Archive for the 'Streak Finders' Category

Here are the longest hitting streaks so far in 2010:

Every single one of these streaks started at the beginning of the year, and the top 4 are all active. (Jeter didn't play yesterday.)

Cantu's streak dates back to last year and is now at 17 games. Looking at streaks from anytime in 2009-2010, he still has a long way to go to catch Ryan Zimmerman's streak of 30 from last season:

Chase Utley has just homered in his 4th consecutive game. Here are the longest HR streaks since the 2007 season:

Utley himself had a couple of streaks of 5 games a couple of years ago and he can tie those on Saturday.

The record, of course, is 8 games, held by Dale Long, Don Mattingly, and Ken Griffey.

Via MLB.com Jorge Cantu tied a record by having at least one hit and one RBI in his 8th straight game to start the season.

Here are the streak finder results for such streaks to start the season.

First, 1993-2010:

Ah, don't you love it when the PI can so easily find something that the Elias Sports Bureau probably spent hours and hours researching?

1976-1992:

1952-1975

Wow, I didn't even know that Marv Throneberry had a brother who played baseball.

1920-1939:

High Pockets. Nice.

And here are the longest such streaks without limiting to the start of a season:

1993-2010:

1976-1993:

1952-1976:

1920-1939:

Ray Grimes. Ray Grimes!

I credit the Phillies radio announcers on WPHT for this one. I was listening to that game online and they mentioned that Halladay was high on the list of most strikeouts a pitcher's first game as a Phillie. We can't search for that exactly (because the Pitching Game Finder doesn't have an option for first game with a new team) but we can find similar results with the streak finder (which does have the new team option.)

Halladay became the 3rd pitcher to have at least 9 strikeouts in his Phillies debut. As you can see, Jim Bunning did it in each of his first two games with Philadelphia. This is post-1920.

I did some Game Finder searches using the team's first game of the season to find active streaks. As games start next week, let's see which of these streaks continue.

Most consecutive wins is 3, by Johan Santana:

Santana is scheduled to start the Mets' first game so he has a shot at continuing the streak. Incidentally, Jake Peavy had a string of 3 straight opening day wins snapped last year.  No other pitcher has a streak going back any further than last year.

Roy Oswalt is on the other side of this equation, having lost on Opening Day each of the last 2 seasons:

Aaron Harang has done the same:

Kevin Millwood snapped a 3-year streak last season but more impressively Barry Zito snapped a 4-year streak. You've got to be pretty good to lose 4 straight Opening Day games, at least.

I'm not going to post line scores, but the only player with more than 1 consecutive Opening Day save is Jonathan Papelbon, who has saved the Red Sox openers in each of the last 2 years. Nobody has blown more than one straight save opportunity.

Taking a step back, the longest active streaks of starting on Opening Day are Roy Oswalt with 7, Roy Halladay with 7, and Carlos Zambrano with 5. The most consecutive Opening Day appearances by a reliever is 4 by Damaso Marte.

In my next post we'll look at Opening Day hitting streaks.

How many pitchers, since 1954, have picked-off at least one runner in four or more straight games (that they have pitched)?

Here's the answer, via Baseball-Reference.com's Play Index Pitching Streak Finder -

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How about Andy Pettitte - picking off at least one runner in 8 straight games back in 1997? That was his third year in the big leagues. Was no one paying attention to his pick-off move during the first two?

Since 1954, there have been 328 hitting streaks of 20 games or more. (You can find them here, here, here and here.) As a group, the players accumulated 12,060 hits in 30,830 at bats for a batting average of .391. For some players, their streaks were a combination of hot hitting combined with a little luck. For others, the streaks appear to almost be a coincidence.

Here are the players with the highest batting averages during their hitting streaks.

Musial's batting average during his streak was so high, that even if you remove the 20 hits and at bats used to extend his streak, he still hit .382.

Conversely, here are the players with the lowest batting average in a streak of 20 or more games:

Tommie Agee hit in 20 straight games and only managed to get 23 hits in those games. If you take out his 20 streak extending at bats and hits, Agee hit a whopping .050 during that streak.

Agee's performance made me wonder about the longest hitting streaks in which a player had exactly 1 hit in each game. Here are the leaders since 1954.

In 2009, Xavier Nady had a short, but  interesting season. Due a major elbow injury, Nady only appeared in 7 games. However, Nady recorded a hit in every game he played. Here is Nady's gamelog for the season:

Of course, this made me wonder about the uniqueness Nady's season. Has a player ever had a longer season-long hitting streak? Please note that I am not using the official definition of hitting streak. To qualify for this list, a player must have hit in every game that he appeared, regardless of whether or not he came to bat.

To answer this question (since 1954), we need to compare the results of two PI searches and see where they overlap. Since 1954 there have been 701 occasions in which a player started a season with a hit in his first 7 games. The longest such streak belongs to Edgar Renteria, who hit in his first 23 games in 2006. Obviously, sifting through this list would be extremely time consuming. However, if  we can figure out which of these player's streaks represent their entire season, we  would have our answer. From 1954-2009, 10,908 players played between 7 and 23 games in a season, but only 182 of those players had at least as many hits as games played.  With a little help from Excel,  we can compare the 701 streaks with the 182 seasons and find that there were  four  players whose season starting hitting streaks were as many games as their entire season. Nady was one, here are the others (with links to their gamelogs):

Glenn Williams 2005 (13 games): The only 13 games of Williams's career all included a hit. As mentioned in his BR- bullpen page and easily confirmed with PI, Williams's has the most AB of any player with career BA of at least .400.

Rafael Bournigal 1993 (8 games): Bournigal's second season as a September call-up was much more successful than his first.

John Castino 1984 (8 games): The last 8 games in the career of the 1979 AL Rookie of the Year. Castino, whose career ended prematurely due to chronic back pain, has the 8th highest OPS+ (or 7th, depending if Mike Hessman plays again) among players with at least 30 PA  in their final season.

A commenter on yesterday's post pointed out that the Nats had two long streaks of scoring at least 5 runs per game. That's correct and here are the longest such streaks in 2009:

As was mentioned yesterday, the Nationals went an amazing 1-9 in their 10-game streak. That's really quite amazing. In the National League in 2009, run scoring averaged 4.43 per game and the Nationals were right at league average. To score more than half a run above the average for 10 straight games and lose 9 of them is pretty unlikely. One of you stats gurus out there should be able to calculate the odds--it must be less than 5%.

Here are the longest streaks with at least 5 runs per game in the 2000's:

So last year's Nationals streak was the worst of the decade in terms of W-L record. The only other team with a non-winning record was Texas with a 3-9 mark over a 12-game streak and they at least averaged more than 7 runs per game over that streak. (Their pitching must have just been awful.)

In case you're curious here are 2009 pitching streaks where at least 5 runs were surrendered per game:

As expected most of these teams had losing records.

Finally here are the longest such streaks of the 2000's:

Ah, pre-humidor Coors Field.

Check out that 2005 Royals streak. They allowed 93 earned runs over 13 games, a horrible 7.15 earned runs per game, but for good measure they allowed another 17 unearned runs, bringing the final average to 8.46 runs per game. Impressive, then, that they won even one of those games.

Here are some streaks for the 2009 season using the team streak finders on the Play Index.

Longest consecutive game streaks without being shut out by the opposition:

Minnesota's 101 game streak sounds pretty impressive until you see that they went just 51-50 over that span. Obviously, getting shut out means necessarily a loss (or I guess a tie is possible, eh Commissioner Selig?) so I would have thought that such a long streak with no shutouts would put a decent team at at least a few games above .500. The Phillies and Angels streaks really jump out as those teams went .603 and .652 respectively.

Now here are the most times in a row in 2009 that a team got shut out:

So on twenty occasions a team suffered consecutive shutouts. Cleveland appears twice on the list, as do the New York Mets, the Astros, and the Braves. The Pirates pulled off the hat trick. Seriously, can you imagine your team getting shutout twice in a row three different times in the same season? I guess Pirates fans don't have to imagine it. Entry #7 on the list is memorable for both Red Sox and Yankees fans as the back-t0-back shutouts of Boston were a big help for the Yankees winning the division. As you can see from coolstandings.com, the Yankees odds of winning the division went from 60.3% before those two games to 72.2% in the immediate aftermath. Those are pretty meaningful games for early August.

In 2009, it happened only 18 times that a given team pitched a shutout in two consecutive games. Some of those occurrences are shown on the table above but here is the full list:

The White Sox did it twice, as did the Tigers. The Giants also managed the trick, pitching back-to-back shutouts twice in a week. Very impressive.

Finally, here are the longest streaks in 2009 where a team failed to pitch a shutout:

This list is kind of interesting. At first it's not surprising to see teams like Baltimore, KC, and Pittsburgh on there. They weren't very good teams and they had bad records over the length of these games (although keep in mind they must have won the games right before and right after the streak, so you can add two more wins.) But then we see a good team like Boston here as well, going a good 33-24 over their own 57-game streak. Add in their two more bookend wins and that's +11 record-wise over a little more than a third of the season, good for a record of about 96-66 if over en entire year.

I guess this goes to show that shutouts aren't all that important. Certainly they are an indicator of the strength of a team's offense or pitching but not a particularly good indicator.