Archive for the 'Play Index' Category

In Andy's "Every starter has 2 or more hits" thread last night, Statboy asked the following question:

"Has there been a game where one team had no zeros in the box score (every player with at least one hit, run, and RBI)?"

While finding all of the games that meet this criteria is quite a challenge, there is a subset of these games that make an interesting PI exercise. The difficulty in a search like the one that Statboy is proposing is that generally we do not know how many players appeared in each game. Therefore, even if we find the games with the most players with at least one run, hit and rbi, there still can be many players who appeared in that game that did not meet the criteria. That being said,  it is possible to limit a PI game finder search to games in which there were only nine players, by searching for players who both started and finished a game.

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Here's another new addition to the Play Index -- the Team Batting & Pitching Game Finders will now output a team's composite batting or pitching stats from the games in question. This will allow you to find things like the teams who drew the most single-season walks in the 2000s:

Similarly, you can use the Pitching Game Finder to look for team leaders like 2000-2011 teams that allowed the most HR in a season:

While we don't have a full-fledged Team Season Finder yet, this is an easy way to get some of the same results.

Just thought I'd post a quick PI Streak Finder leaderboard for the longest Dodger hit streaks since 1919:

Let's also take the time to marvel once again at the fact that Ethier is still just halfway to this streak:

The Dominican Republic has given us many great ballplayers over the years, far more than you might expect from a nation of its size. In fact, the tiny coastal town of San Pedro de Macorís alone has produced more MLB players per capita than any other municipality in the world. Baseball is so deeply ingrained in the culture of the D.R. that Pedro Gonzalez once said, "Every boy grows up with a bat and a ball—it’s the first present a male baby gets in his crib."

So, as a tribute to the fine baseball being played by its natives, here is the all-time Dominican all-star team according to Wins Above Replacement:

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B-R reader Blake had an interesting question this morning:

"You folks are great at acquiring information like this, so I would like to ask:

Could you produce a list of the occasions when a visiting team starting pitcher has had an AB before he has thrown his first pitch in a ballgame?"

Using the Play Index Batting Event Finder, you can set up a search for all PAs in a given year range by a visiting pitcher in the 1st inning:

All of MLB: 189 Plate Appearances in 2003-2011, during 1st Inning, Away Games and As P

Of those 189 instances since 2003:

• All but two teams -- the Texas Rangers and Toronto Blue Jays -- had a pitcher bat before throwing a pitch. The leaders, predictably, are all NL teams; St. Louis saw this happen an MLB-high 15 times, while the Padres and D-Backs had it happen 14 times apiece. The Twins and Angels led the AL with 3 instances apiece.
• Pittsburgh pitchers allowed it to happen the most, as they saw their counterpart in the top of the 1st 25 times. Right behind them were the Rockies (20) and Reds (17).
• The visiting pitcher hit .110/.148/.134, which sort of hampers your chances of making it all the way back to the top of the order -- although away leadoff men also saw a second 1st-inning PA 96 times over the same time span.

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B-R reader James Sinclair sent this one in to us, so what follows are his words:

A conversation with a friend led me to look up the Braves-Pirates box score from July 25, 1992, a game any Braves fan who was around at the time would recognize for at least two reasons: (1) It was the Braves' 13th consecutive win, tying the franchise record at the time (later broken by a 15-game streak in 2000), and, (2) that mundane-sounding "Flyball: CF" with one out in the top of the 9th was this play—Otis Nixon's spectacular catch to rob Andy Van Slyke of a home run that would've given the Pirates a 2-1 lead.

What I had forgotten until I looked at the box score is that the Braves had just one hit, a David Justice home run. Even more unusual, they had just 25 plate appearances, which is the absolute minimum a team can have and still win a full-length game (Jeff Blauser drew a walk in the fourth, but was caught stealing). And it would have to be the home team—one run scored (by home run, most likely), 24 outs, and the top of the ninth ends with a 1-0 lead—while for a visiting team the minimum is 28.

I figured that's a pretty rare occurrence, and the best search method I could think of was to find games where a team faced only one batter over the minimum and still lost, so I went to the team pitching game finder. I had to search in kind of a roundabout way, because I didn't see a way to find all games where BF – PO = 1 for the losing team (and also I'm not a subscriber, for which I sincerely apologize—I won't tell anyone how I got around the limited result displays). So I searched for losing efforts where BF = 25 and PO = 24, then BF = 26 and PO = 25 (to account for games ending in a walk-off), and so on. After about ten rounds of this, I did some broader searches (BF < 42, PO > 36; BF < 48, PO > 42, etc.) to make sure I didn't overlook an extra-inning game that fit the criteria.

Point is, unless I missed something, there are only three full-length games in the Baseball-Reference archive in which the losing team faced one batter over the minimum. Oddly, they were all in the same decade:

July 25, 1992: Pirates 0, Braves 1
July 27, 1993: Rangers 1, Royals 0
September 20, 1998: Dodgers 1, Giants 0

The latter two were won by the visiting team, with 28 plate appearances, so the Braves appear to be in sole possession of the record, since 1919, for least plate appearances in a victory—and it took one of the most memorable plays in Braves history to do it.

A few more observations:

• Kevin Appier's game score of 91 in the 1993 game is the second-highest in the archive by the losing pitcher of a nine-inning game, and the highest since 1964.
• In the 1998 game, the Giants' Brian Johnson led off the eighth with a triple, but the Dodgers managed to get out of the inning.
• Barry Bonds was on the losing team in two of these games, was caught stealing in both, and went a combined 0-for-7 at the plate.
• Nixon robbed Van Slyke of more than a home run—Van Slyke finished the 1992 season with 199 hits (his career high), and tied with the Braves' Terry Pendleton for the league lead.

So, there you go. It's not timely at all, but I feel like I've made an archaeological discovery here (if this is already online somewhere, I haven't found it), and just wanted to pass it on to someone who might be interested.

Thanks, James!

For single seasons, From 1901 to 2011, For players in the saved report : (Batted .260 or lower, 1980-2010, 27 or younger, 2000 PA), From Age 28 to 99, (requiring Qualified for league batting title), sorted by greatest Batting Average: Results - Baseball-Reference.com.

The actual report above isn't that interesting, but the new feature I used to create it is.   When you save a report using the "link url" option under the SHARE link (and you can use this anywhere on the site).  This saved report will now appear as an option on the very bottom of the season finders.

So for the report linked above.  I first found all of the batters from 1980-2011, ages 0-27, with 2000 PA's and sub .260 career batting averages.    I then saved that report, reloaded, used that report, changed the ages to 28+, used single season and then found the best single-season batting averages among this group.

This feature will give you a lot of flexibility.   You could save reports like 2000 first round draft picks, or 1999 Chicago Cubs, or anything else on the site.  I think this will have a lot of power, but I expect you'll have some ideas I haven't thought of.  You will also be limited to 200 players total, so very broad searches may not work.

This is limited also to your last 20 saved reports.  Also note that if you use the season finder to save a report and then want to use that report, that will require a page reload to get that widget populated with the new report.

This is live only on the season finders at the moment and you can only filter on players.  It would be nice to allow searches that look for year n+1 or allow it for particular games, but at the moment, we are stuck with this method.

Have fun and let us know if there are any interesting reports you create.

Just a quick Play Index note: Sean recently added a "team's first ___ games" option at the bottom of the Team Game Finders and a "to start season" option for the Streak Finders.

This will allow you to find things like how many other seasons the Reds scored 7 or more runs four times in their first 5 games, or that Baltimore's season-opening 4-game streak of allowing exactly 1 run was the longest since 1919.

Regarding Albert Pujols' brutal season-opening performance vs. San Diego on Thursday, Greg Simons of The Hardball Times semi-facetiously wondered whether Pujols had the worst Opening Day performance ever.

The answer? No -- but it was close:

Of course, I don't have to remind you that this basically says nothing about Albert going forward -- Pujols will likely go on to have another MVP-type season, and this bad game will be forgotten within a week.

The 2011 season opens tomorrow, so now is a great time to tell you about Baseball-Reference's Play Index . In case you don't already know about the PI, it's a set of research tools that allow you to create customizable queries on our database, save the results, and share them with others. Using the PI, you can:

• Search full-season or multi-year totals to find your own custom leaderboards - Look at the entire history of baseball from 1871-2011 with every year, team, and position available, or filter the results in a vast number of ways: by specific years, by age, by first six seasons or last ten seasons, by American League only, by Cubs only, by switch-hitters, by catchers, by outfielder or infielder, by year of debut, but active or retired, by Hall of Famer, by height and weight, by living or deceased, or by a range of common statistical categories. Then sort the results by any common statistic, by the teams with the most players matching that category, by players with the most seasons matching that category, or by most recent, youngest, oldest, final year, or year of debut, and others.
• Search player game totals - Filtering on any of a dozen or more choices, search for games on a single player level, or on any batter from 1919-2011, or on any pitcher. The same can be done for Team Batting or Team Pitching Totals.
• Search player games looking for the most consecutive games matching a particular set of criteria - This can be done either on a single player level or on any batter in the last 92 years or on any pitcher. The same can be done for Team Batting or Team Pitching Streaks.
• Search the records of a specific player - Output a detailed summary and play-by-play list of all events of a specific type from a single year or an entire career. For example, you can see all of Harmon Killebrew's triples or even his outs to the second baseman.
• Search Batter vs. Pitcher Matchups - This tool presents a complete sortable list of batter or pitcher with totals for every opponent they faced by career or by year. Clicking on the player's name will lead you to a detailed output of their head-to-head plate appearances.
• ...And more!

Personal Subscriptions to the Play Index cost $36 for a year, $6 for a month, or $2 for 24 hours. Subscriptions may only be used by a single user, and there are discounts for users sponsoring at least $35 in pages.

Organizational Subscriptions can be set up for either an unlimited number of users ($600/year, this includes three hours of custom programming and reporting to be used at your discretion), or for up to five users ($125/year, this includes one hour of custom programming and reporting to be used at your discretion).

There are Two Steps to Subscribe to the Play Index:

1. Login to or create a Sports-Reference.com account (the same account used to sponsor pages).
2. Already logged in (or just created an account)? Go to our subscription page to sign up.

Our Always-Available Free Trial: Non-subscribers can use the PI's features as much as you like. However, your outputs will be restricted to a limited number of results.

The Play Index comes with a money back guarantee. We will gladly return the unused portion of any Play Index Subscription should you be dissatisfied with the Play Index.

So go ahead, give the Play Index a try -- we're confident that once you start using it, you'll wonder how you ever got along without it.