This past season, no player caught in more than 138 games. Managers are particularly careful about giving their catchers time off to rest and it is rare that a catcher will go behind the plate for more than 150 games in a season.  In fact, the last player to catch at least 150 games was Brad Ausmus in 2000 (Jason Kendall and Russell Martin both just missed in 2008 with 149 games apiece.)  In baseball history only 27 seasons of at least 150 games caught  been turned in, including 3 each by Randy Hundley (and 1 by son, Todd) and Jim Sundberg. (Obviously, this feat is much easier with a 162 game schedule.)

Please note that games listed are total season games and not necessarily games caught. However, a player must have played at least 150 games at catcher to be included.

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Which player caught the most? In 1968 Randy Hundley caught 160 games. Hundley started 156 of those games and played every inning in 146.

Second place is a 3-way tie at 155. Jim Sundberg did for  the Rangers in 1975. 31 years earlier Frankie Hayes and Ray Mueller also both accomplished this feat even though their teams only played 155 games.

Here are a fewest of list related to strikes made possible by the new and improved PI.

Most Batters Faced - All Strikeouts 1954-2009:

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Most Pitches thrown-  all strikes 2000-2009:

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Most IP -  no balls thrown 2000-2009:

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Most IP with SO > 3*IP 1954-2009:

With this week's American holiday, let's take a look back at some games from the last 10 years for which the opposing team was thankful for all the unearned runs they received as gifts.

I did a Team Pitching Game Finder, 2000-2009, where unearned runs were at least 1.5 times earned runs and then sorted first by earned runs scored and then overall number of runs scored:

This shows many of the games with high unearned run totals. Ideally, I'd like to be able to search for Runs minus Earned Runs to give us exactly the games with most unearned runs, but that function is not yet available. (It's on Sean's radar, I know, but so are many other improvements for the site.)

The game above that sticks out right away is #4 on the list, when the Orioles scored 10 earned runs plus another whopping 13 unearned runs to destroy the Blue Jays by a final score of 23-1. This game occurred very close to the end of the season and both teams were already out of playoff contention.

What a weird pitching line for the Blue Jays. Their starter was Chris Carpenter, now with the Cardinals. Carpenter was finishing up a pretty bad season and was less than 2 years away from a season-ending injury that cost him most of 2002 and all of 2003. He resurfaced with St. Louis in 2004, won the Cy Young in 2005, missed most of 2007-2008 and had another triumphant comeback season in 2009, finishing second in the Cy Young voting.

But check out who relieved Carpenter to try to stop the bleeding. It was none other than Roy Halladay, making his 3rd-to-last relief appearance (to date.) He had pitched to a 10.75 ERA over 67 innings to that point. He relieved Carpenter to start that 4th inning and pitched two-thirds of one of the most bizarre innings I've ever seen:

Brady Anderson walked. Jerry Hairston Jr. reached on an error on the second baseman. Delino DeShields flied out. Albert Belle hit an RBI single but the run was unearned due to the error. Chris Richard grounded out. That's two outs in the inning. Next, Halladay picked off Hairston at third base. However, based on the box score, it would appear Hairston got into a rundown and eventually scored on an error by the catcher. That's two unearned runs and now there would have been three outs if not for the errors. So by definition, any runs that score after this point are unearned.

Halladay then allowed 4 consecutive singles including two more unearned runs scoring. Lance Painter relieved Halladay and allowed a double, single, and a 3-run homer to DeShields. The way scoring rules work, the runs that Painter was responsible for are actually earned.

However, Halladay came out of that inning having pitched two-thirds of an inning, allowing 7 runs, but none earned. His seasonal ERA actually dropped from 10.75 down to 10.64, his final mark for the year. However, I'm sure that nobody was encouraged by his awful performance.

Anyway, the list above contains a bunch of unusual games like this one. Click on some box scores and check them out!

I love Bert Blyleven and I still cannot believe he's not in the Hall of Fame. Here's another piece of the argument in his favor.

Since 1954 here are the most complete game losses by starting pitchers:

So there you have it: only Gaylord Perry had more during this period. (Of course, if we had box scores back to 1900, there would have to be tons of guys with much higher totals of CG losses.) Of the top 11 guys on the list, only Blyleven, Morris, and Lolich are not in the HOF. (While we're talking about, Jack Morris being so high on this list is quite amazing considering that by the time he pitched, complete games were already dying out. Blyleven had the benefit of pitching a bunch of years earlier than Morris.)

Anyway, Blyleven's composite numbers across those 75 games were good, with an ERA and WHIP roughly in the middle of the pack for this group. Let's suppose that with a little luck (i.e. more run support) he won 20 of these games. That would shift his career record from 287-250 (.534) to 307-230 (.572). This alone would increase Blyleven's HOF chances quite a bit.

Another interesting stat from the same time period is most losses for a starter when allowing 2 ER or fewer.

Blyleven fares a little better here with just the 18th-most such losses. Note that 23 of these are some of the same complete game losses as listed in the first table. The overall quality of pitchers in this group is not quite as high as the first list, but still pretty darn good. To some degree, all of these pitchers probably deserved a few more career wins at least when going just by law of averages. Of course, for every Blyleven and Tanana (guy who pitched for generally below-average teams) there is a guy like Maddux, who pitched mainly for excellent teams but still managed to lose lots of games where he allowed very few earned runs. That's a testament to just how good Maddux was--that even in many of his losses, his team was still easily in the game.

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.