Reader Neal W. writes in to ask:

"Has there ever been a doubleheader where the home team played two different teams?"

I don't know the answer--I'm hoping another reader will.

But it does remind me of looking at team schedules as a kid and often being fooled that there was a double-header against two different teams. Back in the days when there still were scheduled double-headers, it wasn't unusual to look at a Sunday on the calendar and see two games scheduled. Occasionally I saw two games where the opponents were different and got surprised. Eventually I realized that the calendars were actually showing two different Sundays for a month that ended on a Sunday or a Monday. They did this to save space rather than print an entire extra week at the bottom that would be mostly empty.

But back to the question at hand--does anybody know?

Keeping Score: The Most Important Skill for a Leadoff Hitter - NYTimes.com

Some basic sabermetric thoughts on leadoff hitters, with a little help from The Book.

Ben Zobrist has 8 RBI in today's Rays game.

Previous single-game leaders for the Rays:

Bartolo Colon has put together a great season so far for the Yankees. First he filled in on long relief of Phil Hughes, who got hammered thanks to his dead arm, and now he's got Hughes' spot in the rotation.

Yesterday, Colon became the first pitcher in 2011 who's at least 37 years old to pitch 8 innings while allowing no more than 1 run:

Interestingly, when Colon was in camp with the Yankees, the reports all along were that his stuff looked great but his conditioning was poor. It makes me wonder how many more effective outings Colon has in him. I wouldn't be surprised if he breaks down before the All-Star game.

Reader Steve T wrote in to ask:

"I see that many members often talk about the unimportance of the triple crown stats.  I was wondering if there was ever an instance of someone winning the triple crown and yet a reasonable argument could be made that he was not the best player in the league that given year"

Well let's take a look.
In 1967 Carl Yastrzemski won the triple crown in the AL. Yaz also led the AL in WAR by a huge margin. He registered a WAR of 12.2 while the next best player was Al Kaline with 7.3.

Here are other triple crown winners and their rank in WAR:

1966 AL, Frank Robinson, 1st in WAR (8.3) over Earl Wilson (6.8)

1956 AL, Mickey Mantle, 1st in WAR (12.9) over Early Wynn (8.5)

1947 AL Ted Williams, 1st in WAR (10.3) over Lou Boudreau (7.3)

1942 AL Ted Williams, 1st in WAR (11.0) over Joe Gordon (8.4)

1937 NL Joe Medwick, 1st in WAR (8.9) over Johnny Mize (6.9)

1934 AL Lou Gehrig, 1st in WAR (10.7) over Charlie Gehringer (9.5)

1933 AL Jimmie Foxx, 1st in WAR (9.0) over Lou Gehrig (7.9)

1933 NL Chuck Klein, 4th in WAR (6.9) behind Carl Hubbell (8.2) and second among all position players to Wally Berger (7.0)

1925 Rogers Hornsby, 1st in WAR (10.0) over Kiki Cuyler (6.9)

1922 Rogers Hornsby, 1st in WAR (10.7) over Wilbur Cooper (7.1)

1909 AL Ty Cobb, 1st in WAR (10.6) over Eddie Collins (9.8)

1901 AL Nap Lajoie, 2nd in WAR (9.4) behind Cy Young (11.2) but first among all position players

There were a couple more triple crown winners before 1901 but I'll stop there.

In all but a couple of cases, the winner put up the best WAR in his league and was probably the best player. Can we make good arguments against any of these guys? I guess I'd start with Chuck Klein.

Here's a great trivia question from reader eorns.

Q: What do the following pitchers have in common?
Graeme Lloyd, Ramiro Mendoza, Bret Prinz, Felix Rodriguez, Mike Myers, David Robertson, and Phil Coke

If you said that they all played for the Yankees, think harder before clicking through.

Read the rest of this entry »

Since 1950, what non-pitcher has the highest WPA in a game where they never officially came to bat?

Read the rest of this entry »

I was just perusing the 2011 MLB baserunning splits and did a sort by XBT%, which is the percentage of time that a baserunner advances more than 1 base on a single or more than 2 bases on a double.

The league average so far this year is 41% but check out the teams with the lowest percentage so far:

The Yankees have by far the lowest percentage. It's an unusually low number as in most seasons the best and worst teams don't usually vary from the average by more than 6 or 7 percentage points.

Initially, you might think that the Yankees' low percentage indicates that they're having trouble scoring runs, but they're not. (Check out the first column above.)

In truth, what's happening is that the Yankees are homering a lot when the guys are on base, and as a result they don't actually have all that many baserunning situations. Note how many fewer situations they have in the columns to the right above, and it turns out that with such a small sample size, they just happen to have had some bad luck so far.

How much does it normally correlate with run scoring in normal cases? Not a ton. I took a look at the 2010 numbers, and there's quite a weak correlation between XBT% and R/G. For those who care, I found just a 0.10 R-squared on a linear correlation.

Last night Jered Weaver won his 6th game in his 6th start of the season. I can't link to it because as I'm writing this our database hasn't gotten its daily update yet.

Here are the players with the longest win streaks to start a season going back to 2001:

Note that this list is not the same as consecutive games without a loss (in other words allowing for no-decisions.) Among starting pitchers, here are the longest streaks to start a season since 20o1 without registering a loss:

The longest streaks in the last 10+ seasons to start a season without a loss all come, of course, from relievers:

Since just about every season at least one starting pitcher starts with a win streak of 5 or 6 games, I've written about this topic before. See here for lists that go back a little further.

Sports Reference's New Blog: Stathead

I have to admit that I find it very hard to follow all of the great research that people people are producing every day on the web. Just for baseball, culling through the good stuff on Baseball Prospectus, Hardball Times and FanGraphs is hard enough, but when you add in team blogs, other stathead blogs and everything else, it becomes impossible. This doesn't even include trying to locate recent research in hockey, basketball, football and soccer.

So we've decided to do something about it. Every weekday, the Stathead blog will summarize the best research-related studies, news, conferences, and resources for baseball, basketball, football, hockey and soccer.

The blog will primarily be edited by Neil Paine and will typically feature 20-30 links to analytic content around the internet. We've been working out the format over the last two weeks, and we think you'll soon appreciate our concise summaries for all of the articles we write about.

Feedback as always is welcome.