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 » Sports Reference
For more from Andy and the gang, check out their new site High Heat Stats.
ShareThisWinningest and Losingest Players
Tom, a reader, asks the following question:
"How can I search the database to find out which player in MLB history has WON the most games (that is, the player actually appeared in the game as pitcher, batter, DH, pinch runner, etc) when his team won that game), and conversely, which player in MLB history has LOST the most number of games."
While PI doesn't have the ability to search for this information for all of MLB history, we can use it to search since 1954. To do this use the "Batting Gamelog Finder", select Team: "Win" and search for "players w/ games in career". This yields the following results:
Games Link to Individual Games +-----------------+-----+-------------------------+ Pete Rose 1972 Ind. Games Hank Aaron 1735 Ind. Games Carl Yastrzemski 1718 Ind. Games Brooks Robinson 1636 Ind. Games Barry Bonds 1606 Ind. Games Eddie Murray 1601 Ind. Games Rickey Henderson 1585 Ind. Games Reggie Jackson 1579 Ind. Games Willie Mays 1536 Ind. Games
Doing the search for losses give us this list:
Games Link to Individual Games +-----------------+-----+-------------------------+ Rusty Staub 1633 Ind. Games Carl Yastrzemski 1589 Ind. Games Pete Rose 1583 Ind. Games Hank Aaron 1555 Ind. Games Cal Ripken 1497 Ind. Games Rickey Henderson 1496 Ind. Games Dave Winfield 1478 Ind. Games Harold Baines 1437 Ind. Games Eddie Murray 1424 Ind. Games Rafael Palmeiro 1423 Ind. Games
Related posts:
This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 8:59 pm and is filed under Game Finders, Suggestions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
October 2nd, 2009 at 6:06 pm
I've read before that Pete Rose has the record for being on the winning team for the most games, so someone has already done this research. But maybe not as quickly as a modern database can do it. I don't know, however, if this only includes games in which he appeared or also includes games for which he was an active player but didn't get in the game. In his career, though, there weren't that many of those games.