Of all the pitchers to once make an All-Star team, who has the most seasons where he did not win or save 20 games?

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B-R reader Blake had an interesting question this morning:

"You folks are great at acquiring information like this, so I would like to ask:

Could you produce a list of the occasions when a visiting team starting pitcher has had an AB before he has thrown his first pitch in a ballgame?"

Using the Play Index Batting Event Finder, you can set up a search for all PAs in a given year range by a visiting pitcher in the 1st inning:

All of MLB: 189 Plate Appearances in 2003-2011, during 1st Inning, Away Games and As P

Of those 189 instances since 2003:

• All but two teams -- the Texas Rangers and Toronto Blue Jays -- had a pitcher bat before throwing a pitch. The leaders, predictably, are all NL teams; St. Louis saw this happen an MLB-high 15 times, while the Padres and D-Backs had it happen 14 times apiece. The Twins and Angels led the AL with 3 instances apiece.
• Pittsburgh pitchers allowed it to happen the most, as they saw their counterpart in the top of the 1st 25 times. Right behind them were the Rockies (20) and Reds (17).
• The visiting pitcher hit .110/.148/.134, which sort of hampers your chances of making it all the way back to the top of the order -- although away leadoff men also saw a second 1st-inning PA 96 times over the same time span.

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Since 1919, how many players had at least 2 homeruns and at least 2 sac-bunts in the same game?

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2011 Wins Above Replacement data is now live on the site and will be updated daily throughout the season. This includes the league pages, player pages, team pages, and Play Index, among other locations.

In the very early going, here are your 2011 WAR leaders:

Position Players

Pitchers

Here's a bizarre one folks...

Sunday, the Pirates' Andrew McCutchen and Jose Tabata homered in the top of the first inning, back-to-back, off Reds' starter Edinson Volquez.

Weirdly, that's the second time Volquez has allowed b2b homers to start a game this year:

(Incidentally, I found these games using the Team Batting Event finder, set to 1st inning, no outs, HR, no runners on, and looked for games with at least 2 such homers.)

I happened to be in Cincinnati over the weekend and heard their local radio guys note Volquez's extreme ERA-by-inning split. He has a 29.25 ERA in the first inningand 1.93 ERA thereafter. The announcer compared this split to the career performance of Tom Glavine, which was not quite as stilted.

Back-to-back homers leading off a game has already happened more in 2011 than it did in all of 2010. Here's the only occurrence last year:

And here's 2009:

Note that these last HRs were in the bottom of the 1st, as opposed to truly leading off the game.

It didn't happen at all in 2008 but check out the cool Finder results for 2007:

There were b2b homers off Bronson Arroyo and Scott Elarton. There were two games that featured not b2b homers but leadoff homers by each team in their own half of the first inning. And, there were back-to-back-to-back homers by 3 Brewers off Phil Dumatrait in another game.

Or, otherwise known as Shamsky's big day off the bench...

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Since 1928, there have been 196 pitchers to debut with a complete game. It hasn't happened since Andy Van Hekken's major league debut in 2002. (Van Hekken, incidentally, is still pitching in the minors.)

Of those fellows, here are the 27 who never pitched more than that 1 CG in the majors: Read the rest of this entry »

Lance Berkman has been on fire the last 5 days. Check out the longest streaks in 2011 (through Friday's games) where the player had at least 1 hit and 1 run scored:

A few players have had longer streaks but check out Berkman's HR and RBI totals. Not bad for a washed-up 35 year old cast off.

On a recent post, some readers got into an interesting discussion about whether there has ever been a major-league game with 4 batters each having at least 2,500 career hits.

It would've happened this year when the Rays faced the Yankees, before Manny Ramirez 'retired'. He would have joined Jeter, A-rod, and Damon.

Reader Doug N writes in with the following gems:

In your Blog posting last week about the Rays not hitting, quite a discussion got going on the topic of players in a game having 2500+ hits.
 
The consensus view at that time was that this had probably not happened since 1927 in As/Senators games of that year. In fact, though, this occurred in two games just last year, involving Jeter, ARod, Manny and Garret Anderson.
 
http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/LAN/LAN201006260.shtml
http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/LAN/LAN201006270.shtml
 
I suspect this may be of interest to Dukeofflatbush, DavidRF and others, if you have a way to pass this on.

Nice finds by Doug. Then, he wrote back to add the following:

Some other really close calls.

The Orioles acquired Harold Baines from the White Sox July 29, 1997. The Angels acquired Rickey Henderson from the Padres Aug 13, 1997. Both Baines and Henderson had reached the 2500 hit mark shortly before being traded. After the Henderson trade, the Angels then released Eddie Murray the next day, Aug 14. The Angels and the Orioles played Aug 8-10, and again Aug 16-18. Had Murray stayed a few more days, or Henderson arrived a few days earlier, then Murray, Henderson, Ripken and Baines would have been in uniform for one (or both) of the Angels/Orioles series.

Texas and the Yankees played Aug 27-29, 2009. The Rangers had Omar Vizquel and Ivan Rodriquez, and the Yankees had Jeter and A-Rod. Alex picked up 4 hits in the series to bring his career total to (alas) 2,494, just shy of the milestone. It was the last meeting of the season for the two teams.

The oddest set of 2500 hit teammates? Personal taste, of course, but I'll go with Babe Ruth and Rabbit Maranville. The appeared together in 3 games including this one, where each both played in the field and reached base safely.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/BSN/BSN193505090.shtml

Thanks to Doug and all the other readers for researching this--a very interesting question.

Now who can guess when it will happen next?

Did you see this one?

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