It's not hard to see which pitchers are the leaders are in wins, losses, and W-L% for any given period. I have gone ahead and calculated something a bit different: team wins and losses for all starts by each pitcher. So that basically takes all no-decisions for each starter and adds them to their win total if the team ending up winning the game, and adds them to their loss total if the team lost.

This stat is pretty easy to see for any individual player. For example, if you check out Bert Blyleven's gamelogs for 1979, you can see that while Blyleven himself earned a 12 and 5 record in 37 starts, the Pirates actually went 23-14 in Blyleven's starts.

I went ahead and got the totals for all starts by each pitcher since 1997, split based on whether the team won or lost. This is really easy to do. Go to the PI Pitching Game Finder, set team W (or team L) on the left, click the bubble for role of Starter, and then sort by Players with games in career. Doing this twice (once for wins and once for losses) generates two long lists. I put those lists into Excel, did alphabetical sorting, and eliminated players who didn't have at least one team win and one team loss. From there, I could calculate leaders by total and percentage. Click through for the details.

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In yesterday's Yankees game, Joe Torre allowed Andy Pettitte to throw 119 pitches in 7 innings of work.  This made me wonder how many times in the "Joe Torre Era" has a Yankees pitcher thrown 119+ pitches in a start where he threw 7 innings or less?  Thanks to Baseball-Reference.com Play Index Pitching Game Finder, the answer is simple:

Year Games Link to Individual Games
----+-----+-------------------------
2000    28 Ind. Games               
1999    20 Ind. Games               
2001    13 Ind. Games               
2002    11 Ind. Games               
1996    11 Ind. Games               
2003    10 Ind. Games               
1997    10 Ind. Games               
2005     8 Ind. Games               
1998     8 Ind. Games               
2004     4 Ind. Games               
2007     1 Ind. Games               

As you can see from the above chart, from 1999 to 2001, Torre used to allow his starters to labor more like Pettitte did last night.  However, from 2004 to the present day, this is no longer the case.  In fact, before last night, the last time that Torre allowed a starting pitcher to throw 119+ pitches in 7 innings or less was almost two years ago to the day: August 31, 2005.

It's interesting to see this change in pattern start in 2004.  That's just about the time that folks, en masse, started to realize that Joe Torre was killing arms in the Yankees bullpen.  However, seeing these stats, maybe the frying of arms was not Torre driven?  Perhaps, come 2004, once the Cones, El Duques, Clemens, and Pettittes of Yankeeland were gone - and replaced with starters more likely to leave a game at 100 pitches, no matter what the inning - Torre was forced to go to his pen earlier, and, more often?  Maybe, if Torre had more pitchers that wanted to go 6 or 7 innings - even if it meant throwing 119 or more pitches - then Joe would have not had the cause to call the bullpen so often? 

Who knows, really, for sure? 

In any event, given that young and/or future Yankees starters like Hughes, Chamberlain and Kennedy will probably be limited to pitch counts, Torre's pen usage - no matter what the actual root cause, albeit driven by need or just Joe's desire - is not likely to change too soon (assuming that he remains Yankees skipper beyond 2007).

A user asked me about Pat Burrell and his bases loaded walks, so I figured, why not check the most ever in a season. Eventually, I want to allow users to search the splits, but that is a little ways off.

| name_common      | year_game | PA   | BB   | IBB  |
+------------------+-----------+------+------+------+
| Jackie Jensen    |      1959 |   18 |    8 |    0 |
| D'Angelo Jimenez |      2004 |   24 |    7 |    0 |
| Charlie Maxwell  |      1960 |   16 |    6 |    0 |
| Rocky Colavito   |      1961 |   17 |    6 |    0 |
| Mike Hargrove    |      1983 |   15 |    6 |    0 |
| Jack Clark       |      1987 |   15 |    6 |    0 |
| Darren Daulton   |      1993 |   29 |    6 |    0 |
| Danny Tartabull  |      1996 |   29 |    6 |    0 |
| Mark McGwire     |      1998 |   14 |    6 |    0 |
| Ellis Burks      |      2000 |   29 |    6 |    0 |
| John Olerud      |      2003 |   25 |    6 |    0 |
| Hideki Matsui    |      2004 |   32 |    6 |    0 |
| Michael Tucker   |      2004 |   24 |    6 |    0 |
| Adam Dunn        |      2005 |   19 |    6 |    0 |
| Chipper Jones    |      2005 |    8 |    6 |    0 |
| Derek Jeter      |      2006 |   17 |    6 |    0 |
| Trot Nixon       |      2006 |   27 |    6 |    0 |
| Pat Burrell      |      2007 |   13 |    6 |    0 |

D'Angelo Jimenez? How about Chipper with six walks in eight PA's.

Here are the career leaders.

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My dad's a huge Yankees fan and is constantly calling opposing players Yankee-killers.  He's obviously suffering from extreme selection bias, so I wanted to put together an objective list of players who hurt the Yankees.  Here are a few ways to do that:

Multi-HR Games Against Yankees:

                   Games Link to Individual Games
+-----------------+-----+-------------------------+
 Manny Ramirez         7 Ind. Games                
 Carl Yastrzemski      6 Ind. Games                
 Ken Griffey           6 Ind. Games                
 Boog Powell           4 Ind. Games                
 Tony Oliva            4 Ind. Games                
 Charlie Maxwell       4 Ind. Games                
 Reggie Jackson        4 Ind. Games                
 Doug DeCinces         4 Ind. Games                
 Cecil Cooper          4 Ind. Games                
 Norm Cash             4 Ind. Games                
 Mo Vaughn             3 Ind. Games                
 Jason Varitek         3 Ind. Games                
 Ken Phelps            3 Ind. Games                
 Larry Parrish         3 Ind. Games                
 Rafael Palmeiro       3 Ind. Games                
 David Ortiz           3 Ind. Games                
 Dick McAuliffe        3 Ind. Games                
 Ron Kittle            3 Ind. Games                
 Harmon Killebrew      3 Ind. Games                
 Troy Glaus            3 Ind. Games                
 Cecil Fielder         3 Ind. Games                
 Chili Davis           3 Ind. Games                
 Rocky Colavito        3 Ind. Games                
 Jose Canseco          3 Ind. Games                
 George Brett          3 Ind. Games                
 Albert Belle          3 Ind. Games                
 George Bell           3 Ind. Games                

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Using a number of basic PI Batting Season Finder searches, we can find out about which relievers have done the best and worst allowing inherited base runners to score.

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Mike Mussina has almost single-handedly dropped the Yankees out of post-season contention. I have seen a fair amount of talk in the New York media about this being the end of the road for him, which I frankly find preposterous. It's true that his dreadful streak comes at the worst possible time for the Yankees, and also true that they are likely to replace him for at least a start or two to try to get back in the wild-card lead. But I don't think his career is over quite yet.

Anyway, from Mussina's game logs, you can see his last three starts:

 CarGm TmG Date       Opp DR GmReslt Pitcher Result  IP   H  R ER BB SO HR   ERA  BF Pit Str GmSc IR IS Situat. In/Out Inn Rnr O Scr  SB CS Pk AB 2B 3B IW HB SH SF RE DP
+-----+---+---------+----+--+-------+--------------+----+--+--+--+--+--+--+------+--+---+---+----+--+--+--------------+--------------+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+
   496 121 Aug 16     DET  4 L  5-8  GS-5  ,L  8-8   5    9  7  6  2  2  1   4.76 26  95  61   23        1t start tie   5t 3 out d 4   1  1  0 24  1  0  0  0  0  0  1  0
   497 126 Aug 21    @LAA  4 L  9-18 GS-2  ,L  8-9   1.2  7  7  7  2  1  0   5.22 14  48  27   12        1b start tie   2b -2- 2 d 6   1  0  0 12  5  0  0  0  0  0  0  0
   498 131 Aug 27    @DET  5 L  0-16 GS-3  ,L  8-10  3    9  6  6  1  0  0   5.53 19  72  49   16        1b start tie   3b 3 out d 6   1  0  0 17  3  0  0  0  0  1  0  0

These performances were all pretty bad, all garnering Game Scores of 23 or fewer. (I think "fewer" is really the correct word there, believe it or not.)

Using the Pitching Streak Finder, here are all pitchers in the last 10 years to have at least 3 consecutive games with Game Scores of 23 or fewer:

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Tim Marchman wrote a column saying that (in some many words) Thome doesn't pass the smell test for HoFer because he didn't stand out from his peers enough, even though he'll likely end up with 500.  To test this, let's compare him to a similar player from a previous generation - Killebrew.

Both were third basemen turned into defensivly challenged first basemen.  Neither is at the tips of anyone's tongues when you think of HoFers.  Neither had superlative averages but both had plenty of walks and homers.

Since Thome's career isn't over, let's compare him with what Killer did threw age 36, Thome's current season.  Here's how Killebrew ranked with his peers through age 36.  Not too shabby.  Behind only Aaron and Mays, and ahead of some guy named Frank Robinson

Here's Thome so far in his career.  He's seventh, barely ahead of eighth. Sure there's expansion, but that doesn't explain why he's over twice as far back.

Marchman's got a point.

We were all happy to see Rick Ankiel make it back to the majors as an outfielder. He's made some noise with the bat, so let's check in on his season so far.

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I was just playing around with Baseball-Reference.com's Play Index Pitching Streak finder to see how some 21-year olds, or younger, started their big league pitching careers, when I noticed how close Josh Beckett and Phil Hughes were on the list that I had generated.  Here's a summary of their stats over their first seven games in the big leagues:

At first blush, with the exception of some errors made behind them, and perhaps some runners left on that came in to score (after they left a game), the numbers are pretty darn close, huh?

Even the number of pitches thrown and those for strikes are within a tick of each other. 

Josh Beckett had a great game in his 8th career start.  Maybe Phil Hughes can do the same?

The Red Sox just finished a heck of a 4-game sweep against the White Sox, winning all four games while scoring at least 10 runs in each game and allowing no more 3 in each game.

I used the PI Team Batting Streak Finder to try to find the last such occurrence of that. I did it by setting the outcome to win, runs scored greater than or equal to 10, and then looking for streaks of at least 4 games that all game against one opponent.

In short, I couldn't find any. Here are some near misses:

In 1998, the Yankees swept three (not four) games from Oakland. But they also allowed 4 runs in one of those games and 5 runs in another.

In 1962, the Giants won 5 straight games while scoring at least 10 runs. But there was a loss sandwiched in there, and 3 of the wins were against the Mets while 2 were against the Dodgers. And the Mets scored 4 runs in one game.

The AP report for yesterday's BoSox-ChiSox game notes that:

"The Red Sox outscored Chicago 46-7 in the series. Boston scored at least 10 runs in each game, only the fourth time that has happened in a four-game series since 1900, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. It's the first time it has happened in the American League in 85 years. The St. Louis Browns did it in 1920 and 1922, and the Colorado Rockies in 1996. Boston's run total in the series was the most for the franchise since it scored the same amount against the Browns in 1949"

So here is the Rockies stream from 1996.  All the games were against LA, and they managed to lose one of them 13-10, while winning one 16-15. (Want a little time warp action? Look at the box score of that game, in which both Todd Worrell and Bruce Ruffin blew saves. Not to mention Curt Leskanic, Darren Holmes, and Scott Radinsky also blowing saves.)

Check out the Browns 1920 schedule and you see that it was the Red Sox they beat up on from June 12th to June 15th, scoring an average of 10.8 runs and allowing an average of 5.5 runs while winning 4 straight games.

The 1922 occurrence by the Browns was against Cleveland, from September 4th to September 6th (it, like the recent BoSox series, included a double-header.) They scored an average of, again, 10.8 runs while allowing an average of 4.0.

All in all, it was a very impressive showing by the Red Sox. Scoring 10 runs these days isn't as tough as it used to be, but allowing so few runs over 4 games while scoring so many is quite impressive.