The Baseball-Reference.com Play Index Stat of the Day

This past season, Carlos Marmol turned in the 4th best ERA+ season (min. 50 innings) for anyone as young as he. Marmol, who started his professional career as an outfielder, was the only middle reliever to receive an MVP vote in 2007. Interestingly enough, Marmol’s age 24 season was extremely similar to another age 24 season that had been turned in almost a decade before.

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After playing for five teams in the last four years, Steve Finley is looking to sign with another team. If he does, he could move up on a few speed related “older” player lists.

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Ever since Omar Minaya rebuilt the Mets, there have been many heated discussions about his stockpiling of Latin American players. I thought that it might be interesting to see what the PI can tell us about this subject. I am not presenting them to you as a judgment, just as a presentation of facts. (more…)

Yovani Gallardo came up on top of 2 of my PI searches today, so I thought that he was worth a mention.

Gallardo is a 21 year old kid who pitches for the Brewers. In fact, among all pitchers who made their major league debut last year and pitched significant innings as a starter, Gallardo had the best ERA+. Included in that ERA+ is an August 8th game when the kid met the Colorado air. The result was the lowest game score of the season and the 6th lowest since 1957. In fact, the game was so detrimental to Gallardo’s numbers, his ERA without it would have been 2.84 instead of 3.67. Had Gallardo missed that game, he would have been second in the majors in ERA
(among pitchers with 100 IP) instead of 25th!

In 2007 87 position players made their major league debut. Their ages ranged from 19 (Justin Upton) to 29 (Guillermo Rodriguez). For those players hoping to embark on a Hall-of-Fame career, how old is too old? (more…)

Single-season outs leaders

Certainly he was helped by setting the all-time Plate Appearance record, but Jimmy Rollins also cracked the top twenty all-time for outs made in a season, coming in at #20, with a whopping 527 outs used. Rollins has finished in the league’s top ten in outs made every year of his career and returned to the top spot after a couple year hiatus.

Sure, he was helped by all those PA, but Dykstra only produced 468 outs in his historic season. The Phillies could have scored a lot of runs with 59 more outs to play with. Might have won another game or two.

There is an absolutely fantastic interview with Tim Raines over here at Baseball Prospectus (shout out to the guys over at The Book for pointing it out.) I’ll let you read the interview on your own, but I’ll use the PI to point out a few of the things that Raines mentions. (more…)

Quick–who is the Philadelphia Phillies’ all-time franchise leader in Saves?

I don’t blame you if you guessed Steve Bedrosian, Mitch Williams, or the late Tug McGraw, who have 103, 102, and 94 saves respectively, but the answer is their once-and-future closer, Jose Mesa, with 111.

Wow.