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

As reader kingturtle suggested, here is a comparison of the frequency of 4-hit games in the regular season versus the post-season.

Also, don’t forget to vote for the 2008 Hall of Fame class.

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There have been 132 four-hit games in the post-season. Here are the guys to do it twice:

                   Games Link to Individual Games
+-----------------+-----+-------------------------+
 Robin Yount           2 Ind. Games
 Bernie Williams       2 Ind. Games
 Alex Rodriguez        2 Ind. Games
 Brooks Robinson       2 Ind. Games
 Mickey Rivers         2 Ind. Games
 Manny Ramirez         2 Ind. Games
 Paul Molitor          2 Ind. Games
 Derek Jeter           2 Ind. Games
 Steve Garvey          2 Ind. Games
 Nomar Garciaparra     2 Ind. Games
 George Brett          2 Ind. Games
 Roberto Alomar        2 Ind. Games                

This accounts for 24 of the 4-hit games, meaning that 108 guys have done it exactly once. (Nobody has done it more than twice.) The full list, for those interested, is here.

As soon as I saw Paul Molitor’s name, I was curious how far apart his two games were. Indeed, he had a 5-hit game in the 1982 World Series with Milwaukee and then a 4-hit game in the 1993 ALCS with Toronto. That’s an 11-year gap.

For all the rest of the guys on the list, here is the gap between their 2 four-hit games (zero meaning that they did them both in the same year): Yount 0, Bernie 1, A-Rod 4, Brooks 1, Rivers 1,  Manny being Manny 8, Jeter 10, Garvey 10, Nomar 4, Brett 0, Alomar 1.

Wow, that’s something isn’t it? I find it amazing that 3 different guys have had 4-hit postseason games separated by a decade or more.

I was just thumbing though Sports Illustrated and they mentioned that only two players have ever had a 2B, 3B, and HR in the same post-season game. PI confirms it: (more…)

From a user suggestion by gswitter, here is a look at players who homered in their only plate-appearance of a post-season series. (more…)

Now we’ve got ourselves a real game here, even if the World Series itself looks pretty lopsided.

Jumping in:

• Josh Fogg’s awful game score of 14 wasn’t predicted by anybody. The average guess was a much healthier 50. Closest was Dre17 with 32, which helped him a lot in the standings.
• Colorado actually scored 5 runs, and the average guess was 4.8: not too shabby. Three players, wellspr, doug730, and ToddCoffeysUsernameIsTooLong got it right.
• Colorado LOB was actually 11, with the average guess at 8. kingturtle got it exactly right. If memory serves, I think Oliver has exactly nailed at least one prediction in every game so far.
• Colorado Home Run Guess: hey we finally have a winner. Several people guessed Holliday.
• Matsuzaka’s game score was 56, and the average guess was 51 Nobody got it exactly right, but ImAShark guessed 57 and several others were very close.
• Boston scored 10 runs, far eclipsing the average guess of 4.9. Closest, with 8, was Dre17, which also contributed significantly to his score.
• Boston LOB = 7, average guess = 8.7. Three players, Dre17, truman, and doug730 got it exactly right. (Are you starting to see a trend with Dre17 yet?)
• Boston Home Run Guess: once again no homers for Boston. It’s amazing that they’ve scored, what, 25 runs and hit only 1 homer?

So, for this game, the average score was 110.

The top 5 finishers for Game 3 were:

1. Dre17 - 28 points
2. doug730 - 31
3. spartanbill - 56
4. zimcity - 61
5. budcrew08 - 92
That’s 2 wins for Dre17 in 3 games–very impressive. So, Doug, you should have done a slightly better job in copying Dre17…heh. Both the top 2 finishers got the smallest scores we’ve seen so far, edging out wellspr’s 38 from Game 2.

Without further delay, here are the overall leaders for Games 1, 2, and 3 of the 2007 World Series Challenge:

1. Dre17 - 210
2. doug730 - 240
3. zimcity - 257
4. larryhisle - 278
5. spartanbill - 311

As it turns out, the 6th place person has 360 points, so anybody not in the top 5 has a fairly poor shot at winning the whole enchilada.

Winning this thing is going to come down to picking the winning pitchers correctly, and in tomorrow’s matchup of Aaron Cook and Jon Lester, that’s a very tough thing to do.

By the way, looking at what my own ballots would have been had I entered, I would (really) have been in last place at this point!

Thanks everybody for participating. Perhaps there is just one game to go! The Game 4 post is already up, so just make your way back there to post your guesses for tonight’s game.

Well, that game was just a bit more competitive and interesting…

Let’s jump right in:

• The average score dropped from 139 for Game 1 to 104 for Game 2. As with Game 1, nobody got the Home Run Guess for either team correct, given that no homers were hit in Game 2!
• Jiminez got a game score of 47, and several people got very close, including kingturtle and doug730 who got it exactly. The average guess for all of you was 45–kudos!
• Schilling got a game score of 58, with truman coming closest at 56. In fact, truman missed both game scores (Schilling and Jiminez) by just 2 each, which is very impressive. The average Schilling game score guess was 53, also quite close.
• Colorado scored 1 run. Nobody got it exactly but larryhisle and budcrew08 were closest with 2. Average was 4.8.
• Boston scored 2 runs. Newcomer Yuri nailed it with nobody else closer than 2 runs off. Average guess was 6.1
• Colorado left 5 men on base (for the second game in a row) and wellspr got that right, with a few others very close. Average guess was 7.3.
• Boston left 12 men on base (also for the second game in a row) and RonBermuda was closest with 11. Average guess was 8.4.
• For the winning and losing pitchers, many folks got Schilling as the winner and Jiminez as the loser. Again, those who did worst for Game 2 missed the pitchers of record. (In retrospect, I made this worth too many points.)

So here are the top 5 finishers for Game 2:

1. wellspr- 38
2. budcrew08 - 69
3. larryhisle - 74
4. Yuri - 82
5. truman - 85

A couple of new folks, Yuri and budcrew08, made the Game 2 leaderboard but they are not eligible for the overall championship since they didn’t participate in Game 1.

With that in mind, here is the overall leaderboard for Games 1 and 2:

1. larryhisle - 167
2. Dre17 - 182
3. zimcity- 196
4. doug730- 209
5. truman - 218

Those of you not appearing on this leaderboard should not be discouraged. The person in 10th place right now is only about 100 points behind first place, which is by no means insurmountable. I’m not listing it just because I don’t want to embarrass anybody, but basically everybody still has a chance. (By the way, had I filled out ballots myself, I would be close to last place…)

Thanks for playing, and please look for the Game 3 entry form later today. I’ve got to go do some real work for a bit.

Before the full post, I just wanted to mention a coupla’ things:

• Please post your predictions for Game 2 of the World Series here. You do not need to have participated in Game 1 to participate in Game 2 or subsequent games.
• Sean made a few improvements to this blog that he didn’t publicize, so I’ll mention them. Over on the left, under the names of the writers, there is a link for suggestions. You can post a comment there if you have an idea for this blog you’d like to see posted. I strongly encourage you all to use that suggestion box. Also, you may have noticed that all the posts have categories. Sean recently added a “post-season” category so you can read all posts on that. (It doesn’t retroactively apply, though, so it’s up to us writers to tag our posts properly.)

Anyway, yesterday I promised you some PI knowledge on youngest pitchers in the post-season.

Here are the youngest players to start a post-season game: (more…)