From the suggestions page:

A’s rookie Carlos Gonzalez now has five hits on the season/career - all doubles.

What’s the most hits to start a season or career without a single?

Comment by gswitter — June 4, 2008 @ 5:16 pm

Good idea. We can't do a direct search but let's see what we can do.

1) If he would retire today Gonzalez would hold the record for the  most hits in a career without a single.

2) We can't search for ab streaks but we can search for games streaks.  By using the advanced criteria in the Batting Streak Finder, we can limit our search to games in which a player had a hit. Searching consecutive games without a single and to start a career yields the following results.

Four players (since 1956) started their careers with 6 hits before getting a single: Pete Incaviglia, Carlos Quentin, Dave Kingman, and Jim Lefebvre. (Pete Daley singled prior to 1956.)

Three previous players (since 1956) have started their careers with 5 hits before getting a single: Mark Johnson, Roric Harrison and Frank Ernaga.

I only checked the players who appear on the search with 4 hits or more. However, these lists are not necessarily all-inclusive. If a player started a game with three extra base hits and then singled it would not be included here.

Also, if a played had a really big day to start his career, it may have been overlooked. (Although a quick run of the PI Game Finder yields nothing significant.)

Dan Uggla and Lance Berkman both had 9 games with two or more extra base hits in their teams' first 50 games of 2008.

Here are the leaders in this since 1956:

                   Year Games Link to Individual Games
+-----------------+----+-----+-------------------------+
 Edgar Martinez    1996    12 Ind. Games
 Hank Aaron        1959    12 Ind. Games
 Vada Pinson       1959    10 Ind. Games
 Frank Howard      1968    10 Ind. Games
 Sean Casey        1999    10 Ind. Games
 Albert Belle      1994    10 Ind. Games
 Dan Uggla         2008     9 Ind. Games
 Dave Parker       1977     9 Ind. Games
 Roger Maris       1960     9 Ind. Games
 Richard Hidalgo   2000     9 Ind. Games
 Todd Helton       2001     9 Ind. Games
 Lance Berkman     2008     9 Ind. Games                

Tonight Chase Utley homered for the fifth consecutive game.  It marked the second time this season that he has done so.  Here are the players since 1956 with the most home run streaks of 5+ games in their careers.

Barry Bonds (4)

Alex Rodriguez (3)

Frank Thomas (3)

Harmon Killebrew (3)

Willie Mays (3)

Chase Utley (2)

Jay Buhner (2)

Jim Thome (2)

Jose Canseco (2)

Ken Griffey Jr. (2)

By having 2 streaks in the same season, Utley joins Bonds(2001), Thomas(1994) and Killebrew (1970). Amazingly, Bonds and Thomas had completed  their second streaks earlier in the season (by date) than Utley did. Bonds had 2 six game homerun streaks by May 22 and Thomas had 2 five game streaks by May 29.

The other day, the Brewers beat the Braves, 1-0.

This got me wondering as to how many times, these days, in a baseball season, does a team win 1-0?

Thanks to Baseball-Reference.com's Play Index Team Batting Game Finder, it's not hard to find out.  Here are the number of times teams have won 1-0, since 2004:

 Year Games Link to Individual Games
+----+-----+-------------------------+
 2005    40 Ind. Games
 2006    39 Ind. Games
 2004    35 Ind. Games
 2007    34 Ind. Games
 2008    14 Ind. Games                

 Games found: 162.

As you can see, since 2004, there are only about 35-40 games in a season where someone wins 1-0.  What does that make it - about 2% of the time that someone wins a game 1-0?  Pretty rare these days, huh?

Back in 1968, in that season alone, a team won a game, by a score of 1-0, 82 times.  That was the year of the pitcher...indeed.