10 Things I Didn’t Know About George Brett
Posted by Chris J. on July 8, 2007
Recently, George Brett discovered b-ref and fell in love with it. In that spirit, here's ten things you can find out about George Brett using the PI Index:
1) He faced 26 pithcers who are still around. Well, 26 pitchers still listed as active at b-ref anyway. One or two of them retired after '06. Some mighty great names on that list: Clemens, Johnson, Mussina and of course Todd Van Poppel.
2) He was fantastic against Hall of Famers. The man frickin' owned Jim Palmer and Tom Seaver. If you're curious, that adds up 151 hits in 505 ABs, for a .299 average.
3) His longest hitless drought was six games long. It happened only once, when he was a late season call up in 1973. After that he only had four stretches of five games without a hit, and two of those happened in the following May, his first full season.
4) On the other hand, in his magical 1980 season, his longest drought was only two games. That only happened twice. DAAAAMMMN! To put that in perspective, a couple years ago when Ichiro! shattered an 80-plus year old record for hits in a season, he had three back-to-back games without a hit.
5) He played in 9 All-Star Games in 10 teams. Not merely got selected mind you, but got in the game. And yes, people really did used to get 5 plate appearances in those games.
6) Doc Medich never walked him, in 54 plate appearances. Ya gotta scroll all the way to the bottom, but trust me it's there. The batter vs. pitcher stuff only sorts by one thing at a time, but it's secondary default sort is plate appearances, so you can always find out who a batter faced the most and never walked against or struck out against or whatever it is that you're searching for. Also, looking around that same list you can see that Mike Timlin walked Brett every time he faced him.
7) If you read Sean's blog post (linked at the top here) about Brett and b-ref, you'll note that Ed Figueroa was Brett's favorite target in 1980, with 7 hits. Scroll down to the bottom and you'll find the name of the only man Brett faced at least 5 times that year and didn't get a hit off of. For the record, there were 37 guys he faced at least 5 times in 1980.
8. He had five hits in a game five times. Only once in 1980, though.
9) Let's go back to 1980 for a second. He had two streaks where he had at multiple hits in four straight games. Plus four more stretches of three straight games.
10) He had 24 hitting streaks that lasted 10 games or more. His best was a 30 gamer in, of course, 1980.