Stores across the US are gearing up to begin selling gifts staring this evening.  Here are some prolific gift receivers, players (since 1955 when IBB became a stat) who were walked more intentionally then unintentionally. Only players with at least 15 walks are included.

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To our American readers celebrating today's holiday:

Enjoy your turkey or other kind of bird (such as duck or chicken.)

And don't forget the cranberry sauce, stuffing, and apple pie.

I got curious to see what players have had a lot of RBI without scoring all that many runs. Here is a list of players since 1901 to have more than double the number of RBI as compared to runs scored, ranked by most RBI in a season.

 
It's unsurprising that none of these guys had big HR totals. If a player hits 30-40 HR, he automatically scores 30-40 runs and, when adding in other runs scored will usually get a pretty decent total.

What I found somewhat more surprising is how many of these guys are catchers. Of the top 20 seasons, 13 of them saw the guy play significant time at catcher.

I know what you're thinking---duh Andy, catchers are usually slow and slow players don't score as many runs. While it's true that catchers are slow, I wonder why their plodding path around the bases causes fewer runs to be scored. I don't think it's just because slower runners take the extra base less often and therefore score less often. I think it has more to do with where these guys bat in the lineup. The fastest guys on the team, as long as they are decent at getting on base, usually bat leadoff. The 2-5 hitters are usually good hitters and fairly rarely are very slow. But if a manger has a good hitter who is slow, I think he tends to put that guy in the 6th or 7th hole more often. That means that he has the weakest hitters in the lineup following him, and that means he scores fewer runs.

Here's what I'm trying to say by way of example. Let's imagine two identical hitters except that hitter A is an average runner (speed-wise) and hitter B is a slow runner. If they both bat 3rd in the same lineup over the course of 150 games, my guess is that hitter A would score 10-20 more runs. So maybe he finishes with 100 RBI and 80 runs scored, while hitter B finishes with 100 RBI and 60 runs scored. I don't think this is enough of a difference to account for the performances we see on the list above. But in reality, a manager wouldn't bat hitter B in the 3-hole unless he was an incredibly good hitter, like Mike Piazza. Instead, the decent but slow hitter bats 6th or 7th, has fewer RBI chances but scores MANY fewer runs.

That's my guess--anybody have a different theory?

2009 Minor League Free Agents by HR - Baseball-Reference.com

The queries are a little slow, but you can now select minor league free agents when searching through the batting and pitching leaders.

Here are the pitching minor league FA's by Wins

I've added a link to the Minors Front Page as well.

Current Free Agents with 1500 PAs over the last three years sorted by OPS+ - Baseball-Reference.com

We've entered the 255 major league free agents into the database, and you can now search the season finders on just these players. The 2009 Free Agent checkbox option is in the second column for both of these finders.

Kenny Lofton is quite a well-traveled man, so Sporcle wants to know: Can you name every MLB team he played for?

With this week's American holiday, let's take a look back at some games from the last 10 years for which the opposing team was thankful for all the unearned runs they received as gifts.

I did a Team Pitching Game Finder, 2000-2009, where unearned runs were at least 1.5 times earned runs and then sorted first by earned runs scored and then overall number of runs scored:

This shows many of the games with high unearned run totals. Ideally, I'd like to be able to search for Runs minus Earned Runs to give us exactly the games with most unearned runs, but that function is not yet available. (It's on Sean's radar, I know, but so are many other improvements for the site.)

The game above that sticks out right away is #4 on the list, when the Orioles scored 10 earned runs plus another whopping 13 unearned runs to destroy the Blue Jays by a final score of 23-1. This game occurred very close to the end of the season and both teams were already out of playoff contention.

What a weird pitching line for the Blue Jays. Their starter was Chris Carpenter, now with the Cardinals. Carpenter was finishing up a pretty bad season and was less than 2 years away from a season-ending injury that cost him most of 2002 and all of 2003. He resurfaced with St. Louis in 2004, won the Cy Young in 2005, missed most of 2007-2008 and had another triumphant comeback season in 2009, finishing second in the Cy Young voting.

But check out who relieved Carpenter to try to stop the bleeding. It was none other than Roy Halladay, making his 3rd-to-last relief appearance (to date.) He had pitched to a 10.75 ERA over 67 innings to that point. He relieved Carpenter to start that 4th inning and pitched two-thirds of one of the most bizarre innings I've ever seen:

Brady Anderson walked. Jerry Hairston Jr. reached on an error on the second baseman. Delino DeShields flied out. Albert Belle hit an RBI single but the run was unearned due to the error. Chris Richard grounded out. That's two outs in the inning. Next, Halladay picked off Hairston at third base. However, based on the box score, it would appear Hairston got into a rundown and eventually scored on an error by the catcher. That's two unearned runs and now there would have been three outs if not for the errors. So by definition, any runs that score after this point are unearned.

Halladay then allowed 4 consecutive singles including two more unearned runs scoring. Lance Painter relieved Halladay and allowed a double, single, and a 3-run homer to DeShields. The way scoring rules work, the runs that Painter was responsible for are actually earned.

However, Halladay came out of that inning having pitched two-thirds of an inning, allowing 7 runs, but none earned. His seasonal ERA actually dropped from 10.75 down to 10.64, his final mark for the year. However, I'm sure that nobody was encouraged by his awful performance.

Anyway, the list above contains a bunch of unusual games like this one. Click on some box scores and check them out!

Let's try something a little different this afternoon. I'll call it PI tag.

I'm going to post a trivia question that can be answered using PI.

The first commenter will post a PI link containing the answer to this question and also a trivia question of his own.

Each subsequent commenter will reply to the previous comment in a similar fashion.

I don't know if it will work, let's give it a shot.

Question 1: Which are the only 2 games since 1954 in which both starting pitchers were teenagers?

I love Bert Blyleven and I still cannot believe he's not in the Hall of Fame. Here's another piece of the argument in his favor.

Since 1954 here are the most complete game losses by starting pitchers:

So there you have it: only Gaylord Perry had more during this period. (Of course, if we had box scores back to 1900, there would have to be tons of guys with much higher totals of CG losses.) Of the top 11 guys on the list, only Blyleven, Morris, and Lolich are not in the HOF. (While we're talking about, Jack Morris being so high on this list is quite amazing considering that by the time he pitched, complete games were already dying out. Blyleven had the benefit of pitching a bunch of years earlier than Morris.)

Anyway, Blyleven's composite numbers across those 75 games were good, with an ERA and WHIP roughly in the middle of the pack for this group. Let's suppose that with a little luck (i.e. more run support) he won 20 of these games. That would shift his career record from 287-250 (.534) to 307-230 (.572). This alone would increase Blyleven's HOF chances quite a bit.

Another interesting stat from the same time period is most losses for a starter when allowing 2 ER or fewer.

Blyleven fares a little better here with just the 18th-most such losses. Note that 23 of these are some of the same complete game losses as listed in the first table. The overall quality of pitchers in this group is not quite as high as the first list, but still pretty darn good. To some degree, all of these pitchers probably deserved a few more career wins at least when going just by law of averages. Of course, for every Blyleven and Tanana (guy who pitched for generally below-average teams) there is a guy like Maddux, who pitched mainly for excellent teams but still managed to lose lots of games where he allowed very few earned runs. That's a testament to just how good Maddux was--that even in many of his losses, his team was still easily in the game.

At the end of every game, no matter the result, the two pitchers who pitched last have a tally added to their stat sheet. If the pitcher started the game it is  called a "complete game" and if the pitcher entered in relief it's called a "game finished."  With the exception of baseball's very early years, it is very rare for a pitcher to complete all of his starts. Yet, even among relief pitchers  it is extremely uncommon  for a pitcher to relieve a significant number of games and  finish off  every single one of them.

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