Let's take a look at post-1954 HR leaders in their team's wins and losses. For starters, here's a little lesson about new capabilities of the PI.

For a long time, we could search for career games in which players hit at least one home run. Here are the top 20:

But this doesn't tell the entire story since it doesn't take into account multi-homer games. With the new Batting Game Finder, the total stats in such games are also provided and can then be sorted. Re-running the list above and then sorting for total homers gives a new top 20:

Reggie Jackson drops from 4th down to 7th. If I had to guess why, I'd say it's because he played longer than most and added on more games with single homers.

Now here are the most total homers in team losses:

Hmm, wow, this is interesting. Firstly, Bonds and Sosa pass Aaron for more total homers in losses. I think that can be attributed to 2 general factors: 1) I'm guessing that Aaron's teams had a better overall W-L% than Bonds' or Sosa's teams. Obviously, all other things being equal, playing on better teams makes it harder to hit home runs in losses. 2) In Aaron's day, one guy hitting a home run gave his team a much better chance of winning. With so much more offense these days, a single home run does less to win games for your team and means that guys like Bonds and Sosa tend to have their homers spread more evenly across wins and losses.

A bunch of new names pop up on this top 20 list for homers in losses: Banks, Thomas, Kingman, and Winfield. I suspect that these guys turn up here but not on the top 20 list for team wins because of the same 2 factors I mentioned above.

The recent addition of the arithmetic option to the PI created the possibility of searching for rate stats on a game by game basis. For example, if I wanted to find all of the teams since 1954 that had a  batting average of .500 during the course of a game, I could search for H=.5*AB.  Here are the results of a few of these searches.

Batting Average

Since 1954 there have been 84 teams that have had a batting average of more than .500 in a game.  Another 97 teams have hit exactly .500.  The teams did it in different ways, some with reduced ABs with multiple sacrifices and some with an explosion of hits. 180 of the teams won, one did not.

The highest single game batting average since 1954 belongs to the 2003 Boston Red Sox who went 28-46 against the Florida Marlins on June 27th. Their .609 batting average was the only time since 1954 in which a team hit over .600.

Slugging Percentage:

Since 1954 there have been 67 teams that posted a single game slugging percentage of 1.0 or higher. The only team to lose is the one with the fewest at bats:

The highest single game team slugging percentage since 1954 was posted by the '87 Blue Jays whose 53 total bases with only 44 AB were god for a slugging percentage of 1.205

TOB/PA

While we can't sort by OBP for an individual game, we can use a similar stat of  Times on Base/Plate Appearances. This ratio is similar to OBP, but will reward a team for reaching on an error and penalize it for a sacrifice bunt. Still it can be revealing, nonetheless.
The highest TOB/PA produced by a team in a game since 1954 was by the 2008 Cardinals who combined 9 walks with 26 hits in a single game against Atlanta.

This is another study that was done a while ago using the old version of the PI. It's much easier to do with the new version.

Using the Team Batting Game Finder and my favorite new feature, the arithmetic criterion, I have done several searches setting H = XBH (extra base hits) to achieve the following results.

Anyway, since 1954, a team has had all of its hits go for extra bases a total of 901 times.

These are the 31 times from just 2009. Right away you'll notice that most of these games were losses. That makes sense--if all your hits are for extra-bases, there's a good chance that you didn't get a lot of hits. It's pretty hard to have 7 or more hits all go for extra bases and it's tough to win games with 6 or fewer hits.

In 2009, teams achieving this "feat" went 5-26 (.161). It's easy to find the overall record in such games since 1954 by limiting the searches to just wins or losses.  Since 1954, teams have won 189 such games while losing 712 games (.265 winning percentage.)

The highest number of hits in game where all hits were XBH was 9:

As has been noted on this blog a few times by bloggers and readers alike, game #1 on the above list is highly notable as not only the most hits in a game where all hits were extra-base hits, but also because all nine of the hits were doubles. Notice that in these 11 extraordinary games, the teams went 8-3 (.727) meaning that in games with 5 hits or fewer they went 181-709 (.203.)

Again as has been mentioned elsewhere, since 1954 there have been 4 games where all the hits in the game (by both teams) were extra-base hits. These are really easy to find by doing the same kind of Team Batting Game Finder search but clicking on the bubble near the top to sort by greatest number of teams matching the criteria.

The 3 older games were all 1-0 scores and the game from 2 years ago was a 2-1 game. Not surprisng.

I ran a bunch of other searches looking just at games where all of a team's hits were singles. Since 1954 there have been 19,139 such games. Of those, 3,860 were wins and 15,253 were losses, yielding a win percentage of .201. It's interesting that getting either all singles or all extra-base hits is bad. It's getting a combination of both that is needed. Makes them sound like food groups.

Here are the most hits in games where all of a team's hits were singles. Man, games #2 through #5 were some bad luck! Getting 18 or 19 hits and still losing is rough.

Finally, of those 19,139 times that team has had all its hits go for singles since 1954, more than 2,000 of the occurrences came in the same game when both teams achieved it. In fact, there have been 1,026 games in which that's happened.

Here are the 13 times it happened in 2009:

The teams achieving the feat went 13-13 in these games. (That's a little humor for you...)

Here's another use of the arithmetic function in the new version of the PI. In this case I did a team batting finder search and looked for games where both teams had more runs than hits. It hasn't happened very often:

These are the only 17 such games since 1954. In case what I mean is not clear, let's look at the situation with #1 above, a game played this past May between the Marlins and the Dodgers.

The Dodgers won 12-5, scoring 12 runs on 11 hits. The Marlins themselves scored 5 runs on 4 hits.

Each team scored runs without too many hits but my different mechanisms. In the case of the Dodgers offense, they walked all day long against the Marlins pitchers, totaling 8 bases on balls. John Koronka also made two errors, both allowing runs to score while the batter got to first base. In the case of the Marlins, they didn't get many hits or walks all day. In the 9th inning, they grouped 3 hits and a walk to score 4 runs on a grand slam (after the game was already out of hand). Their other run came on a double, groundout, and sacrifice fly. There you have it--4 hits and 5 runs. They didn't have any other hits in the game.

Number 11 on the list above was an interesting game too. Randy Johnson started and issued 7 walks in 6 innings. The Oakland pitching staff was even more generous, issuing THIRTEEN walks in 9 innings. The Mariners also made 3 errors. All that adds up to lots of runs without hits.

Number 16 is the only game in which neither team issued more than 5 walks. Both teams used some home runs combined with walks to score runs. The Orioles managed 9 runs on only 6 hits!

Would you believe that 4 of the games above (numbers 2, 3, 4, and 6) featured both teams scoring at least 10 runs?

According to my original plan,  yesterday's post was supposed to be all about unique lineups that have occurred since 1954. However, that plan was quickly discarded when I became fascinated by the story of the youngest lineup. Today, I try again. Let's take a look.

33 or Older

Since 1954 a team's starting lineup has only featured players ages 33 or older on two occasions. Both were by the 1998 Baltimore Orioles with the same lineup twice in the same week.

While both these games featured 9 hitters who were 33 or older, the second game was started by a "kid" pitcher, 32 year old Scott Erickson. The first game, however, is the true winner. 36 year old Doug Drabek got the call in that one, completing a true senior moment. Here is the Orioles' starting lineup for that game:

On September 27, 1963, in what has to have been one of the worst match-ups ever, the 64-95 the Houston Colt 45s hosted the 50-109 NY Mets.  The season was just about over and the Colt 45s were looking to boost attendance and so they tried a gimmick, starting an all-rookie line-up and using a total of 15 rookies in the game.  46 years later that team is still  only  team since 1954 to have  ever fielded a starting lineup featuring 9 players younger than the age of 22. The results were not pretty as the Mets walked away with an easy 10-3 victory. You can read more about the game on the Astrodaily website. Here is the Colt .45's starting lineup for that day:

As you would expect from a group of prospects, the ensuing careers would turn out to be a mixed bag.  For 17 year old starting pitcher  Jay Dahl, the game was tragically his only game in the bigs. For Joe Morgan, it was only the  6th game in what would become a Hall-of Famer  career. Here's a look at what became of the rookie 9. The player names link to their BR-bullpen pages, the source for much of the included information.

This post-season, Alex Rodriguez played in 15 games and reached base at least twice in 12 of them. Is that some sort of a record? Well, thanks to Baseball-Reference.com's Play Index Post-Season Game Finder, we can figure these sorts of things out. And, here's the leader board list of "Post-season games, 1903 to 2009, most games with TOB>=2, sorted by greatest number of games in a single season" -

Of course, with the post-season expanded in 1995, to include the LDS, you're going to see more "modern" players on the top of this list.

Now, for fun, let's take the guys on this list with 10+ such games and sort them by OPS and then look at just the ones with an OPS that rounds to 1.5 or greater:

Now, these guys really rocked an October, didn't they? By the way, there's quite a few confirmed or suspected PED users on this list as well. But, I'll leave that debate to the conspiracy theory guys...

More than two years ago, I posted on this blog about games in which all of a single team's hits were home runs. Check out the old post right here.

It turns out that with the new version of the PI, this entire study can be done in a single search.

Just go to the Team Batting Game Finder, set the arithmetic criterion in the lower right box to H = 1* HR (which boils down to hits = homers) and here are the results:

To keep the table short, I lopped off all the results with 1 homer and 0 homers. You can view the full list here.

Incidentally, at the top of the Team Batting Game Finder, you can select to find games where the most teams (i.e. 2) have accomplished the given criteria in any game. I checked, and there has never been a game where both teams have had all their hits go long.

Sometimes the simple searches via Baseball-Reference.com's Play Index are still the most fun ones...

...such as show me all the players to hit 4 homers in a single game since 1954:

And, sometimes these quick and easy lists can lead to more fun - and some good trivia...

For instance, seeing the above group it's clear that you cannot hit 4 homeruns in a game and not have at least 16 total bases in the contest. After all, four times four is sixteen. But, how many players, since 1954, have had 16+ total bases in a game regardless of their homerun totals that day? Here's that list:

Note Fred Lynn and Edgardo Alfonzo here. They had 16 total bases in a game without hitting 4 homeruns that day. And, that's a nice little trivia question: Name the only two players in the last 56 years to have at least 16 total bases in a game without hitting four homeruns in the contest. Go ahead and try that one on your friends - and see if they can answer it with Play Index!

When folks talk about "20-game losers," it's often said that they must be pretty good pitchers - or else a team would not keep running them out there to the point where they pitch enough to lose twenty games. This got me wondering about which pitchers were given lots of chances to start games in a season - even though they were not picthing a lot of great games that year. Thanks to Baseball-Reference.com's Play Index Pitching Game Finder, it's easy to come up with a list to find an answer to questions like these. In this case, I looked for SP who had the most games in a season with a Game Score of 40 or less. Here's the leaderboard for the result of that query:

Yikes! Look at those lines for Jose Lima and Dennis Lamp. What were their managers thinking, giving them so many turns those seasons?