pitching game finder and searched for all starts sorted by IP and (when I reached the results limit) just kept changing the IP requirements until I had a copy of all 4860 starts from 2009. Here is the information in couple of tables:

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