You Are Here > Baseball-Reference.com > Blog >

SITE NEWS: We are moving all of our site and company news into a single blog for Sports-Reference.com. We'll tag all B-R content, so you can quickly and easily find the content you want.

Also, our existing B-R blog rss feed will be redirected to the new site's feed.

Baseball-Reference.com ยป Sports Reference

For more from Andy and the gang, check out their new site High Heat Stats.

Most multi-hit games, first 8 games of the season

Posted by Andy on April 15, 2009

There is a changing of the guard in Boston. Manny is gone and David Ortiz has hit poorly for more than half a season (hopefully due to nagging injuries that will heal.) Pedroia, Youkilis, and Bay are the new men in town.

Last night, Kevin Youkilis had his 7th multi-hit game of the season, putting him on this short list:

                   Year Games Link to Individual Games
+-----------------+----+-----+-------------------------+
 Barry Larkin      1990     8 Ind. Games
 Kevin Youkilis    2009     7 Ind. Games
 Bobby Murcer      1969     7 Ind. Games
 Garry Maddox      1973     7 Ind. Games
 Ray Knight        1987     7 Ind. Games
 Bob Allison       1960     7 Ind. Games
 Hank Aaron        1959     7 Ind. Games

These are the most multi-hit games in a team's first 8 games of the season, going back to 1954. Only Barry Larkin had 2 or more hits in all 8 games, coming in 1990, the year the Reds won the World Series.

This is a recurring theme with Youkilis--it's not the first post I've written about his multi-hit games. The guy is, as advertised way back in Moneyball, an on-base machine.

A couple of side notes. I, like many of you I'm sure, was terribly saddened by the death of Harry Kalas. I recounted the story of the day I met Mr. Kalas on my blog over here. Also on that blog, I'm running a weekly contest about predicting winning pitchers and home run hitters in certain games. You can enter this week's contest right here. There are prizes!

Related posts:

    Multi-HR post-season games
    Most post-season multi-hit games
    Consecutive multi-hit games
    Multi-homer games in the post-season
    Winning percentage in multi-homer games

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 at 8:04 am and is filed under Game Finders. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “Most multi-hit games, first 8 games of the season”

  1. David in Toledo Says:

    A Hall of Fame case for Barry Larkin, using Play Index, follows. Each of these shortstops played at least 2000 games and hit for at least 3000 total bases. In hitting, Larkin ranks third. Stolen base rate and fielding add to his value.

    http://www.bb-ref.com/play-index/shareit/w7Ua

  2. leatherman Says:

    Larkin's Reds won all 8 of those games, too. They stretched it to 9 games in a row to start the season a few days later, on their way to their most recent World Series title.

  3. JohnnyTwisto Says:

    David, but how much advantage in stealing and fielding do you think Larkin deserves compared to the others on that list, considering they're all shortstops?