Archive for the 'Box Scores' Category

August 2, 1919 Philadelphia Phillies at Chicago Cubs Box Score and Play by Play - Baseball-Reference.com.

Thanks to the phenomenal work of RetroSheet, we now have 1919 box scores, gamelogs and splits on the site.  The play index has also been updated with 1919 data where appropriate.

In addition, a couple dozen previously undiscovered play-by-play accounts have been added for more recent  seasons and numerous bugs have been fixed both in our scripts and in the retrosheet data.

Please let us know if you come across any bugs or things that need to be fixed.

150,000+ Box Scores in the Palm of Your Hand / Mobile Home Page

All 155,000 regular season box scores (from 1920-2010) are now available in a mobile-friendly format via our recently launched mobile site.
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In the last 20 seasons, there have been 138 Opening Day games started by left-handed pitchers. Randy Johnson has 14 himself, followed by Mark Buehrle with 8. There have been 444 Opening day games started by righties, led by Roger Clemens with 10 and Brad Radke with 9.

That works out to 23.7% of games started by lefties.

Over the same 20 years, looking at all games (not just Opening Day), lefties have started 25,906 games and righties have started 66,514 games. That's 28.0% of games started by lefties.

That means that lefties are a bit less likely to start on Opening Day than on other days. In turn, this might simply mean that over the last 20 years, there have been a few extra right-handed ace pitchers that have prevented lefties from taking some of those #1 turns.

Going back to 1919 (yes, our box scores go back to 1919 now!) the numbers are:

Opening Day:  508 starts by lefties, 1,444 starts by righties (26.0% by lefties)

All: 88,743 by lefties, 218,857 starts by righties (28.9%  by lefties)

Here are the fellas to have at least 4 hits in his team's first game of the year, going back the last 10 seasons:

Notes:

• Clint Barmes and Aaron Miles did it for the same team in the same game.
• Carlos Gonzalez and Carlos Gomez did it for opposing teams in the same game.
• Overall teams were 17-3 when at least one of their players had 4 hits.
• Every position except pitcher is represented. The only time since 1920 that a pitcher got 4 hits on Opening Day was in 1932 by Phil Collins. Every batting order position except 9 is also represented on the list above.
• Gonzalez from last year is the only player to have a negative WPA for his day. That was in part because of his erasure on a CS after leading off the game with a single. The single put the Rockies' odds of winning from 50% up to 54%, only for it to immediately drop to 48% when he was thrown out. He also grounded into a double play in his only at-bat that didn't result in a hit.

Yesterday I gave a big-picture overview of all the features we have in our Postseason Section, so today I wanted to talk about a really cool, underrated feature of our playoff boxscores...

As you probably know, our regular-season play-by-play data stretches back to 1950 -- which is amazing and to the credit of Retrosheet that anything close to that amount of information is available. But did you know that our postseason boxscores have play-by-play accounts for the entirety of the World Series era?

That's right, we have play-by-play descriptions of baseball games that happened 107 years ago. Not only that, but we have Win Probability statistics and graphs for those games! I don't know about you, but I think that's pretty amazing. In fact, basically anything you can do in a 2010 box score, you can do for postseason games going back to 1903.

So if you ever wondered how much WPA Babe Ruth cost the Yankees when he was caught stealing to end the 1926 World Series, we can answer that and many more questions. Play around for a while in the Postseason Section, and you may find a whole new way to look at games that happened a century ago.

This post is the ninth in our series of ten new features for our tenth anniversary.

Thanks to the heroes at RetroSheet, we now have access to box scores and gamelogs for every major league game from 1920-2009, and play-by-play going back to 1950. Ninety years of major league history and more than 150,000 games. That includes over 80% of the batting seasons in major league history (back to 1871), 74% of the team seasons, and full careers for 72% of all major league players.
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June 30, 2010 Tampa Bay Rays at Boston Red Sox Play by Play and Box Score - Baseball-Reference.com

I'm just doing a little bit of experimenting here to see if this might catch on.  Each of our 2010 box scores now allows you to "Like" the game on facebook.  You can make your own comments on your facebook page about the game and it will show up on your Wall.  Haven't figured out if it shows up in your friends feeds as well.  I think it may.  Give it a whirl.  If no one uses it, we'll take it away next week.

Here we examine a graphical look at Game Scores.

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Yesterday was an unusual day in MLB. Lots of interesting things happened, but one particular oddity was two different games that featured non-pitchers pitching:

• IF-OF Bill Hall came in to pitch the 9th inning for the Red Sox, retiring the side in order and hitting 89 with his fastball.
• C Kevin Cash pitched the 8th inning for the Astros. Cash needed only 10 pitches to complete the inning, but this is a little deceptive as he also allowed 3 hits and a run. The first batter hit a pop fly out on the first pitch. The next two batters each saw 3 pitches and each got hits. The fourth batter singled on the first pitch, and the final two batters of the inning each made an out on the first pitch. Facing 6 batters with 10 pitches, I'm willing to bet that Kevin Cash will finish this season with the fewest pitches thrown per batter, minimum 1 inning pitched.

Of course, this wasn't the first time this season that two different non-pitchers pitched on the same day. In this game, both Felipe Lopez and Joe Mather pitched for the Cardinals in the same game against the totally awesome Mets.

This is the fourth of ten features we are adding for our 10th anniversary.

The first place I saw Win Expectancy (WE) was when I was writing for the Big Baseball Annual back in the late 1990's. Doug Drinen, who has since moved on to become one of the leading NFL analysts and creator of Pro-Football-Reference.com, wrote a series of articles on reliever usage that built on the original Mills Brothers work on Win Expectancy (WE). Doug even included a WS Game WE Graph in one of the books. I always have thought it was an elegant measurement of what happened during the game and I'm excited to now have it on the site.
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