Archive for the 'Streak Finders' Category

In his two starts against the Rays this post-season, Cliff Lee pitched at least 7 innings both times while not walking a single batter.

Here are the longest post-season streaks in which the pitcher went at least 7 innings with no walks in each:

So Lee is the most recent guy to go it since, umm, Cliff Lee last year.

A few other interesting observations:

• Note how many more strikeouts Lee has in his games than anybody else.
• Carl Pavano has the biggest gap between games, completely skipping over his time with the Yankees and Indians (when he didn't make any post-season starts.) He's also the only guy to have his streak with two different teams, although Lee's two streaks have come with different teams.
• Two of the streaks on here include non-starts: both Roy Collins and Cy Young made one of their appearances in relief. Collins relieved Buck O'Brien to start the second inning and pitched the rest of the game. Young relieved Tom Hughes in the 3rd inning and finished out the game.
• Only Lee (both times) and Greg Maddux actually won all the games in their streaks.

The Twins lost their 11th consecutive post-season game tonight. This ties the Phillies for the second longest post-season streak. Of course  they're not quite comparable; the Phillies' streak occurred over  62 years and the Twins' streak in just 7.  Here are the longest streaks before today.

The Giants just finished an amazing streak of 18 straight games without allowing more than 3 runs. Check out the longest such streaks since 1920:

The Giants have the longest streak within one season since 1920. Elias has reported that the White Sox had 20 straight such games in the 1917 season.

A few interesting things:

• Despite allowing no more than 3 runs and an average of just 1.4 runs per game over the streak, the Giants still went "only" 12-6, not as good a record as might be expected.
• The 1986 Yankees allowed 11 homers in 16 games and still didn't give up more than 3 runs in any of them--wow.
• The A's 1981 streak might be the most impressive one here. They went 15-1 over 16 games while allowing an average of just 1.4 runs per game.

I recently saw this tweet from Ed Price:

SFGiants have gone 20 games w/o allowing more than 4 R. No team has done that in 21 straight since '81 A's. Last w/22 was '72 Cubs.

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Since 1996, how many starting pitchers had 15+ games in a row, to start a season, where they pitched at least 6 innings in each contest?

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In his last 3 games, Troy Tulowitzki has 5 homers and 13 RBI. Among the 58 times that a guy has homered in at least 3 straight games this season, nobody has picked up as many RBI as Tulo over the entire length of the streak:

There's no easy way to search for this, but I don't think anybody else this season has had 13 RBI over 3 games.

Thanks to reader Gary F for the tip on this post subject.

The Diamondbacks recently struck out at least 12 times in 6 straight games:

Our Streak Finder goes back to 1920 but other reports say that the Diamondbacks' streak is the longest in major-league history. Unsurprisingly, they lost 5 out of 6 of those games.

Even looking at consecutive games with just 10+ strikeouts, no team beats the recent Arizona streak:

Using the data in Play Index, I decided to look at which relief pitchers had the most games in a row with " BF>=1 AND R=0" at the start of their major league career.

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The Padres have now lost 10 games in a row but are clinging to the NL West division lead. By using the streak analyzer, I found that the last playoff team to lose 10 games in a row at any point in the season and still make the playoffs was the 1982 Braves, who dropped 10 in a row in early August of that year.

Those 1982 Braves finished 89-73 but deserved by Pythagorean W-L to win only 85 games. They would have finished 3rd that year with just 85 wins.

According to coolstandings.com the Padres' chances of winning their division have dropped from 93% to 57% over the course of their losing streak.

Thanks to Geoff at Ducksnorts.com for the post idea.

MLB.com is reporting that CC Sabathia has now won 15 consecutive decisions at home and has not lost a game there in his last 20 starts.  How does this rank historically? Here are a couple of PI searches to help frame Sabathia's streak. Both  charts are since 1920.

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