Archive for the 'Gamelogs' Category

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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Matt Garza earned a save last night against the Red Sox in just his 3rd career relief appearance and first since 2007. That came just 2 days after he started a game against the Red Sox.

Click through for more.

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Pitcher A:

G: 6
Starts: 6
IP: 30.0
Hits: 37
BB: 17
SO: 27
ER: 27
ERA: 8.10
Record: 1-4

Pitcher B:

G: 6
Starts: 5
IP: 33.0
Hits: 20
BB: 10
SO: 31
ER: 11
ERA: 3.00
Record: 5-1

Click through for the answers.

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Earlier this season, Jamie Moyer became the oldest player to pitch a complete-game shutout.

Last night, he set a record equally unlikely to be broken anytime soon. Unfortunately, it was for oldest pitcher to give up 9 earned runs a game:

Moyer broke his own record, but by quite a large margin of nearly 3 years.

Keep in mind that these 'records' I refer to go back to 1920, plus there's the possibility of games in the period 1940-1951 that don't show up in my searches.

Amazingly, the next oldest starter to allow 9 ER in no more than 1 inning was Orlando Hernandez at age 34 in a 2000 game.

Check out Moyer's last two starts for the Phillies:

The ERA column lists his seasonal ERA year-to-date at the conclusion of each game. It's purely psychological but it's painful to see his ERA jump from under 4 to over 4 in one game.

It can't be too often that a pitcher has back-to-back games of such extremes.

According to his neutralized pitching stats, Roy Oswalt deserves a .731 winning percentage this year, which projects to a 19-7 record for the season. Instead, he's actually 3-6 with a .333 winning percentage. He's had a whopping 2.3 runs of support per game. (I'm using "whopping" facetiously there.) That works out like this: The Astros have scored 23 runs in his 10 starts (2.3 per game) and 115 runs in their other 36 games (3.2 per game.) Even 3.2 runs per game is horrible but it beats the heck out of 2.3 runs per game.

So here Roy sits with a 178 ERA+ and twice as many losses as wins.

Nobody else has ever had a season like that in history.

The only guys who come even close are Tomo Ohka in 2000 with the Red Sox and Ned Garvin split between two teams in 1904. Ohka started 12 games and finished with an overall record of 3-6 despite an ERA+ of 163 and Garvin earned himself a 5-16 record over 24 starts despite a 159 ERA+.

The good news for Oswalt is that this means the trend is very unlikely to continue. The Astros almost certainly have to get better, and almost certainly have to trade Oswalt.

You have to go back to 2002 to find another pitcher with 6 losses in his team's first 46 games, despite not allowing more than 3 ER in any of those games. Here are all the top totals since 2000 for those criteria:

Clay Buchholz has been quite hot for a while now, going back to last August 19th. Here are his stats from that day through yesterday. For those too lazy to click through:

19 games and starts
12-4 record
(15-4 record for the Red Sox in those games)

His peripherals are good although not incredible:

115.1 IP
106 hits
41 walks
91 strikeouts
3.59 ERA

The bottom line, I suppose, is that Buchholz has been pitching at 20-game-winner-quality for the better part of a year now. His stock might be high enough to pry a good hitter away from another team, should the Red Sox decide to make a trade.

Wow, Mariano Rivera just gave up a grand slam to Jason Kubel, blowing his first save at home since 2007. Click through to see the list of his previous 52 save chances at home.

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

Due to the tireless work of the RetroSheet volunteers (otherwise known as heroes) Baseball-Reference.com now has play-by-play (PBP) for the 1952 and 1953 seasons and box score level accounts (BSEF) of all games in the 1920-1939 seasons. This is the first time that I have incorporated seasons with just BSEF data, so it necessitated some changes which I'll try to highlight below.

Beyond that major change there have been many, many additional improvements to the
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I've been working on getting the latest and greatest data from RetroSheet onto the site and will be making a few additions to the affected pages as well, which I'll go into more later when they launch.

Building all of this stuff is a five day process where our server runs continuously for five days building the 120,000 box scores, the 9m rows of play-by-play, the 5m rows of gamelogs, and 10m rows of splits. So adding a little thing here and there just isn't worth it. I've got about two windows a year to get things added and this is one of them. So if you want to suggest a split, gamelog, or boxscore feature, now would be a good time to do so.

One idea I've had since we'll be adding a lot of data from 1920-1939 (no pbp, just boxes) is to add a split for vs. RHstarter and vs. LHstarter. We won't know Lou Gehrig's exact splits, but we'll know what he did when a lefty started the game and when a righty started the game.

Others you would like to see?

Note: We also had a twitter outage after our blog update, but things are back up and running now.