Archive for the 'Pitcher vs. Batter' 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.

(Thanks to reader McCombe35 who emailed in about this.)

Check out Ron Kittle's career homers, split out by pitcher faced:

Did Kittle homer actually homer off Blyleven a lot? Let's look into the numbers a bit more.

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Along with the sitewide updates I just posted on, I also added some upgrades to the Play Index.

After you get the summary table of information from an event finder search, selecting two or more headings of the same type (click on the red text) will now cause the search to perform an or on those two options. So you can now answer questions like show me all the hits by Derek Jeter In Fenway or Rogers or Camden or Tropicana all bunched together.

The summary options now show more complete data like all opponents not just the top 10 or so.

In batter vs. pitcher you can now select ranges of years.

and on the event finder you can now columns for WPA, li and Re24 and summaries for pulled/opposite field, ahead and behind in the count, and leverage level (low, medium, high), so you can ask how many of Ryan Howard's Home Runs were high, low or medium leverage.

I've also updated and attempted to make the looks of each of the tools much more consistent. There was an astounding amount of redundant code in the original Play Index code and the code is now at most half the size of the previous code.

More importantly is that the Play Index code is now integrated with the standards of the rest of the site and I'm free to do new Play Index tool development. Before I knew I was going to have to do a massive rewrite and it kept me from doing anything new. Now I can go ahead and do that new work.

Nah, that's not some new wave band from the '80's...read on...

Just killing some time waiting for the Yankees-Red Sox game to start in Fenway Park tonight, before they finally called the game, I was looking at guys who had at least 40 PA facing Randy Johnson and who had an OPS of 850+ overall in that time. Yeah, I sometimes look at the strangest baseball stats for no reason...

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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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There's a sporting event taking place at Yankee Stadium today. But, it's not baseball-related. More via the L.A. Daily News -

Yuri Foreman made his amateur boxing bones growing up in Israel after moving from Belarus at age 9. His goal was to become a world champion as a pro, but duking it out one day in Yankee Stadium never entered his mind.

Foreman will defend his junior middleweight world title there tonight against Miguel Cotto of Puerto Rico. It is the first fight in the new Yankee Stadium and the first fight at either the new or old one since Muhammad Ali and Ken Norton tangled nearly 34 years ago.

"Never in my wildest dreams after I decided to leave Israel and pursue a boxing career in the United States, did I think I would be fighting at Yankee Stadium, much less the very first fight ever (in the new one)," said Foreman, 29, who moved to Brooklyn 11 years ago.

"I'm looking here and I can't believe it. This is the place where Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson and Rocky Marciano fought. And look at me, a guy from Israel who is joining all of them in defending a world championship here. It's awe-inspiring."

The media attention for the fight has been enormous in the Big Apple. With a large Puerto Rico population there, Cotto has drawn 93,000 to fights in New York City over the past decade. And Foreman is training to be a Rabbi. The large Jewish population of the city will have his back.

Since the media has decided to really play the Jewish/Puerto Rican angle on this event, and it's being played in a baseball facility, I thought I would try and spin off all that and use Play Index to give us some "baseball" stuff to look at and discuss. And, here it is - the year by year record of Sandy Koufax facing Roberto Clemente:

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Overall, Roberto did pretty good against Sandy, wouldn't you say?  An OPS of .905  on 122 PA is impressive.  And, look at these two games - played somewhat close to each other:  May 17, 1964 and May 31, 1964.  In a span of 6 PA over those two games, Clemente hit for the cycle against Koufax.    Does that count as a TKO?

David Wells was part of the broadcast team for yesterday's TBS coverage of the Twins-Yankees game. He's mentioned a couple of times about how much difficulty he had facing the Red Sox and specifically Mo Vaughn.

I looked up his splits. Here are his career totals against all teams against whom he pitched at least 100 innings:

Wells said specifically that he felt he always found a way to lose. The stats seem to bear that out. His ERA against Boston was pretty bad but his record was really awful, as Boston is the only team against which he lost 20 games in his career.

Wells also mentioned that pitching as a visitor in Fenway Park was particularly difficult for him. Check out Wells' starts in Fenway (excludes starts in Fenway when he played for the Red Sox):

What an interesting progression. As you can see from the "App,Dec" column, he lost his first 6 starts in Fenway and was 0-7 in his first 8 starts there. In the 6 starts that followed, he alternated wins and losses. Over his final 9 starts there as a visitor he went 5-0. So maybe he learned something along the way.

As for Mo Vaughn, all I can say is HECK YES he killed Davis Wells:

That's 9 homers and a 1.390 OPS in 76 plate appearances.

Just a few quick hits on Randy Johnson's career:

Here are the guys who faced him the most:

Ouch, that's a painful line for Rickey Henderson. The 26 walks is nice, but everything else is ugly.

Here are the guys struck out most often by Johnson:

Now let's relive some of Johnson's best career starts, ranked by Game Score:

Why did I show the first 27? Number 1 on the list is Johnson's perfect game with an almost unbeatable score of 100. His other no-hitter is all the way down at #27 on the list with a game score of "only" 89. That's right--this guy threw a no-hitter but also threw 26 other games that were even better. Just think about that. Is there any pitcher with an official no-hitter ranking lower on his own game score leader board? I doubt it. The list also features Johnson's 20-strikeout game as well as one of his two 19-strikeout games. (I was at his other 19-K game, the one that featuring a booming home run by Mark McGwire that nearly touched the roof of the Kingdome.)

And let's not forget some of his post-season accomplishments, including:

• Two post-season shutouts in 2001
• He got the win in relief in Game 5 of the 1995 division series against the Yankees, when Ken Griffey Jr. scored the winning run in the 11th inning
• He pitched a complete game victory earlier in 1995 in the last game of the regular-season, a one-game playoff to give the Mariners their first playoff appearance.

Randy Johnson was truly one of the greats. It was my honor to see his career from start to finish.

Monday, October 12, 2009 Game Previews - Baseball-Reference.com

There are a lot of balls in the air behind the scenes at Baseball-Reference.com and one of the places they tend to hit the ground is at the interface between regular and postseason stats.

I've fixed a couple of issues with the regular and postseason stats. The game previews for postseason games now combine regular and postseason stats in (what I think) is a sensible way.

The batter vs. pitcher tools now include an option for including postseason stats as well. For example, here is Cliff Lee vs. the Rockies including postseason stats or just with regular season stats. Please let me know whatever issues you find.

Barry Bonds Batting Against Greg Maddux - Baseball-Reference PI

I'm getting ready for the postseason and I've cleaned up the presentation of the batter vs. pitcher numbers to include a line for the playoffs along with a total line for the regular season and also for regular and postseason.