According to the PI Pitching Event Finder (using multiple searches) there have been only 2 games since 1954 which featured at least 6 bases loaded walks. One of them involved 6 bases loaded walks in the first 2 innings. The other included an inning that is hard to imagine.

April 22, 1959

Heading into 7th inning in their game against the A's, the White Sox only held a small 8-6 lead. However, they had no reason to worry. In the 7th the White Sox  would score  11 runs on 1 hit. That inning would feature a single, two players reaching on errors (plus an additional error), a base-loaded hit batsman, and 10 walks;  8 of them with the bases loaded. Although their lone single made it into RF, Chicago's three outs never even made it past the pitcher. Here is the play by play:

Here's another use of the arithmetic function in the new version of the PI. In this case I did a team batting finder search and looked for games where both teams had more runs than hits. It hasn't happened very often:

These are the only 17 such games since 1954. In case what I mean is not clear, let's look at the situation with #1 above, a game played this past May between the Marlins and the Dodgers.

The Dodgers won 12-5, scoring 12 runs on 11 hits. The Marlins themselves scored 5 runs on 4 hits.

Each team scored runs without too many hits but my different mechanisms. In the case of the Dodgers offense, they walked all day long against the Marlins pitchers, totaling 8 bases on balls. John Koronka also made two errors, both allowing runs to score while the batter got to first base. In the case of the Marlins, they didn't get many hits or walks all day. In the 9th inning, they grouped 3 hits and a walk to score 4 runs on a grand slam (after the game was already out of hand). Their other run came on a double, groundout, and sacrifice fly. There you have it--4 hits and 5 runs. They didn't have any other hits in the game.

Number 11 on the list above was an interesting game too. Randy Johnson started and issued 7 walks in 6 innings. The Oakland pitching staff was even more generous, issuing THIRTEEN walks in 9 innings. The Mariners also made 3 errors. All that adds up to lots of runs without hits.

Number 16 is the only game in which neither team issued more than 5 walks. Both teams used some home runs combined with walks to score runs. The Orioles managed 9 runs on only 6 hits!

Would you believe that 4 of the games above (numbers 2, 3, 4, and 6) featured both teams scoring at least 10 runs?

According to my original plan,  yesterday's post was supposed to be all about unique lineups that have occurred since 1954. However, that plan was quickly discarded when I became fascinated by the story of the youngest lineup. Today, I try again. Let's take a look.

33 or Older

Since 1954 a team's starting lineup has only featured players ages 33 or older on two occasions. Both were by the 1998 Baltimore Orioles with the same lineup twice in the same week.

While both these games featured 9 hitters who were 33 or older, the second game was started by a "kid" pitcher, 32 year old Scott Erickson. The first game, however, is the true winner. 36 year old Doug Drabek got the call in that one, completing a true senior moment. Here is the Orioles' starting lineup for that game:

On September 27, 1963, in what has to have been one of the worst match-ups ever, the 64-95 the Houston Colt 45s hosted the 50-109 NY Mets.  The season was just about over and the Colt 45s were looking to boost attendance and so they tried a gimmick, starting an all-rookie line-up and using a total of 15 rookies in the game.  46 years later that team is still  only  team since 1954 to have  ever fielded a starting lineup featuring 9 players younger than the age of 22. The results were not pretty as the Mets walked away with an easy 10-3 victory. You can read more about the game on the Astrodaily website. Here is the Colt .45's starting lineup for that day:

As you would expect from a group of prospects, the ensuing careers would turn out to be a mixed bag.  For 17 year old starting pitcher  Jay Dahl, the game was tragically his only game in the bigs. For Joe Morgan, it was only the  6th game in what would become a Hall-of Famer  career. Here's a look at what became of the rookie 9. The player names link to their BR-bullpen pages, the source for much of the included information.

This post-season, Alex Rodriguez played in 15 games and reached base at least twice in 12 of them. Is that some sort of a record? Well, thanks to Baseball-Reference.com's Play Index Post-Season Game Finder, we can figure these sorts of things out. And, here's the leader board list of "Post-season games, 1903 to 2009, most games with TOB>=2, sorted by greatest number of games in a single season" -

Of course, with the post-season expanded in 1995, to include the LDS, you're going to see more "modern" players on the top of this list.

Now, for fun, let's take the guys on this list with 10+ such games and sort them by OPS and then look at just the ones with an OPS that rounds to 1.5 or greater:

Now, these guys really rocked an October, didn't they? By the way, there's quite a few confirmed or suspected PED users on this list as well. But, I'll leave that debate to the conspiracy theory guys...

More than two years ago, I posted on this blog about games in which all of a single team's hits were home runs. Check out the old post right here.

It turns out that with the new version of the PI, this entire study can be done in a single search.

Just go to the Team Batting Game Finder, set the arithmetic criterion in the lower right box to H = 1* HR (which boils down to hits = homers) and here are the results:

To keep the table short, I lopped off all the results with 1 homer and 0 homers. You can view the full list here.

Incidentally, at the top of the Team Batting Game Finder, you can select to find games where the most teams (i.e. 2) have accomplished the given criteria in any game. I checked, and there has never been a game where both teams have had all their hits go long.

On June 12, 1970, Dock Ellis of the Pirates pitched a no-hitter. But that's not the most interesting part of what happened that day, because this was no ordinary no-hitter. For one thing, Ellis walked 8 batters and hit another, still one of the wildest performances ever in a no-hitter. And why was he so erratic? Well, we'll let him tell the story:

Sometimes the simple searches via Baseball-Reference.com's Play Index are still the most fun ones...

...such as show me all the players to hit 4 homers in a single game since 1954:

And, sometimes these quick and easy lists can lead to more fun - and some good trivia...

For instance, seeing the above group it's clear that you cannot hit 4 homeruns in a game and not have at least 16 total bases in the contest. After all, four times four is sixteen. But, how many players, since 1954, have had 16+ total bases in a game regardless of their homerun totals that day? Here's that list:

Note Fred Lynn and Edgardo Alfonzo here. They had 16 total bases in a game without hitting 4 homeruns that day. And, that's a nice little trivia question: Name the only two players in the last 56 years to have at least 16 total bases in a game without hitting four homeruns in the contest. Go ahead and try that one on your friends - and see if they can answer it with Play Index!

When folks talk about "20-game losers," it's often said that they must be pretty good pitchers - or else a team would not keep running them out there to the point where they pitch enough to lose twenty games. This got me wondering about which pitchers were given lots of chances to start games in a season - even though they were not picthing a lot of great games that year. Thanks to Baseball-Reference.com's Play Index Pitching Game Finder, it's easy to come up with a list to find an answer to questions like these. In this case, I looked for SP who had the most games in a season with a Game Score of 40 or less. Here's the leaderboard for the result of that query:

Yikes! Look at those lines for Jose Lima and Dennis Lamp. What were their managers thinking, giving them so many turns those seasons?

Just some quick results without a lot of analysis:

Most players getting a hit for one team in a game (since 1954):

I recall when the Braves tied that record. Greg Myers went 0-for-2 after coming in for Eddie Perez. Had he gotten a hit, the Bravos would have the record all to themselves.

Here are the top games since 1954 for totals hit by different players on either team:

Game #1 was a blowout where the Dodgers Giants went up 13-0 after 4 innings. I guess that makes sense--given that it was a September game, both teams opted to bring in lots of reserve players.

The other two games tied for first place were both second halves of double-headers AND both games went to extra innings! The teams must have been playing on fumes by that point. These also make sense as games where lots of different players got hits.