Longest Streak to Start Career with Multiple Hits – Baseball-Reference PI
Posted by Sean Forman on September 16, 2009
Longest Streak to start career with multi-hit games - Baseball-Reference PI
Ian Desmond has gotten off to a fine start for his career with three multi-hit games, but he'll need to be better to be the best of recent memory.
To generate this list I used the batting streak finder. I made the decision to only consider games with 2 or more AB's. This causes us to include Oliva's streak. In 1962 and 1963 he pinch hit a bunch of games, but actually had only one multi-AB game in that stretch. He then started 1964 with five multi-hit games. Salazar pinch ran in his debut and then rattled off his streak. The caveat that this is only for the retrosheet-era 1954 on applies. If you want to push the retrosheet era back earlier, volunteer here.
StreakStart Streak End Games AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SO BB SB CS BA OBP SLG OPS Teams +-----------------+-----------+-----------+-----+--------- Tony Oliva 1962-09-14 1964-04-19 6 27 6 13 3 2 1 9 3 3 0 1 .481 .533 .852 1.385 MIN Luis Salazar 1980-08-17 1980-08-21 5 19 3 11 0 1 0 3 4 1 0 0 .579 .600 .684 1.284 SDP Josh Anderson 2007-09-14 2007-09-17 4 18 3 11 2 0 0 5 2 1 0 0 .611 .650 .722 1.372 HOU Willy Taveras 2005-04-05 2005-04-09 4 15 3 9 1 0 0 1 2 1 1 0 .600 .625 .667 1.292 HOU Morgan Burkhart 2000-06-27 2000-06-30 4 15 3 8 1 0 0 4 1 4 0 0 .533 .632 .600 1.232 BOS Pete Coachman 1990-08-18 1990-08-21 4 18 1 8 1 0 0 4 4 1 0 0 .444 .474 .500 .974 CAL Doug Dascenzo 1988-09-02 1988-09-05 4 19 3 10 3 0 0 4 0 1 0 0 .526 .550 .684 1.234 CHC Nyls Nyman 1974-09-10 1974-09-13 4 14 5 9 2 1 0 4 1 0 1 0 .643 .667 .929 1.596 CHW Ken Griffey 1973-08-25 1973-08-29 4 17 3 9 2 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 .529 .529 .647 1.176 CIN Rich Coggins 1972-08-29 1972-09-05 4 16 2 9 3 0 0 0 4 0 0 0 .563 .563 .750 1.313 BAL Tommy Helms 1965-09-01 1965-09-04 4 16 2 9 2 1 0 2 2 2 1 0 .563 .611 .813 1.424 CIN Gene Baker 1954-04-13 1954-04-18 4 17 7 9 3 0 2 7 0 3 0 0 .529 .600 1.059 1.659 CHC Ian Desmond 2009-09-10 2009-09-13 3 13 2 8 3 0 1 4 2 1 0 0 .615 .643 1.077 1.720 WSN plus many more with three
September 17th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
FWIW...Desmond, with his 4th straight multi-hit game to start his career, joined only Coachman, Taveras and Griffey (without the caveat), and therefore could become the only player in history with 2-or-more hits in each of his first five major league games. Quite a feat, but I'm sure he'd trade that milestone if it could ensure a career longer than Coachman's, whose started and ended in '90.