The Mets and Mariners have each started their season this year by going 4-11. Since 1988, how many teams have lost 11+ of their first 15 games?

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the club Lance Pendleton.

Since 1919, how many teams have won a game where they had zero hits?

Read the rest of this entry »

Using the new feature that allows us to do "two-tiered" searches...

There are 114 lefties to win 20 games in a season since 1901. Among those guys, here are the ones with the fewest career wins:

Some interesting entries here, including #25, who went on to a successful career elsewhere on the diamond.

The Yankees hit into six double plays this evening - yes, 6 GIDP in a 9 inning game.  Since 1919, how many teams had 6+ GIDP in a game of 9 innings or less?

Read the rest of this entry »

Since 1919, how many starting pitchers have had 3+ games within his team's first 15 games of the season where he pitched 5 innings or less while allowing 5 ER or more?

Read the rest of this entry »

If you live in the U.S., remember that today your Taxis due.

B-R reader James Sinclair sent this one in to us, so what follows are his words:

A conversation with a friend led me to look up the Braves-Pirates box score from July 25, 1992, a game any Braves fan who was around at the time would recognize for at least two reasons: (1) It was the Braves' 13th consecutive win, tying the franchise record at the time (later broken by a 15-game streak in 2000), and, (2) that mundane-sounding "Flyball: CF" with one out in the top of the 9th was this play—Otis Nixon's spectacular catch to rob Andy Van Slyke of a home run that would've given the Pirates a 2-1 lead.

What I had forgotten until I looked at the box score is that the Braves had just one hit, a David Justice home run. Even more unusual, they had just 25 plate appearances, which is the absolute minimum a team can have and still win a full-length game (Jeff Blauser drew a walk in the fourth, but was caught stealing). And it would have to be the home team—one run scored (by home run, most likely), 24 outs, and the top of the ninth ends with a 1-0 lead—while for a visiting team the minimum is 28.

I figured that's a pretty rare occurrence, and the best search method I could think of was to find games where a team faced only one batter over the minimum and still lost, so I went to the team pitching game finder. I had to search in kind of a roundabout way, because I didn't see a way to find all games where BF – PO = 1 for the losing team (and also I'm not a subscriber, for which I sincerely apologize—I won't tell anyone how I got around the limited result displays). So I searched for losing efforts where BF = 25 and PO = 24, then BF = 26 and PO = 25 (to account for games ending in a walk-off), and so on. After about ten rounds of this, I did some broader searches (BF < 42, PO > 36; BF < 48, PO > 42, etc.) to make sure I didn't overlook an extra-inning game that fit the criteria.

Point is, unless I missed something, there are only three full-length games in the Baseball-Reference archive in which the losing team faced one batter over the minimum. Oddly, they were all in the same decade:

July 25, 1992: Pirates 0, Braves 1
July 27, 1993: Rangers 1, Royals 0
September 20, 1998: Dodgers 1, Giants 0

The latter two were won by the visiting team, with 28 plate appearances, so the Braves appear to be in sole possession of the record, since 1919, for least plate appearances in a victory—and it took one of the most memorable plays in Braves history to do it.

A few more observations:

• Kevin Appier's game score of 91 in the 1993 game is the second-highest in the archive by the losing pitcher of a nine-inning game, and the highest since 1964.
• In the 1998 game, the Giants' Brian Johnson led off the eighth with a triple, but the Dodgers managed to get out of the inning.
• Barry Bonds was on the losing team in two of these games, was caught stealing in both, and went a combined 0-for-7 at the plate.
• Nixon robbed Van Slyke of more than a home run—Van Slyke finished the 1992 season with 199 hits (his career high), and tied with the Braves' Terry Pendleton for the league lead.

So, there you go. It's not timely at all, but I feel like I've made an archaeological discovery here (if this is already online somewhere, I haven't found it), and just wanted to pass it on to someone who might be interested.

Thanks, James!

(Thanks to our friend Marcos Grunfeld for sending along this great find.)

The other day, Brayan Villarreal of the Tigers became the first pitcher (at least as far back as we have pitch data, which is the late 1980s) to record a hold in a game without throwing a pitch. He relieved Brad Penny and picked Julio Borbon off first base.

When this blog first starter, Sean posted a list of pitchers to record a save without an official batter faced. That includes a save by Mitch Williams where he didn't even throw a pitch but rather came in and immediately picked a runner off to end the game.

In the Baseball-Reference.com database we can find 31 games where a pitcher got a hold without officially facing a batter. As far as I can tell, all of these games involve an out on the basepaths--either a pickoff, a caught stealing, or a runner throw out trying to advance (presumably on a wild pitch or passed ball).

Sean's list of saves recorded without facing a batter now includes 16 games thanks to a few added prior to 1957.

Overall we can find 251 games since 1919 where a pitcher recorded at least 1 out without ever facing an official batter in the game. This list includes all of the holds and saves referenced above as well as a whole bunch of others.

Just in case this is confusing to anybody, a pitcher doesn't get credit for a batter faced until the plate appearance is over. So a pitcher can, for example, go to a 3-and-2 count on a batter, then pick off a runner, and (if the pickoff was the 3rd out) the plate appearance is essentially thrown out. The batter comes to bat again next inning with a fresh set of balls and strikes and the pitcher doesn't get credit for a batter faced (unless he's still the pitcher when the next inning starts and he completes a new plate appearance against that batter.)  Another way it can happen is if a pitcher is relieved in the middle of a plate appearance--the reliever gets credit for the batter faced.

Yesterday, Sean rolled out a new feature. I didn't quite get it at first but Raphy gave me a Google-chat based tutorial and now I see the awesomeness of it all.

Basically, you can base a PI search on the results of a previous PI search. Even more basically, it means you can do one search to identify a group of players, and then do another search among just that group of players.

This is particularly useful for looking up a search that combines both season and career totals, or both season and individual game totals, or both career and individual game totals.

Here's an example.

Here's a list of most 40-HR seasons. That's a basic PI search, the kind of stuff we were posting 4 years ago. I did it by using a Batting Season Finder, 40+ HR, sort by players with the most seasons in their careers. Then I clicked on 'Share', and 'link', and I renamed it "40 HR season", then created the link.

Then, I went back to the PI Batting Season Finder. Down at the bottom, there's a dropdown menu to use only the players from a selected report, so I selected by "40 HR season" report. Then I did a new search totaling for careers, ranked in ascending order for home runs.

Among the 125 guys to have at least one 40-HR season, here are the ones with the fewest career HR:

Unsurprisingly, many of these guys are still active. (I could have chosen to ignore active players in my PI search, of course.) It seems pretty likely that Jose Bautista and Mark Reynolds will eventually pass Davey Johnson in career HR, putting Johnson back at the top of this list. I had no idea that Richard Hidalgo was second among retired players.

Anyway, this is a sweet new feature from Sean. Another thing I'll be doing with it is looking for pitchers who achieved both a particular pitching feat and a particular hitting feat--we get asked about that all the time, and now we have an automated way of searching for it!