Archive for the 'Streak Finders' Category

In his short career, Angels rookie closer Jordan Walden has now appeared in 42 games. In all but 2 of those games, Walden has pitched exactly one inning. In the other 2 games Walden retired one batter. Those 42 consecutive games without throwing more than one inning at the start of a career are by far the most from any pitcher since 1919 (and probably before, as well.) Here are the longest streaks since 1919 (through yesterday's games).
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Dodgers 1B James Loney hit his 2nd HR of the year tonight, off Javier Vazquez.

What next? -- the McCourts reconcile?

Now that he's (ahem) "out of his slump," let's have a look at the worst qualifying seasons by a 1B in the live-ball era:

OPS+ of 75 or less by a qualifying 1B, 1920-2011

Five current seasons on that list.  It's early yet, but it's getting pretty late for Adam LaRoche, Aubrey Huff, Daric Barton, Loney and Justin Morneau.

How about that Johnny Sturm? He gets one season in the big leagues, starting at 1B for the Yankees, ending the 2-year tenure of Babe Dahlgren; sullies the sainted Lou Gehrig's position even more than Dahlgren did; and winds up a World Champion.

Sturm is the only one of the past players here whose team won it all. Pete Rose made it to the Series.

Detroit Michael recently asked if any pitcher had a week like the one Brandon League had this week.  And, the answer is "yes."

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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:

2002 Oakland Athletics Batting, Pitching, & Fielding Statistics - Baseball-Reference.com.

If you look above the team batting stats you will now see a graphical summary of the team's season.  The height of the bar is equal to the margin of victory (up to ten runs).  Losses are in red and wins are in green.

I've grouped the games by month.  Double-headers are slightly narrowed since they occurred on the same day.  Off days are included as blanks, and if you mouse over the bar you will see a summary of the game as shown below. Clicking on the bar will take you to the box score.

Mouseover a bar to show the game's details

Currently this is updated back through 1985, but we'll have every team updated within an hour or so.

Houston, Boston and Tampa Bay all sport disappointing 0-5 records . Five games isn't a lot over the course of a long season, but it is rare for really good teams to start that poorly. In fact  only 2 teams in history have overcome an 0-5 start to win their divisions.

PIT sched  1974-04-05  1974-04-12     0-5      .000     20     38   88-74     1 Division Champ
CIN sched  1995-04-26  1995-04-30     0-5      .000     24     37   85-59     1 Division Champ

Six teams that have started 0-5 have gone on to win more than 55.6% (the equivalent of 90 out of 162) of their games.

CIN sched  1995-04-26  1995-04-30     0-5      .000     24     37   85-59     1 Division Champ
LAD sched  1976-04-09  1976-04-16     0-5      .000     13     24   92-70     2
MON sched  1987-04-06  1987-04-12     0-5      .000     10     28   91-71     3
BAL sched  1978-04-07  1978-04-12     0-5      .000     15     49   90-71     4
NYY sched  1930-04-15  1930-04-22     0-5      .000     16     30   86-68     3
STL sched  1960-04-12  1960-04-17     0-5      .000     11     22   86-68     3

In their first 4 games this season, the Orioles haven't allowed more than 1 run in any game:

The Orioles haven't had a lot of streaks like this. Here are all their streaks over the last 50 seasons of at least 4 games with no more than 1 run allowed:

None of the rest of the streaks came at the start of the season, not that that matters much.

The last team I could find that had such a streak at the start of the season was the 2007 Mets. They finished 88-74, which I'm sure most Orioles fans would be ecstatic with in 2011.

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.

Since 1920, how many pitchers had hitting streaks of 8 games or more?

Update: Note these streaks do not include games where a "P" appeared as a "PH" only and did not get a hit.

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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.