Archive for the 'Mailbag' Category

Here's a message from John, who wants to know whether Derek Jeter can break Pete Rose's hits record:

"After his fresh new contract will Jeter approach and pass Mr. Rose or will he fall short, he needs 1330 base knocks. That is an average of 222 hits over the next 6 seasons (he never has reached 222, EVER) or 190 hits over the next 7 season, Per Season.? What do you think ? Will Jeter hang on like Rose to be a player/manager, player/coach to reach the record? This is a revisit of your 2008 blog."

I don't think he'll be a player/coach, but we can judge his chances as a plain old player using what Bill James called the "Favorite Toy". This is how our Bullpen Wiki describes the methodology:

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As you probably know, the 2010 Giants won the World Series after leading the majors in Earned Run Average during the regular season. So here's a recent question from B-R reader Joshua Rosenstock:

"How many times has the team that led the MLB in ERA won the World Series?"

Let's go to the data...
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B-R user Simmy Cohen noticed that we don't have a K/BB leaderboard on our all-time playoff pitching leaders page, and asked if I could post one today. Here you go... Career K/BB ratio leaders (along with some other stats), in the postseason, minimum 30 innings pitched:

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Here's an interesting question sent to us by B-R reader Phil:

"I've been a Mets fan since 1967, when, as the youngest kid in my neighborhood, I needed something to differentiate myself from the older kids who grew up Yankees fans at the tail end of the dynasty. In 1969, God performed his last certified Miracle. As I've learned more about baseball over the last 40 years, I've come to wonder: did the Mets 1969 pitching staff have the best 'potential' of any staff? By that I mean, did they have the most wins left in them?"

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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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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: