Who am I?

I am the only pitcher is baseball history with the same career number of games pitched, hits allowed, strikeouts, and walks.

Simple. I am the player who, since 1901, has the record for most doubles, triples, and homers in a season in which those three totals were identical. Who am I?

With the Winter Meetings in full swing and free agent buzz reaching a fever pitch, Larry Granillo of Wezen-Ball looked back from 1979-2009 at the evolution of the salary due baseball's highest-paid player. Remember when Nolan Ryan making >$1 million was a big deal?

Who am I?

• I was once regarded by many as one of the very best hitters in baseball.
• I missed a lot of time due to injuries.
• I had five different seasons where I just missed getting 200 hits in a season. In some of them, I didn't even play in as many as 145 games.

In short, I am a good example of the fickle attitudes of a fraction of baseball fans. Five times I fell at most 10 hits shy of a 200-hit season and in only one other season did I get 200 hits. With a few bounces the other way, I might have 6 different 200-hit seasons and be remembered as a fantastic player. That being said, some fans do remember me as fantastic. Anyway, who am I?

Post your guesses in the comments or you can ask questions to try to get some hints.

Gary Gillette of the Baseball Early Bird is covering the Winter Meetings, and has filed his first report. You can get the Early Bird every morning via e-mail. It includes trivia and news and notes from yesterday in baseball. Give it a look.

On the non-news front, the announcement of Chone Figgins signing by Seattle on the eve of the Winter Meetings apparently will come today, assuming the free agent passed his physical exam yesterday. And reports have been circulating that St. Louis is close to a deal with free-agent pitcher Brad Penny, with only a physical holding up an announcement. That could come today, or tomorrow, or perhaps never, given the depressingly low standards that sports journalism has sunk to in terms of reporting even the second-hand whisper of a rumor of an unsubstantiated report of something that maybe could possibly potentially even really happen.

Slightly off-topic, but mostly on, here's a site I think many of our readers (math-oriented and numerophobic alike) will be interested in: it's called the Book of Odds, and it "explores the world through the lense of probability, writing articles and publishing statistical information." Of particular note for our purposes is the series of baseball articles they rolled out for this past World Series:

Behind the Numbers: 2009, a Baseball Season of Oddities

World Series Wishes (Exploring the odds a fan has seen their team win a World Series -- Sorry, Cubs fans)

Odds Are a Baseball Player Is Superstitious

David Gassko, who many of you may know from his work at The Hardball Times, writes for the site as well, so they do have some baseball people over there. Anyway, give it a look -- like I said, it's not just for people who like math, but instead I think it's aimed at getting everyone to start thinking about the world in a more probabilistic way.

Who am I?

• I finished my pitching career with a winning record and an ERA+ better than 110.
• I never won or lost 20 games in a season.
• My neutralized pitching record suggests that I deserved more than 200 wins and fewer than 150 losses.
• The teams I pitched for made it to the World Series three times but we never won!

In short, I was a good pitcher for many years but because I never won 20 games or was part of a championship team, I'm not very well-known.

Post your guesses in the comments or you can ask questions to try to get some hints.

Gary Gillette of the Baseball Early Bird is covering the Winter Meetings, and has filed his first report. You can get the Early Bird every morning via e-mail. It includes trivia and news and notes from yesterday in baseball. Give it a look.

At 10 a.m. today in Indianapolis, the Hall of Fame announced the results of the two Veterans Committees balloting for the class of 2010. One panel was considering the qualifications of managers and umpires, the other the qualifications of executives and pioneers.

The 16-member committee voting on managers and umpires elected umpire Doug Harvey and manager Whitey Herzog to the Hall of Fame. Only one member failed to cast a vote for the 31-year veteran umpire Harvey. Herzog received 14 of the 16 possible votes. Manager Danny Murtaugh and umpire Hank O'Day each were named on eight ballots. No other candidate received more than three votes.

On the other slate composed of executives and pioneers, a completely indefensible result saw no one get selected for immortality--including Marvin Miller. Former Detroit Tigers owner John Fetzer received eight of the 12 possible votes, falling one short of the 75% needed for election. Miller and former Yankees' owner Jacob Ruppert each received seven votes, falling two short. Former Kansas City Royals owner Ewing Kauffman, who was the holdover candidate with the most support in the last election, received six votes. No other candidate received as many as three votes.

Each committee had 10 names on its ballot. The most interesting and controversial nominee was Miller, pioneering leader of the Major League Baseball Players Association. The election of former commissioner and Miller nemesis Bowie Kuhn two years ago--while Miller failed to get even half of the votes he needed--caused many observers to rightly decry the whole process as biased in favor of owners and executives and biased against labor. Miller himself asked publicly not to be placed on any future ballots.

Nonetheless, Miller's name appeared on the ballot again, giving the Hall of Fame a chance to demonstrate that it is independent of Major League Baseball by making the painfully obvious choice of immortalizing Marvin Miller. The Hall failed again, confirming the opinions of many who feel that the institution has become irrelevant.

The idea that Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, whose muddled and mostly incompetent leadership severely damaged the game, is enshrined in Cooperstown while Miller is not is, frankly, a complete joke. Miller is the pioneer who for more than a decade out-negotiated and out-thought Kuhn, dragging the National Pastime and its recalcitrant commissioner and owners into the 20th century against their lordly will.

Despite the tired complaints of the old-line, hard-line owners that still hate Miller and his legacy, the game is far better off for the changes he and the Players Association he so ably led wrought in the 1970s and 1980s. As with the non-election of Buck O'Neil in 2006, the result of all the Hall's preening and posturing has been another travesty of justice and a grievous insult to the game's history.

• I never hit more than 27 homers in a season but if my stats are normalized to playing 162 games each year, then I had a 5-year run where I went over 30 homers 4 times.
• My career OBP is over .370 and my career OPS+ is over 130.
• Even though I was great at getting on base, I never got a chance to play a full season and I played almost exclusively for bad teams.

In the comments, post your guess or a question asking for more information.

One of the new PI features is to group Game Finder results by the most players achieving the criteria in the same game for 1 team or for both teams. That lets us find crazy things like this.

Most different pitchers throwing a wild pitch in the same game for one team:

Since 1954 the record is 4 different pitchers, done 15 times. In that most recent game from 2009, the Angels actually tossed 6 wild pitches total.

And how about most pitchers throwing a wild pitch for either team in the same game (also post-1954):

The record here is 6 pitchers, done in the 1998 Red Sox-White Sox game. That was one of the wilder games in recent years, with the Red Sox winning 15-14 despite Chicago putting up an 8-run sixth inning. In addition to all the wild pitches, both teams homered and hit at least one batter.

Just for laughs, here are the leaders in game with the most different pitchers issuing a balk. First for just one team:

Is it any surprise that so many of these games are from 1988? If you recall, that's the year that MLB issued instructions to the umpires to be more diligent about calling balks and also modified the rule a little bit.

The record for both teams in 4, also occurring mainly in games from 1988:

So there you go.