Sam Fuld missed the cycle by a single last night.

I've written about missing the cycle by a single quite a bit before:

• Last year I listed the players to do it the most often after Ian Stewart did it for the second time
• In 2008 I wrote about it after Dustin Pedroia did the feat, joining past and future teammates Adrian Gonzalez and Eric Hinske that season.
• Way back in July 2007 when this blog first started (holy smokes...is that really almost 4 years ago already?) I did a detailed study about missing the cycle by each different type of hit

How many pitchers had 1,500 IP after 1932 with an ERA+ of 100 or better in their career and never made an All-Star team?

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I've got nothing more to say. I'm too busy making sure my affairs are all in order.

2002 Oakland Athletics Batting, Pitching, & Fielding Statistics - Baseball-Reference.com.

If you look above the team batting stats you will now see a graphical summary of the team's season.  The height of the bar is equal to the margin of victory (up to ten runs).  Losses are in red and wins are in green.

I've grouped the games by month.  Double-headers are slightly narrowed since they occurred on the same day.  Off days are included as blanks, and if you mouse over the bar you will see a summary of the game as shown below. Clicking on the bar will take you to the box score.

Mouseover a bar to show the game's details

Currently this is updated back through 1985, but we'll have every team updated within an hour or so.

Through 2011:

The Marlins have 2 guys on there.

Overall this is a pretty weird list. A negative OPS+ against....another guy with just a 1.50 ERA but a 121 OPS+ against...or a 0.00 ERA and 138 against...

How many players had 5,000+ PA after 1932 with an OPS+ of 100 or better in their career and never made an All-Star team?

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I saw another stat-based license plate yesterday. This one was 9533 HR.

I started wondering how a number of almost 10,000 HR could be relevant. In any given season these days, there are 4,000-some homers, so that's not it.

But check this out. Among the 30 current franchises, the Yankees have the most HR, with 14,319. The Rays have the fewest, with 2,033.

The Minnesota Twins have 9,512 HR in franchise history. That means that in about 2 weeks, they'll probably get the 21 more they need to reach 9533 HR. Sweet.

Reader mccombe35 emailed me and pointed out that Paul Konerko has at least 1 RBI in each of the first 7 games for the White Sox this year.

Since 1919 here are the only guys to do that in his team's first 7 games:

Oh yeah, remember that hot start Jorge Cantu had last year? He set the post-1919 record with RBI in the first 10 games.

In today's Phillies-Braves game, Philly starting catcher Brian Schneider homered. Later, Carlos Ruiz hit a pinch-hit grand slam and then moved to catcher, replacing Schneider.

That doesn't happen all that often--namely that two guys play catcher and homer for the same team in the same game.

Here are the 36 previous occurrences since 1919:

I'd have to look at each game manually to see how many of them (unlike today's game) feature the homers when each guy was actually playing catcher. I presume the case today with Ruiz--hitting the HR as a pinch-hitter and then switching to catcher--is pretty common.

Quick--think of a ballplayer named Mickey.

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