Andy's post earlier this evening made reference to the fact that Doug Fister has pitched at least 8 innings in 4 of his  starts this seasons. However, as you can see in Andy's chart, Fister has yet to throw a complete game. Which begs the question of which pitcher has the most starts of 8 or more innings without a complete game in a season. (I understand that this is a bookkeeping question. Pitchers can be credited with a complete game in an 8 inning loss or not credited in a long extra-inning appearance.)

From what I can  tell, the PI tool best equipped to answer this question is surprisingly the Player Pitching Streak Finder. I'm going to limit our search only back until 1952 because there seem to be no CG records in the game finders for the '30s. Change the starting year to 1952. Select starter, set CG=0 and select "To Start Season".  Click "Choose additional, advanced criteria" and set IP>=8. This  finds the longest streaks from  the beginning of the season, in which  the starter did not throw a complete game, only considering games of at least 8 IP. This search produces the following list.

Many of these pitchers did ultimately pitch a complete game during that season. Therefore, we need to check their gamelogs (or seasonal stats) for CGs. This can be easily done by clicking on the number of games in the streak (or on the player name.) We can also eliminate Adam Wainwright and Charles Hudson who pitched rain-shortened complete games during their streaks. Eliminating these players leaves us with  this list of pitchers (1952-2010) who are the leaders in most starts of at least 8 innings in a season without a CG.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010 at 11:04 pm and is filed under Streak Finders. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.