One of the fun new things we can do with the PI is to sort the results of a game-finder search by a season finder.

Here are all the pitchers since 1919 to throw a  no-hitter of at least nine innings, sorted by career H/9IP. Charlie Robinson appears to be the clear-cut winner of surprise No-Hitter throwers.

If you sort by games started, it is interesting to note that 18 retired pitchers (and 3 active ones) who threw no-hitters , started less than 100 games. Bobo Holloman started only 10.

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Baseball-Reference always owes a debt of appreciation to our users who edit the B-R Bullpen Wiki, the collaborative baseball encyclopedia that anyone can edit, but that's especially true today as the Bullpen reached a major milestone -- 60,000 articles! -- thanks to its many tireless editors. Great work, everyone!

If you want to get involved, here are some links on the project:

• What is the Bullpen?
• How to contribute
• Guidelines
• Learn more
• What's Happening in the Bullpen

(Or you could just go to a Random Page.)

Give it a try, explore a little, and maybe even take a shot at editing a page. With your help, the Bullpen can add even more pages as we continue collecting and organizing as much baseball knowledge as possible.

For single seasons, From 1901 to 2011, For players in the saved report : (Batted .260 or lower, 1980-2010, 27 or younger, 2000 PA), From Age 28 to 99, (requiring Qualified for league batting title), sorted by greatest Batting Average: Results - Baseball-Reference.com.

The actual report above isn't that interesting, but the new feature I used to create it is.   When you save a report using the "link url" option under the SHARE link (and you can use this anywhere on the site).  This saved report will now appear as an option on the very bottom of the season finders.

So for the report linked above.  I first found all of the batters from 1980-2011, ages 0-27, with 2000 PA's and sub .260 career batting averages.    I then saved that report, reloaded, used that report, changed the ages to 28+, used single season and then found the best single-season batting averages among this group.

This feature will give you a lot of flexibility.   You could save reports like 2000 first round draft picks, or 1999 Chicago Cubs, or anything else on the site.  I think this will have a lot of power, but I expect you'll have some ideas I haven't thought of.  You will also be limited to 200 players total, so very broad searches may not work.

This is limited also to your last 20 saved reports.  Also note that if you use the season finder to save a report and then want to use that report, that will require a page reload to get that widget populated with the new report.

This is live only on the season finders at the moment and you can only filter on players.  It would be nice to allow searches that look for year n+1 or allow it for particular games, but at the moment, we are stuck with this method.

Have fun and let us know if there are any interesting reports you create.

In 2011, for the first 10 games that each team has pitched, there have been a total of 49 games with at least 10 strikeouts.

In fact, here is the total for all seasons going back to 2001:

Once again, this is the 10+ strikeout game total among the first 300 games of the year. (That's each of the 30 teams' first 10 games.)

It's interesting to see what a big range in W-L record we see from year to year. In 2011, teams won 67.3% of the time with 10+ strikeouts. The high-water mark came in 2001 with a 76.1 W-L%. In 2009, it was the lowest at just 50.9%.

I guess the variation is due to the small sample sizes...

Reader Josh, the same guy who pointed out that Gallardo scored the only run in a 1-0 complete game, noted that the Brewers pitcher registered only two strikeouts in his complete game (and only 1 before the ninth inning).

This isn't terribly rare, as it turns out. Going back to 2010, here are complete games with 2 or fewer strikeouts:

So there were 13 such games last year.

From 2007 through present, there have been 48 complete games with 2 or fewer strikeouts. (Incidentally the last with 0 was by Steve Trachsel in 2007.) Over that same period of time, there have been 571 total complete games. So, 8.4% of those performances featured 2 or fewer strikeouts.

Going back 25 years, over the period 1982 to 1986, there were 500 complete games with 2 or fewer strikeouts (holy disparity, Batman!) Overall, there were a whopping 3,317 complete games. That means 15.1% of the performances featured 2 or fewer strikeouts.

I wonder why it's less prevalent these days. My first thought is that 2 strikeouts in 9 innings is quite low (the average is about 7 per 9 these days) and is just so far below the norm that it's rare to see such a complete-game performance. In th early 1980s, there were about 5 strikeouts per 9, and so getting just 2 was still unusual but more common.

Have you ever looked at the single season HR records in terms of pre-1987, post-2003 and during the period 1987 through 2003?

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A B-R user recently wondered about the source for our pre-1910 batter strikeout data (example), given that those stats were not officially kept track of until 1913 in the AL and 1910 in the NL. I posed the question to Pete Palmer, stat legend and season-data provider to Baseball-Reference, and here was his reply:

"The strikeout data came from Jonathan Frankel, who did a tremendous amount of work with a number of helpers checking box scores in various newspapers. He identified about 90% of NL batters and 80% of AL batters from 1897-1909. The results were then prorated for the remainder of the season. Work is continuing on digging up more boxes and also on 1910-12 AL.

I was surprised that Jonathan was able to find so much data. What happened is that the local papers often carried the strikeouts for their games, so it required volunteers all over the country to check the papers, plus some inter-library loans. It was a terrific undertaking."

It turns out that Jonathan has a blog where he posts updates about the progress of his batter strikeout research. He says the 1910 AL is 89% complete right now, and that he has begun work on the 1912 AL as well.

Reader Josh pointed out a cool feat by Yovani Gallardo. He pitched a complete game shutout earlier this season that his team won 1-0 while he scored the only run of the game.

Looking up such games in the PI is difficult, but I found a way to limit the search and sort through manually.

Jason Hammel scored the only run in a 1 -0 win in 2010, but he pitched "only" 8 innings.

Gallardo himself also scored the only run of a 1-0 win in 2009 but he also pitched "only" 8 innings.

Other pitchers to score the lone run of a 1-0 game:

Odalis Perez in 2008 with 7.1 IP

Woody Williams in 2004 with 7 IP

Odalis Perez in 2002 with 8 IP

Kerry Wood in 2000 with 8 IP

Bobby Jones in 1994 with 8 IP

Steve Avery in 1993 with 8 IP

Chris Hammond in 1991 with 6 IP

Pete Harnisch in 1991 with 9 IP (complete game!)

That's as far back as I'll go. So there you have it--Gallardo is the first guy to do it while pitching a CG in 20 seasons since Harnisch in 1991.

On a side note about odd baseball statistics, who would have expected to see Odalis Perez show up here twice?

I was looking at Josh Hamilton's career to date, since he got hurt tonight and is expected to be out two months, and wanted to see what players had the highest slugging percentage between ages 26 and 30, where the player played a fair amount of the time but didn't play all the time.

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Click through for 5 random observations from this weekend's Yankees-Red Sox Series.

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