Archive for the 'History' Category

Over the years, many users have written to us expressing confusion over the assignment of saves for seasons prior to 1975, the year the current save rule was put into effect. This post will hopefully set the record straight on what changes the rule has seen over the years, which version of the rule we apply to older seasons, and why the save totals on a player's main page might not always match those you find in the player's game logs and splits.

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With the news of George Steinbrenner passing today, I thought it would be interesting to use the data on Baseball-Reference.com to look at the completed Yankees seasons from the time he bought the team until his death. There's a lot more good seasons in there than bad...that's for sure.

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Full List of Expansion Draft Picks

This has been sitting around on my desktop for years. Finally got it onto the site.

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

A month or so ago, I changed the underlying database for the statistics on the site. The site now relies on Pete Palmer's database for full season stats and team totals. Pete is a giant in the sabermetric community and was recently honored by inclusion in the inaugural class of SABR's Chadwick Award. His work is the basis for Total Baseball and the ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia. I am certain that his numbers are the most accurate representation of baseball history.

The site also is now updated with the Biographical and Minor League dataset from SABR much more regularly. On a weekly basis, the latest version of the SABR Biographical Committee's work (so our necrology data will be updated much more regularly), and SABR Minor League Committee's DB are incorporated into the site. You can follow the improvements to the minor league database on SABR's website. I generally incorporate these changes 3-6 days after the notes are posted there.

Today, we get a question from reader Dan, who wrote:

"I am having a debate w/ a friend that the # of pitchers to win at least 15 games a season for teams w/ a sub .500 record is far & few between. He contests the opposite, and I have no idea where to find this information. Even a category for most wins by a pitcher in a season with a team record of less then .500."

Unfortunately, you can't use the Play Index to find that right now, but with Baseball-Databank.com & a little MySQL and/or Excel know-how you can put together a query along those lines. Since 1901, I found that 626 pitchers have had seasons with 15 or more wins on a team with a sub-.500 record (for split-season pitchers, I took the weighted average of their team WPct's by their IP with each team). Here are the most wins in a season by pitchers on losing squads:

How about the best W-L% by a pitcher who won 15 games on a losing team?

How about the 15-game winner on a losing team whose personal W-L% differed the most from his team's?

Finally, here are the number of times it happened per year since 1901:

Nomar Garciaparra retired today, marking the end of a once-promising career derailed by injuries by age 30. Because of his drop-off over the second half of his career, Garciaparra will never be a member of the Hall of Fame, but there was a time in the not-so-distant past when it looked like Nomar was definitely tracking for Cooperstown. Through 2003, his age-29 season and his 8th in the majors, Garciaparra had these numbers:

Using the Play Index's Batting Season Finder, here are the players who met or exceeded Garciaparra's output (.323 AVG, 1231 H, 173 HR, 669 RBI) through age 29:

Here are the players meeting those same criteria, but through their first 8 MLB seasons:

Through age 29, here were his most similar players:

 Sim  Player              From  To Yrs   G    AB    R    H   2B  3B  HR  RBI  BB   SO    BA   OBP   SLG   SB   CS OPS+
+---++-------------------+---------+--+----+-----+----+----+---+---+---+----+----+----+-----+-----+-----+----+---+----+
      Nomar Garciaparra   1996-2003  8  928  3812  685 1231 272  47 173  669  271  390  .323  .370  .555   82  28  134
 862* Ernie Banks         1953-1960  8 1078  4159  676 1213 188  55 269  778  398  502  .292  .354  .557   36  37  140
 829  Joe Torre           1960-1970 11 1357  4926  631 1464 210  36 181  753  470  694  .297  .362  .465   12  23  130
 826* Yogi Berra          1946-1954  9 1053  3964  646 1175 177  37 181  790  332  179  .296  .354  .497   16  18  130
 824  Miguel Tejada       1997-2003  7  936  3584  574  968 191  11 156  604  287  542  .270  .331  .460   49  20  106
 823* Travis Jackson      1922-1933 12 1265  4587  643 1367 237  66 103  695  328  374  .298  .346  .446   67  13  106
 820  Derek Jeter         1995-2003  9 1212  4870  926 1546 239  41 127  615  513  873  .317  .389  .462  178  48  121
 811* Chick Hafey         1924-1932  9  895  3206  576 1050 261  49 129  654  253  323  .328  .381  .560   60   7  138
 811* Tony Lazzeri        1926-1933  8 1130  4196  683 1274 235  94 114  825  528  541  .304  .383  .486  110  67  129
 810  Chipper Jones       1993-2001  8 1094  4041  773 1240 237  23 227  737  652  609  .307  .400  .545  106  36  141
 810* Charlie Gehringer   1924-1932  9  985  3846  739 1209 237  94  63  548  383  182  .314  .380  .474  110  63  118
+---++-------------------+---------+--+----+-----+----+----+---+---+---+----+----+----+-----+-----+-----+----+---+----+

(I think we can assume that Jeter and Jones will also be enshrined in the HoF someday, which means 8 of Nomar's 10 most similar comps through age 29 were eventual Hall of Famers.)

Sometimes it can be hard to remember an athlete's glory days when they're still playing as a broken-down shell of what they used to be. In fact, some kids may not even be old enough to remember Garciaparra as anything but the oft-injured Cub, Dodger, and Athletic he was late in his career. But today, we should recognize that at one point less than a decade ago, Nomar Garciaparra seemed like a pretty good bet to make the Hall of Fame.

In some sad news, former Dodger CF Willie Davis has passed away at the age of 69. Davis was an extremely underrated player throughout his career, because at the time people looked at his career .279 BA and thought the former highly-touted prospect (he had a career .349 BA in the minors and was an MLB regular by age 21) was a major disappointment. But this was before most people understood park effects in anything but an abstract sense, and Dodger Stadium during the 1960s -- one of the NL's most offense-starved eras -- was beyond brutal to play in as a hitter. We have a metric called "AIR" that measures the offensive context in which a player played; 100 is average, numbers above 100 mean he played in a situation that boosted offense relative to all-time standards, and vice-versa for numbers below 100... Davis' career AIR is 91, and during his 20s it ranged from 89 at its highest to a staggering 75 in 1968, the nadir of the post-deadball era for hitters. So yes, Davis hit .279 in his career... but in a situation where the league-average hitter would have only hit .256. Likewise, he was an above-average hitter 10 times by OPS+, maxing out at 134 in a 1969 season that was muted to just .311/.356/.456 because of park effects.

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Short outings by starters tax a bullpen. Extra inning games do as well.  A combination of the two, must bring tears to the eyes of  even the most macho of  managers. Here are 3 teams that have had to face the ultimate bullpen challenge; 20 or more innings of  relief in one game. (I found these by checking the box scores from this list. If I missed one please let me know.)

On May 31st, 1964 the Mets and Giants met to play 2. The first game was a  tidy 2:29 minute game as the Giants overcame an early 3 run homer by center-fielder Jim Hickman to beat the Mets 5-3. The Mets used 3 pitchers in the loss and were in good shape heading into the second game. However, the Mets used reliever Bill Wakefield to start the game and he was done after 2 innings, 21 before the game would end. The Mets were in further trouble when Craig Anderson bombed and only completed 1/3 of an inning.  Extended outings   from Larry Bearnath and Galen Cicsco saved the day amd the Mets managed to make it through the marathon using only six pitchers. The Mets lost in the 23rd inning, Cisco's 9th inning of work. Here are the pitching lines for the game.

New York Mets                 IP     H   R  ER   BB  SO  HR    ERA   BF  Pit-Str  Ct·Sw·Lk   GB·FB·LD· ?   GmSc  IR-IS   LevI    WPA
B Wakefield                    2     2   2   2    2   1   0   4.34   10     -       ·  ·      2· 5· 2· 0     43    -     0.85  -0.14
C Anderson                     0.1   4   4   4    0   0   0   5.54    5     -       ·  ·      1· 3· 3· 1          0-0    1.35  -0.21
T Sturdivant                   2.2   3   0   0    1   2   0   3.91   11     -       ·  ·      2· 6· 3· 0          2-2    0.43  -0.06
F Lary                         2     0   0   0    0   2   0   6.30    6     -       ·  ·      1· 3· 0· 0          0-0    0.23   0.02
L Bearnarth                    7     3   0   0    4   4   0   3.58   26     -       ·  ·     10· 8· 5· 0          0-0    2.72   0.84
G Cisco, L (2-5)               9     5   2   2    2   5   0   2.45   35     -       ·  ·     17·10· 2· 0          0-0    2.50   0.57
Totals                        23    17   8   8    9  14   0          93     -       ·  ·     33·35·15· 1          2-2 

(As an aside, Ed Kranepool who played first base for the Mets that game had quite a day. According to newspaper reports at the time, Kranepool had played a double header in Syracuse the night before, finishing at 1:00 AM. The Mets then called up Kranepool who caught a 6:00 AM flight to NY and proceeded to play in all 32 innings of the Mets' double header. That's quite a marathon.)

The other two (since 1954)  instances of 20+ innings of bullpen work occurred in the one game. Yankee pitcher "Bullet Bob" Turley faced off  against the Tiger's Frank "The Yankee Killer" Lary in a late June game. Unfortunately for both starters, the year was 1962, a season in which neither player would live up to their nickname. The Yankees jumped all over  Lary for 6 first inning runs, but the Tigers clawed their way back. By  the end of the second inning, both starters were gone (Turley long gone) and  there were still another 20 innings to play.

After the initial offensive outbursts the teams settled down, with only 1 run scoring from the fourth through the 21st inning. Each team would use 6 relievers before  Jack Reed hit his only career home run to drive in the deciding runs in the top of the  22nd inning. Jim Bouton was the pitching star for the Yankees, throwing 7 scoreless innings, while Terry Fox pitched 8 scoreless for Detroit.  The game became famous as the longest in Yankees history, and it was the relievers who carried the day. The teams' starters combined to allow 10  runs in 2.1 innings, the bullpens allowed 6 in 39.2.

New York Yankees              IP     H   R  ER   BB  SO  HR    ERA   BF  Pit-Str  Ct·Sw·Lk   GB·FB·LD· ?   GmSc  IR-IS   LevI    WPA
B Turley                       0.1   1   3   3    3   0   1   3.94    5     -       ·  ·      0· 1· 0· 1     34    -     0.80  -0.17
J Coates                       2.2   4   3   3    1   6   0   4.48   13     -       ·  ·      2· 0· 0· 4          1-0    1.02  -0.13
B Stafford, BS (1)             2.2   4   1   1    1   3   0   3.83   13     -       ·  ·      2· 3· 0· 4          0-0    1.48   0.00
M Bridges                      0.1   0   0   0    0   0   0   1.31    1     -       ·  ·      0· 1· 0· 0          1-0    1.27   0.04
T Clevenger                    6.1   5   0   0    3   1   0   1.42   26     -       ·  ·     11· 6· 2· 5          0-0    2.24   0.76
B Daley                        2.2   2   0   0    0   2   0   5.29   11     -       ·  ·      5· 3· 1· 0          1-0    2.97   0.41
J Bouton, W (2-1)              7     3   0   0    2   6   0   2.49   26     -       ·  ·      6·11· 0· 1          0-0    2.29   0.93
Totals                        22    19   7   7   10  18   1          95     -       ·  ·     26·25· 3·15          3-0 

Detroit Tigers                IP     H   R  ER   BB  SO  HR    ERA   BF  Pit-Str  Ct·Sw·Lk   GB·FB·LD· ?   GmSc  IR-IS   LevI    WPA
F Lary                         2     7   7   7    1   1   1   5.04   14     -       ·  ·      5· 1· 0· 6     14    -     0.99  -0.45
J Casale                       3     1   0   0    2   0   0   3.55   12     -       ·  ·      5· 5· 1· 0          0-0    1.14   0.13
R Nischwitz                    1.2   2   0   0    2   0   0   1.65    9     -       ·  ·      3· 2· 0· 2          0-0    1.76   0.02
R Kline                        1     0   0   0    2   0   0   5.40    5     -       ·  ·      3· 0· 0· 0          3-0    2.26   0.14
H Aguirre                      5.1   2   0   0    1   8   0   2.59   20     -       ·  ·      5· 4· 1· 2          2-0    2.34   0.70
T Fox                          8     7   0   0    0   2   0   0.96   31     -       ·  ·     12·12· 1· 5          1-0    2.46   1.19
P Regan, L (4-7)               1     1   2   2    1   1   1   5.22    5     -       ·  ·      1· 1· 1· 1          0-0    1.57  -0.41
Totals                        22    20   9   9    9  12   2          96     -       ·  ·     34·25· 4·16          6-0 

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.

From the discussion that ensued in the previous post about this topic, it is pretty clear that while it may be a justified decision to split them, I'm going to need to study this a bit more. It seems to me that there are many such circumstances in baseball's primordial past that warrant further study. So my decision is to punt and do nothing. I'm going to leave it as is until we can come up with a reasonable process to study each and every one of these issues. Perhaps this would be a good job for the SABR Executives and 19th Century committees. Just a thought. Thank you to everyone who commented.