2007 AL Team Splits: as Reliever Sorted by PA - Baseball-Reference PI

This is a new feature that was just added to the league splits. When you go to a league split, you can now click on the split name (note the red text), which will bring up a list of all of the team's results for that split sorted by OPS+ or ERA. Next you can click on any header to sort the results and then click again to sort in ascending order.

I've enabled sharing and saving for these as well.

This goes back to 1957 and is presented as a free preview through next week.

Today, I decided to use Baseball-Reference.com's Player Index Batting Gamelog Finder to see how many Yankees had 4+ extra base hits in a game since 1957.  This is what I found:

Cnt Player            Date          Tm   Opp GmReslt PA AB  R  H 2B 3B HR **XB** RBI BB IBB SO HBP SH SF ROE GDP SB CS BOr Positions 

+----+-----------------+-------------+---+----+-------+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+------+---+--+---+--+---+--+--+---+---+--+--+---+---------+ 

    1 Alex Rodriguez    2005-04-18    NYY  TBD W 19-8   6  6  5  5  2  0  2    4     6  0   0  0   0  0  0   0   0  0  0 5th 3B 

    2 Hideki Matsui     2003-06-05    NYY @CIN W 10-2   5  5  2  4  3  0  1    4     3  0   0  0   0  0  0   0   0  0  0 7th CF 

    3 Shane Spencer     1998-08-07(2) NYY  KCR W 14-2   5  5  4  5  2  0  2    4     3  0   0  0   0  0  0   0   0  0  0 7th RF 

    4 Graig Nettles     1976-09-29    NYY @BOS W  9-6   5  5  4  4  2  0  2    4     6  0   0  0   0  0  0   0   0  0  0 3rd 3B 

    5 Jim Mason         1974-07-08    NYY @TEX W 12-5   5  5  3  4  4  0  0    4     1  0   0  0   0  0  0   0   0  0  0 8th SS 

    6 Roger Maris       1962-04-29(2) NYY @WSA W 11-6   5  5  2  4  3  0  1    4     4  0   0  0   0  0  0   0   0  0  0 3rd RF

Jim "You can knock the bat out of his hands" Mason made the list?  Wow.

There's a trivia question for your friends:  Name the three Yankees whose last name starts with "M" to have 4 extra basehits in a game since 1957.  They may guess "Maris" - and some sharp person may remember "Matsui" - but no one will ever guess "Mason."

PI has a new feature that makes it 10 times cooler than before (in my opinion anyway).  Go to league splits, say 2007 MLB offensive splits.  (The link is at the main 2007 NL & 2007 AL pages). 

When you get to the MLB splits page, you'll note all the split options are now in red text.  Folks, lemme tell ya, red text = cool stuff around here. 

 Click on the red text, and you can how all teams in the league (all MLB in this case) performed under this split.  They're ordered by sOPS+ or ERA.  COOOOOL

Full results are only available to PI subscribers though.  And there's no save & share for me to make it easy to link to. 

However, if you have PI, you can see that the team with the best sOPS+ in all baseball in extra innings so far is the St. Louis Cardinals.  The Devil Rays of all teams are best in the AL. 

The worst team - by far - is the Cubs, with an sOPS+ of 24.  Next worse are the Pads at 46.  The worst AL teams, hilariously, are the Yanks and Red Sox. 

Along similar lines, you can see that the Cards are getting better offensive production from their #9 slot than: the Tigers, Rangers, Angels, Twins, or Orioles. 

 The Nationals have the worst OBP from the leadoff position.

 The Yanks and Phillies have the most dangerous infield offense. 

The White Sox have the AL's weakest hitting outfield & the game's weakest hitting infield. 

Philly has the best hitting 7-9.

I could go on forever.  And that's just the 2007 offensive splits.  The site now offers you all this for hitters and pitchers for every year since 1957. 

Recently, George Brett discovered b-ref and fell in love with it. In that spirit, here's ten things you can find out about George Brett using the PI Index:

1) He faced 26 pithcers who are still around. Well, 26 pitchers still listed as active at b-ref anyway. One or two of them retired after '06. Some mighty great names on that list: Clemens, Johnson, Mussina and of course Todd Van Poppel.

2) He was fantastic against Hall of Famers. The man frickin' owned Jim Palmer and Tom Seaver. If you're curious, that adds up 151 hits in 505 ABs, for a .299 average.

3) His longest hitless drought was six games long. It happened only once, when he was a late season call up in 1973. After that he only had four stretches of five games without a hit, and two of those happened in the following May, his first full season.

4) On the other hand, in his magical 1980 season, his longest drought was only two games. That only happened twice. DAAAAMMMN! To put that in perspective, a couple years ago when Ichiro! shattered an 80-plus year old record for hits in a season, he had three back-to-back games without a hit.

5) He played in 9 All-Star Games in 10 teams. Not merely got selected mind you, but got in the game. And yes, people really did used to get 5 plate appearances in those games.

6) Doc Medich never walked him, in 54 plate appearances. Ya gotta scroll all the way to the bottom, but trust me it's there. The batter vs. pitcher stuff only sorts by one thing at a time, but it's secondary default sort is plate appearances, so you can always find out who a batter faced the most and never walked against or struck out against or whatever it is that you're searching for. Also, looking around that same list you can see that Mike Timlin walked Brett every time he faced him.

7) If you read Sean's blog post (linked at the top here) about Brett and b-ref, you'll note that Ed Figueroa was Brett's favorite target in 1980, with 7 hits. Scroll down to the bottom and you'll find the name of the only man Brett faced at least 5 times that year and didn't get a hit off of. For the record, there were 37 guys he faced at least 5 times in 1980.

8. He had five hits in a game five times. Only once in 1980, though.

9) Let's go back to 1980 for a second. He had two streaks where he had at multiple hits in four straight games. Plus four more stretches of three straight games.

10) He had 24 hitting streaks that lasted 10 games or more. His best was a 30 gamer in, of course, 1980.

Through the first half of the season, the Red Sox have three guys who, if they had identical second halves, would be very serious contenders for AL Rookie of the Year.  They are SP Daisuke Matsuzaka (10-5, 3.53, 1.195 WHIP), RP Hideki Okajima (2-0, 0.88, 0.780 WHIP), and 2B Dustin Pedroia (.316 BA, .398 OBP, 20 2B, 33 R and 25RBI, batting mainly from the 8th or 9th spot all year).

Matsuzaka has performed very closely in line with expectations, mainly very similar to his performance in Japan. Some of his early struggles and reversals were predicted, and again as predicted he has evened out (into a dominant pitcher) when the weather got warm.

Okajima has been a major surprise. His performance so far has been far, far better than anything he ever did in Japan (and that's saying something, because his stats in Japan were excellent.) He's on pace to have perhaps the best ever season for a non-closing reliever. And you know what his salary is? Just $1.2 million. Theo Epstein comes up aces (no pun intended) on this one.

Pedroia has also been a bit of a surprise. He had been a good hitter in the minors but, especially after a dreadful September call-up last year, was expected to simply hit enough to hold down the starting job. The thinking was that he'd hit enough to keep Alex Cora on the bench as a backup. (As it turns out, Cora is going to have to fill in for Julio Lugo, who has fallen off the face of the baseball earth this year.)

Anyway, all of this was a long-winded way of saying that all three of these guys are going to get a ton of votes for Rookie of the Year. Often, when a team has multiple candidates for the major awards, they hurt each other because they split up votes. (See, for example, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz both losing out on AL MVP in recent deserving years because they split the votes. For example, this is why A-rod won the MVP in 2005.)

I was trying to remember the last time a team had multiple players rank highly in the Rookie of the Year voting. The only example that popped into my head was in the 1989 NL voting:

                           1st           Max       |       Season Results 
 Rk Name             Team Place Points Points Share|   AB  H  HR   BA    OPS  SB|  W-L   IP  ERA   WHIP  SO SV
+--+----------------+----+-----+------+------+-----+-----+---+--+-----+-----+---+------+---+-----+-----+---+--+
  1 Jerome Walton     CHC   22    116    120  0.97 |  475 139  5  .293  .720  24|                            
  2 Dwight Smith      CHC    2     68    120  0.57 |  343 111  9  .324  .875   9|                            
  3 Gregg Jefferies   NYM    0     18    120  0.15 |  508 131 12  .258  .706  21|                            
  4 Derek Lilliquist  ATL    0      6    120  0.05 |   63  12  0  .190  .396   0|  8-10 166  3.97  1.42  79   
  5 Andy Benes        SDP    0      3    120  0.02 |   24   6  1  .250  .625   0|  6-3   67  3.51  1.23  66   
  5 Charlie Hayes     TOT    0      3    120  0.02 | +304  78  8  .257  .671   3|                            
  7 Greg Harris       SDP    0      2    120  0.02 |   19   1  0  .053  .196   0|  8-9  135  2.60  1.17 106  6

Here, Jerome Walton and Dwight Smith (both of the Cubs) finished 1-2 in the voting. (Incidentally, both then proceeded to have mainly forgettable major league careers.)

Can you think of any other examples of multiple players from one team having getting significant ROY votes?

Melky Cabrera struck out five times in today's Yankees game.  According to Baseball-Reference's Player Index Batting Gamelog Finder, this is only the second time since 1957 that a switch-batter who also throws left has struck out 5+ times in a game - with the other one being Nick Swisher of the A's, who did it in a June 29th game from last year.

Hey, it's something for Lance Berkman to shoot for next season - and maybe we can have three different guys do it for three years in a row?

Following up on Chris' post, what an egg the White Sox just laid losing to the Twins 20-14.

In the last 50 years, a team has scored at least 14 runs and lost the game just 22 times:

 Cnt Date          Tm   Opp GmReslt  PA  AB  R  H 2B 3B HR RBI BB IBB SO HBP SH SF ROE GDP SB CS LOB Batrs
+----+-------------+---+----+-------+---+---+--+--+--+--+--+---+--+---+--+---+--+--+---+---+--+--+---+-----+
    1 2004-06-19    CHW @MON L 14-17  50  41 14 15  4  0  2  14  7   1  5   2  0  0   1   1  0  1   9    19 
    2 2004-05-08    DET @TEX L 15-16  53  45 15 16  3  0  1  15  6   0  7   1  1  0   0   0  1  0   8     9 
    3 2001-08-29    SDP @STL L 14-16  49  43 14 15  4  0  4  14  6   1 11   0  0  0   1   1  1  0   8    17 
    4 2001-08-05    SEA @CLE L 14-15  54  50 14 17  4  0  0  13  2   0  7   1  0  1   1   0  0  0   7    14 
    5 2000-05-14    CHC @MON L 15-16  51  46 15 21  1  0  3  14  4   0  9   1  0  0   0   0  6  0   9    17 
    6 2000-05-05    OAK @TEX L 16-17  51  43 16 16  3  0  5  16  8   0  8   0  0  0   1   0  0  1   8    11 
    7 1998-09-14    DET  CHW L 16-17  60  58 16 22  4  1  3  16  1   1 10   0  0  1   2   0  1  0   8    14 
    8 1998-07-05    CHW @BOS L 14-15  48  39 14 12  4  0  2  11  8   0  3   1  0  0   2   2  0  0   7    10 
    9 1996-06-30    LAD @COL L 15-16  51  44 15 18  2  1  6  15  6   0 12   0  0  1   0   0  2  0   9    15 
   10 1990-07-15    ATL  MON L 14-16  52  49 14 20  2  0  5  14  3   0  5   0  0  0   2   0  1  0  11    18 
   11 1988-07-30    CHW  CAL L 14-15  50  42 14 15  2  2  3  14  7   1  6   0  0  1   1   0  0  0   9     9 
   12 1987-06-29    TOR  NYY L 14-15  48  44 14 16  3  0  3  13  4   0  6   0  0  0   1   0  1  0   7    13 
   13 1985-09-24    CHC  MON L 15-17  51  46 15 20  2  0  3  15  4   0  4   0  0  1   1   0  1  1   9    22 
   14 1979-05-17    CHC  PHI L 22-23  59  56 22 26  3  1  6  22  3   0  4   0  0  0   2   2  0  0   7    19 
   15 1977-07-28    CIN @CHC L 15-16  69  58 15 19  5  0  5  14 10   4 12   0  1  0   3   2  6  0  15    16 
   16 1976-04-17    CHC  PHI L 16-18  58  48 16 19  5  0  3  16  6   1  7   3  1  0   1   1  0  0  12    18 
   17 1970-07-03    CHC  PIT L 14-16  50  40 14 18  5  0  2  14  9   2  6   0  1  0   0   1  0  0   9    18 
   18 1970-05-23    SFG  SDP L 16-17  76  60 16 23  2  0  4  16 10   3 12   0  6  0   0   1  1  2  15    22 
   19 1969-08-03    PHI  CIN L 17-19  51  47 17 21  4  1  3  17  4   1  6   0  0  0   1   2  1  0   7    18 
   20 1961-07-23(2) KCA  DET L 14-17  54  46 14 17  5  0  2  13  7   0  9   1  0  0   2   0  1  0  13    17 
   21 1959-09-07(1) DET @CLE L 14-15  45  39 14 13  2  0  4  14  6   1  3   0  0  0   0   1  0  0   4    12 

The 22nd game is today's performance by Chicago(A). There are some very memorable games in there, including the 23-22 Phillies/Cubs debacle. Amazingly, though, you can see that no team on this list lost by more than 3 runs. Well, congrats to Ozzie Guillen's crew for shattering that record and losing by 6 runs.

Ouch.

Today, Jon Garland got maimed against Minnesota.  He allowed 12 runs, 11 earned, off of 11 hits and 3 walks while recording only 10 outs; none of whom whiffed.  That's a game score of -11.

How does that compare with past ChiSox game scores?  Well, today's action isn't the b-ref database yet (heck, the game isn't over yet as I write this), but I can find the ChiSox gamescores for every other regular season game since 1957 in the PI Index.

Since 1957, the Sox have had 7 other times a guy has had a game score of zero or worse.  Sadly, Garland really did have the worst start by a White Sox pitcher in over a half-century.

A very nice piece over at The Hardball Times by Richard Barbieri looks at some of the pairs of brothers who have played MLB, with a focus on the Hoffman brothers.

It's true that the Phillies have often been on the shorter end of brother combos in baseball. Aside from the ones mentioned in the article, the Phillies also ended up with Tom Barrett (instead of Marty), Juan Bell (instead of George, who the Phillies lost in the Rule 5 draft to Toronto), Ken Brett (instead of George, although this one is tough since Ken Brett was pretty good hinmself), Tom Delahanty (instead of brother Jim, but of course they did have brother Ed), Ron Roenicke (instead of Gary), Mark Leiter (instead of Al), Rich Surhoff (instead of B.J.), Frank Torre (instead of Joe), and Mack Wheat (instead of Zack).

But the one I remember most...

Read the rest of this entry »

Bizzare one: who are the youngest switch-hitting shortstops to homer in the last half-century?

Go to PI's Batting Gamelog Finder, and set the search at requiring HR>=1 and Age<=20 for SS  switch-hitters.

Here's the results.   Jose Reyes did it four times, Jose Oquendo once, and Garry Templeton.  No teenaged switch-hitting SS ever did it, though.  At least not since 1957.  Reyes was the youngest, and his was a grandslam.