Never Struck Twice
Posted by Raphy on September 4, 2009
Yesterday afternoon my interest was piqued by a blog post about pitching streaks without allowing two homers in the same game. And so, I prepared this beautiful post about how Chad Bradford and Jason Frasor were among the career leaders in games pitched without allowing 2 home runs in the same game. Talk about a jinx. Last night Frasor gave up 2 home runs in the one game. It marked the first time that he had done so in his 331 game career. Unlike Frasor, some pitchers have been able to go their entire careers without giving up 2 bombs. Here are the pitchers who have pitched the most games since 1954 without ever allowing 2 home runs in the same game:
StreakStart Streak End Games W L GS CG SHO GF SV IP H R ER BB SO HR ERA HBP WP BK Teams +-----------------+-----------+-----------+-----+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Paul Assenmacher 1986-04-12 1999-10-03 884 61 44 1 0 0 275 56 855.2 817 371 335 315 807 73 3.52 22 31 5 ATL-CHC-NYY-CHW-CLE Bob Locker 1965-04-14 1975-06-20 576 57 39 0 0 0 288 95 879 777 329 269 258 577 40 2.75 36 37 5 CHW-SEP-MIL-OAK-CHC Chad Bradford 1998-08-01 2009-09-02 557 36 28 0 0 0 114 11 512.2 520 211 184 135 313 27 3.23 29 4 3 CHW-OAK-BOS-NYM-BAL-TBR Jim Mecir 1995-09-04 2005-09-28 474 29 35 0 0 0 126 12 527 482 240 221 225 450 41 3.77 23 19 1 SEA-NYY-TBD-OAK-FLA Ramon Hernandez 1967-04-11 1977-07-27 337 23 15 0 0 0 184 46 430.1 399 158 145 135 255 23 3.03 14 7 5 ATL-CHC-PIT-BOS Doug Sisk 1982-09-06 1991-05-23 332 22 20 0 0 0 161 33 523.1 527 238 190 267 195 15 3.27 20 15 3 NYM-BAL-ATL
The stats are through 9/2. Bradford added to his streak last night.
To find this information I used the pitching streak finder to find the players with the most games to start a career with at most 1 hr. Then I checked the HR logs for all the top players and only kept the ones who never gave up more than 1 homer in a game.
September 4th, 2009 at 8:14 am
I'd have thought this list would favor one-out guys like Mike Myers or latter-day Jesse Orosco. Without looking it up, I'm willing to bet those guys had very few cases of allowing 2 homers, but obviously they had at least one or else they'd be on this leader board.
September 4th, 2009 at 8:57 am
6 two-homer games for Orosco and 4 for Myers.
September 4th, 2009 at 9:46 am
Looking a little closer at Myers and Orosco. Both players gave up two homers when they faced only a few batters and also when they were extended into multiple innings.
http://bbref.com/pi/shareit/cDczE
http://bbref.com/pi/shareit/p8DFM
However, I do agree with Andy that those players would have been my first guess.
September 4th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
I'd find this concept much more interesting if it were restricted to starting pitchers.
September 7th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Without looking them up, my guess is that Orosco pitched his 2 HR games earlier in his career, before he became a one-out guy. For the first third of his career, Jesse was the Mets closer or co-closer, and typically pitched one-plus innings per appearance.
I, too, would be interested in a list of pitchers with the longest streaks (not necessarily entire careers) of games *started* allowing zero or one homer. I wonder if Jim Palmer would be on it? I seem to recall that he went his entire career without giving up a grand slam...