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ShareThisAaron Harang & Pitching 10+ innings
Aaron Harang pitched 10 innings last night.
It's just one of four such occasions in the oo's:
Cnt Player Date Tm Opp GmReslt App,Dec IP H R ER BB SO HR Pit Str GmSc IR IS BF AB 2B 3B IBB HBP SH SF GDP SB CS Pk BK WP ERA +----+-----------------+-------------+---+----+-------+---------+----+--+--+--+--+--+--+---+---+----+--+--+--+--+--+--+---+---+--+--+---+--+--+--+--+--+------+ 1 Aaron Harang 2007-07-23 CIN MIL W 2-1 GS-10 10 7 1 1 0 10 1 121 87 84 37 37 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.90 2 Roy Halladay 2007-04-13 TOR DET W 2-1 CG 10 ,W 10 6 1 1 0 2 1 107 70 78 35 35 2 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0.90 3 Mark Mulder 2005-04-23 STL HOU W 1-0 SHO10 ,W 10 5 0 0 0 5 0 101 75 87 33 33 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 0.00 4 Roy Halladay 2003-09-06 TOR DET W 1-0 SHO10 ,W 10 3 0 0 1 5 0 99 70 90 35 33 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0.00
As you can see, Roy "The Toy Boy" Halladay has done it twice. Interestingly, Harang is the only one not to get a decision, as the game went 12 innings.
Pitching 10 innings isn't really such a big deal. Harang threw 121 pitches, and plenty of guys have thrown that many pitches in 9 innings or fewer (there have been 41 such starts this year.) It is true that warm-up pitches between innings mean that throwing 10 isn't the same as throwing 7 if the official pitch count is the same.
Starters going 10 or more innings is become quite rare. As mentioned above, it's happened 4 times so far in the 00's. In the 1990s, it happened 37 times, including 3 times by Dave Stewart and 3 times by Bill Wegman, of all people. In the 1980's it happened a whopping 249 times, led by Mike Norris doing it 5 times and Charlie Hough 4 times. In the 1970's, we saw 576 such games, including 8 by Gaylord Perry and 6 by Bill Singer.
My guess is that the drop-off in 10-inning or more starts very closely mirror the drop-off in complete games. It's hard to pitch 10 innings when the manager takes you out for the middle reliever or the closer. I'll do that analysis another day coming up.
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 9:59 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
July 24th, 2007 at 10:29 am
I made some errors in the above post, because I totaled times individual did it by YEAR not by the decade. The real numbers are as follows:
1970s: Gaylord Perry did it 24 times, Jim Palmer did it 18 times
1980s: Charlie Hough did it 9 times, Jack Morris did it 8 times
1990s: Wegman, Stewart, and Mark Langston all did it 3 times