Archive for the 'Streak Finders' Category

Last night  Jonathan Papelbon imploded , allowing 4 runs in the 9th to the Yankees. Amazingly, it was the first time in his career that Paplebon allowed 4 runs in a game. Papelbon's streak of 284 games with less than 4 runs allowed to start his career was the 3rd longest in baseball history. Since this is a short relief stat, I assume that the years not covered by PI will have little , if any bearing on this list.

Here are the leaders:

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After looking at the leaders in consecutive saves at home, reader DoubleDiamond made the following comment:

I think that a most consecutive saves streak on the road would be even more impressive. Not only would someone be in enemy territory, but the stakes are higher - a go-ahead run is a walk-off, not just something for the pitcher's team to think about overcoming in the bottom of the ninth (although often against the opponent's closer). While a home game never presents a save opportunity in an extra inning game, a closer called in to preserve a lead in the bottom of an extra inning is not only trying to prevent a walk-off win but also to prevent the game from going into even more innings.

That seems like a good idea. Here are the leaders for consecutive saves on the road (1920-1939,1952-2010)

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With Mariano Rivera blowing a save at home today for the first time in ages, there was some discussion in the comments from Andy's thread about the longest home save streaks. Now that Mariano is done,the longest active streak belongs to Fernando Rodney with 27.  Here are the longest such  streaks as listed by the PI.

In what seems to be happening on a daily basis, another young pitcher threw a gem yesterday. This time it was Mat Latos's turn. Latos absolutely shut down the Giants and missed a perfect game by half a step. On the way to his one-hit shutout Latos also out 6 for a game score of 91. This comes on the heels of last week's beauty in which Latos allowed 0 runs on 2 hits with 9 strike outs in 8 innings. And he's only 22. Here are a couple of interesting lists to put Latos's performance into perspective.

In the current PI era (1920-1939,1952-2010) only 5 previous pitchers had thrown at least 5 innings with at most 2 hits with no walks in consecutive starts (a couple of those had a relief appearance thrown in). Only 1 those pitchers, Billy Pierce in 1958, pitched more innings in those games than Latos did in his starts.

Even if his starts were not consecutive, throwing 2 games with a gamescore of at least 87 at such a young age, so early in the season puts Latos on very short list of pitchers. Here are the previous pitchers who were younger than 23, that also put up 2 starts in their team's first 34 with a gamescore of at least 87 (1920-1939, 1952-2010).

Bud Norris makes his seventh  start of the season for the Astros this afternoon. In doing so, Norris will attempt to pitch more than 5 innings for the first time this season. Here are the longest streaks of consecutive starts with at most 5 IP to start the season.

Homer Bailey pitched a beauty of a game for the Reds today. Bailey allowed only 4 hits in a complete game shutout against the Pirates. As reader Kahuna Tuna notes this comes the day after Johnny Cueto also pitched a shutout for the Reds.

While back to back complete game shutouts were once common in baseball, today they are a rarity. Here are the longest team streaks of complete game shutouts since 2000 (before today).

Wilson Valdez has quite a GIDP streak going. As Rich, a reader, mentioned in the comments of another thread, Valdez has now hit into a double play in 5 consecutive games (Tonight's Phillies game has been postponed.)  As double play records were not uniformly kept in baseball until 1939, the PI era  for researching  this streak is 1952-2010. Here are the longest streaks since 1952.

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Much has been made of Wilson Ramos's start to his career. However, Ramos is also the first catcher this season to string together consecutive 3-hit games. No catcher has had 3 consecutive 3-hit games since Victor Martinez in 2005. (Joe Mauer, for whom Ramos is filling in, had 4 separate 2 game streaks last season, but never made it to 3.) The all-time (PI era) longest consecutive 3-hit game streak for a catcher belongs to Carlton Fisk who did it in 4 games in 1974.

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In last night's game against the D-backs, the Phillies ended a 5-game streak with no homers. As you might expect for this high-powered offense, it had been a while since they'd gone 5 games without a homer:

Before 2007, it was a lot more common for them.

Roy Halladay has had a very impressive start. It's been a while since a pitcher won his first 4 starts of the season with at least 7 IP in each:

These are the longest such streaks since the 2000 season. Halladay has had weird run support so far--an average of 5.91 runs per start but an unusual distribution of just 2 runs twice, 8 runs, and 11 runs. It hasn't mattered, though, as he's pitched to a 0.82 ERA so far.

Also since 2000 here are the longest streaks to start the season where the pitcher won his start and allowed no more than 2 earned runs:

Most of these performances were quite memorable, especially Loaiza's, which was the start of his only truly excellent season in 2003. (I would argue that his 2005 season with the Nationals was also very very good despite his 12-10 record.)