How many catchers, since 1901, have posted seasons in the big leagues where they've had 200+ PA at age 20 or younger? Actually, it's not been that many...via Baseball-Reference.com's Play Index Batting Season Finder...here's the list:

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It's an interesting list. The first thing that jumps out to me is how many of these "men" stayed in the game after their playing career albeit as a manager or coach in the big or minor leagues - or had some sort of career in the media covering baseball. The second thing that jumps out at me is that only two of these guys have done "this" since 1976 and we've seen no one do it since 1992. Pretty rare stuff these days...

EDIT: The original question posted here was phrased using a search since 1901. I have revised it to include all players since 1871.

A quick search of the Season Batting Finder reveals that there are 229 members of the Hall-of-Fame who batted in the major leagues. Of those 229,  215 played at least 50% of their career games at a single position (OF positions are counted separately when available), 14 did not. 2 of the 14, Whitey Herzog and Dick Williams, were elected as managers.

Can you name the 12 8 12 HOF players who didn't play at least 50% of their games at any one position (4 2 4were 19th century players) ?

Danny Ainge Statistics and History - Baseball-Reference.com

As you hopefully are aware, Baseball-Reference.com is part of a family of Sports Reference sites. All of them very good, very complete and well worth checking out. We have now created a rosetta stone matching players and coaches across all of the sites, so Danny Ainge's page, linked above, now has a link to his Basketball-Reference page, and Ricky Williams' minor league page now links to his Pro-Football-Reference page.

A reader named JR asked for a post about Ichiro and all his hits. JR was focused on Ichiro's amazing seasonal hit totals. I looked into his hitting and found some other interesting stuff.

In baseball history, there are only 22 players with at least 1.3 hits per game played (minimum 3000 plate appearances.)

As you can see, most of these guys played pre-1900 and Ichiro is the only one active since the second half of the 20th century.

Here is the same group as above, but now ranked by highest hits/game ratio, showing just the top 7:

That's right--Ichiro has more hits per game than any other player in baseball history (again, minimum 3000 PAs.)

That being said, Ichiro has 4 things working to his advantage in this stat:

• Most players hit their peak at age 27. Ichiro played in Japan through Age 26 and hit the majors right at his peak. The stats above do not count, of course, his stats from Japan. I just did some quick math and if my figures are correct, Ichiro had 1,434 hits in 1,057 career games in Japan--good for a ratio of 1.357 which is still hugely impressive.
• Most players experience a decline in performance at the end of their careers. As Ichiro is still active, he has a likely decline not yet factored into his final career values.
• Ichiro has hit exclusively leadoff, which gets him more plate appearances per game.
• Ichiro has played in an era of high run-scoring, which gets him more plate appearances per game.

These last two points can be backed up in a couple of ways. If you look at the original table at the top, Ichiro's career batting average of .333 is among the lower figures in the group of 22 players. That's to be expected--he's getting lots and lots of hits, but he's also doing it in more plate appearances per game that most other players get.

The other way to back it up is simply to look at PA/G leaders. Here are the 25 guys in history to have at least 4.55 PA per game played (minimum 3000 PAs):

Other than DiMaggio and Rolfe, we have players from the two high-offense eras: before the turn of the 20th century and present day. We see lots of leadoff hitters here and also generally players from good teams. (Good teams = more runs scored = more plate appearances per game.) If you're curious, Ichiro has the 6th-most PAs per game, coming in at 4.633. He's led by Hamilton (4.767), Hoy (4.660), Gore (4.660), Burkett (4.649), and Childs (4.641).

Bottom line? Ichiro has had the opportunities and has other factors that assist his rankings, but he is still an incredible player and probably the best hitter of the Steroids Era. He may well rank among the best hitters of all time.

Reader JR, who got me thinking about all of this, asked me my opinion on Ichrio's HOF worthiness. If he retired today and we ignore his performance in Japan, the only possible sticking point is his longevity. He has played 9 seasons in MLB and his worst seasons were merely excellent. Interesting is that his HOF Monitor (how likely to get in) is 200, with a likely HOFer around 100, but his HOF Standards (how deserving to get in) is only 34, with average HOFers around 50. If I had a vote, I'd put him in. I wouldn't count his stats from Japan, but I'd give him a pass on the longevity issue since he started in the Major Leagues so late.

Please vote below in the polls.

A strange list via Baseball-Reference.com's Play Index Batting Season Finder - players with 502+ PA in a season where their whiffs were greater than 7 times their walks:

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It's only been done 13 times in baseball history and 7 of those times its been done by someone playing for the Tigers or the Cubs. And, how 'bout John Leary? He was the first to do it, ever, and then had to wait 50 years for someone else to join the club.

The latest rumors have the Red Sox signing Mike Cameron to play left field in a platoon with Jeremy Hermida.

Cameron has had a long strange career.

For starters, he's a pretty unlikely member of the 4-homers-in-a-game club.

Here's a reminder of the post-1954 members of that group:

I suspect that Cameron's name will be the oddest one in this group for many years to come, although Whiten and Horner also had comparatively short major-league careers.

Here's another thing about Cameron. While he's not a terribly good hitter, his OPS values always end up above average. He has a string of 11 straight years with an OPS+ of at least 104 and his career value is 107. He's no superstar with the bat but he's solid and, perhaps more importantly, consistent.

Since 1901 here are the players with the most seasons having an OPS+ of at least 104 but a batting average no higher than .273.

Interesting group, eh? Joe Morgan is the odd man out here because, as the only middle-infielder on the list, he was actually an above-average offensive player (for his position) and managed to make the group. The rest of these players were all good, most had a couple of excellent seasons, but none was a superstar.

Cameron and the rest of these guys all fit a similar mode: decent power and decent walk rate. Bumps to OBP from walks or to SLG from occasional homers--that's how these guys kept their OPS+ values on the good side of 100 despite having lower batting averages. (I know the search limited to .273, which is not a bad batting average, but keep in mind that Cameron's career BA is .250. Most of the guys on the list above were below .260 in their careers.)

Here's another club for which Cameron carries a membership card: striking out in at least 24% of one's plate appearances (minimum 3000 PAs):

This is kind of surprising, isn't it? It makes Cameron seem like a pretty good slugger and run-producer, at least if you cherry pick Jim Thome and Ryan Howard off here. On the other hand, grouping him with Jose Hernandez and Pete Incaviglia paints a different picture, as far as perception goes.

You can put me down in the Mike Cameron fan club. He's not a perfect player, but he provides significant offense and is very consistent. At the right price, I'd take the guy on my team.

1967 Hall of Fame Voting - Baseball-Reference.com

Several readers pointed out (thank you!) that we had some issues with the older HOF voting results. The HOF had some quirks (like runoff elections in 49, 64, 67, a nominating round in 1946, and a ill-defined Veterans Ballot in 1936) that I wasn't quite prepared for (we assumed players could only be on one ballot a year) and it screwed up a number of the results, which we have fixed. Things now jibe with other sources and are presented correctly. Sorry for the mixups.

On Sunday, we looked at the players since 1954 with the most home runs in their first 162 games. Today, let's look at the hits leaders.

Ryan Braun makes both  lists. Here are Braun's totals for his first 162 games:

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Reports suggest that John Lackey is about to sign a contract with the Boston Red Sox.

Much has been made in recent years of Lackey pitching in Fenway Park, where he has by far the worst numbers of his career. Check out his splits by ballpark. These are offensive stats against Lackey:

Of particular interest is the final column, tOPS+, which basically shows the share of the total offense against Lackey. It shows that, for example, he has pitched very well in Dodger Stadium, Network Associates Coliseum, and SkyDome (isn't that called the Rogers Centre now?) His worst mark is at Fenway Park.

Now, of course, there is one big factor here that we cannot forget. For much of Lackey's career, the Red Sox have been a very good team. More pitchers than not from the last several years have worse numbers against the Red Sox than against most other teams.

The Angels and Red Sox have played each other a few times in the playoffs recently and there was much speculation that the Angels tried to set up their rotation to avoid having to pitch Lackey in Fenway for fear that he would do poorly. How much does that have to do with the ballpark vs. the Red Sox offense? Will it be different for Lackey when he himself wears red socks?

I see that the Orioles picked up Kevin Millwood in a trade for Chris Ray. In itself, that's quite an interesting deal. Ray is coming off a bad year, one season after missing an entire year due to injury. In theory, if he can learn to pitch after Tommy John surgery, he could be valuable. Millwood is an expensive veteran coming off one of his best years in 2009 but some so-so years before that.

Let's take a look at pitchers who did what Millwood did in his Age 34 season. These are the last 20 players to qualify for the ERA title with an ERA+ of 127 or better in their Age 34 year:

So two guys did it this past season. Millwood had one of the worst W-L% of this group, although that's somewhat self-selecting since the minimum ERA+ was set to Millwood's value of 127. Most pitchers had a far better ERA+ than Millwood's, so it's likely that their W-L% would also be higher. (Who has the worst W-L% on here? Why it's that man, Bert Blyleven.)

One wonders where Millwood goes from here. This list is a mixed bag. The last guy to do it before 2009, Hideo Nomo, never had another good season in the majors. Mike Mussina had 5 more quality years including 2 really good ones.

But the guy who sticks out on this list as a good comp, perhaps, is Tim Belcher. In his Age 34 season, Belcher was on the Royals who were (like now) not very good. The Rangers are a better team now than the Royals were then, but not by all that much. In earlier seasons, like Millwood, Belcher played for some better teams. Don't get me wrong--Millwood is clearly a better pitcher than Belcher but I think their histories before their Age 34 seasons are more similar than, say, Millwood and Maddux.

Danny Darwin had his best year in his Age 34 season, posting a career-high (and league-best) ERA+ of 168. The next season his ERA+ halved to 83, although that included a move to Fenway Park and an injury-limited season of just 68 IP. Darwin posted another excellent season in his Age 37 year and was well below-average for most of the 5 years remaining in his career afterwards.

Nolan Ryan, too, had his best season at Age 34, at least in terms of ERA+. His 194 value that year led baseball and was more than 50 points better than any other year of his career. It also came in the whacky 1981 season and Ryan pitched only 149 innings, a paltry total for him. As is always the case with Ryan, he's an abberation from an age standpoint, having pitched a whopping 12 more seasons after this one. Most of them were quite good, with a couple of really good ones thrown in there. (A nice Ryan tidbit...after his Age 34 season, he would lead the league in K/9 five more times, coming in 5 consecutive seasons from Age 40 to Age 44. Simply amazing.)

Jim Rooker's season is quite odd. He had his career-best ERA+ value but also had a very low K/9 rate of 3.9 ( as compared to his career value of 4.9, itself pretty low) and the worst HR/9 rate of his career.

Anyway, what does all of this mean for Kevin Millwood? It's tough to say because the guy has always been an enigma. He's always seemed on the cusp of becoming a great pitcher and he's had some excellent seasons, most notably 1999 with the Braves when he went 18-7 with a 167 ERA+ over 228 innings. To date, though, he's had only 4 seasons with an ERA+ as high as 127, he's had 6 full seasons with an ERA+ within 8 points of 100, and his 2007 and 2008 were both below average. To his credit, he's been pretty durable, making the 7th-most starts of the decade 2000-2009.

If I had to guess, I'd say that the Orioles will get 200 innings and an average ERA next year out of Millwood. For that team right now, that might not be such a bad thing.