Baseball Reference Blog

Congrats to the St. Louis Cardinals for winning the 2011 World Series.

On September 24th, per CoolStandings.com, the Cards had a 6.8% chance of just making the post-season.  Just over a month later, they were the kings of baseball.

The story of the '11 Cardinals should go down in baseball history as one of the best comeback stories of all-time, no?

With his 2-run double in the 1st inning of Game 7 tonight, David Freese now has 21 RBI this post-season, an all-time record. This particular stat of course favors players on good teams from the wild card era, who tend to have more games each post-season.

Before tonight's games, here were the all-time leaders:

Baseball Reference (baseball_ref) on Twitter.

We've been live tweeting the World Series games this year and will be wrapping up our coverage tonight.  See our timeline (linked above) for some of the notes we pulled from our databases for last night's game.

World Series Game #7s - Baseball-Reference.com.

Complete list of World Series Game #7's.  Where do you expect tonight's game to rate?

Forget Pujols' 3 homers already. Last night, David Freese put together the greatest single-game offensive performance in World Series (and all post-season) history:

Move over, Kirk Gibson. Freese now has the highest single-game Win Probability Added in any post-season game.

By the way, Lance Berkman himself made #4 on that list, also from last night's game.

I don't know what will happen in the rest of Freese's career, but he has etched himself quite a place in the baseball history books. His totals so far this post-season: 17 games, 5 homers, 19 RBI, and a 1.235 OPS. Simply incredible.

Using this query and another one, here's a list that I came up with:

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Any games mentioned here that should be excluded? Any not mentioned that should be included?

According to my rough scan, last night was only the third time in basebal history where we had a post-season Game 6 or later where the home team drove in runs in both the bottom of the 8th and 9th innings:

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Of course, the Cardinals, last night, scored in the bottom of the 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th innings. What a game!

Before tonight, here's the other times where it has happened:

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Of course, the Rangers just homered now - taking away from the excitement of what the Cards did in the 9th...

Here's one possible list -

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Any here that you would not include? Any missing that should be included?

I was stunned to see on our front page that Roy Smalley Jr. had died, but it turns out that I was just confused.

I know that both Roy Smalley and his father of the same name played in the majors, and I always assumed that Roy Smalley Jr. was the decent-hitting middle infielder who played mainly for the Twins in the 1970s and 1980s. This Smalley (who, incidentally, is Roy Smalley III, not Roy Smalley Jr.) just turned 59 two days ago and is certainly way too young to have passed away (and thankfully he has not.)

It's Smalley's father who is Roy Smalley Jr. He was a light-hitting shortstop for mainly the Cubs and Phillies in the late 1940s and 1950s, and he died a few days ago at the age of 85.

Anyway, it's a shame that it took Mr. Smalley's death for me to correctly figure out who was who, but I'm glad that I finally did.

Roy Smalley Jr.'s 1950 season was quite interesting. He had career highs in HR, RBI, SLG, and a few other categories, and most by a large margin. He also had a career high in strikeouts and even led the league in that category. He had good power for a shortstop from that era, averaging 11 homers per 162 games for his career.

On a separate note, I will be live tweeting Game 6 of the World Series tonight. You can subscribe to my feed @AndyBBREF. This is sort of an experiment---not sure whether I will continue tweeting after tonight, but at least tonight you can get real-time stat updates during the game.