Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

It's none other than Albert Pujols.

His rate stats are still well off from his career averages and he's still leading the league in GIDP, but he also might lead the NL in homers for the third straight year.

One very interesting stat, though, is intentional walks:

Even with Holliday and Berkman behind him, pitchers don't seem nearly as afraid...

On Saturday, the big news in the Angels' 11-2 loss was Jered Weaver allowing a career-high 8 runs (upping his ERA from 1.78 to 2.13) and failing to complete the 5th inning for the first time in his last 50 starts.

There was an odd little footnote, though: With just 4 hits, the Angels hit for the cyle -- HR and 2B by Alberto Callaspo, 3B by Torii Hunter, single by Howie Kendrick. The 3B and 2B both came in the 9th, with Callaspo's 2-out double completing the cycle.

Such games are far more common than I had expected: Since 1919, there have been 92 team cycles on just 4 hits. There were five last year alone, the most in any live-ball season -- three in June, two on consecutive days.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here's a brief look at some of the players with a birthday today.

Clay Buchholz is on the disabled list with a serious shot at missing the rest of the season. While it's only his 3rd time on the DL in his career, he's topped 100 innings pitched in a season only once so far. It's starting to become cause for concern.

Mark Fidrych also topped 100 innings pitched just once, in his magical rookie season of 1976. He pitched effectively but infrequently in 1977 and 1978, and then ineffectively and infrequently in 1979 and 1980. Fidrych would have been 57 today had he not died in 2009. I am still finding hard to believe that he's gone.

Mark Loretta had a fine major-league career but doesn't get a lot of credit for it. He was recently mentioned on my thread about players who played multiple positions with the very unusual SS/1B combo. He was the top 2B in MLB in 2003-2004.

Mark Gubicza seems to be overrated by some and underrated by others. He gets more credit than he deserves based on winning 20 games in 1988, but the folks who point out his overall losing career record of 132-136 are missing the boat as well. Gubizca had a couple of rough injury-filled years in 1990 and 1991. From 1984 to 1989, he had a 118 ERA+ over 1313.1 IP and from 1992 to 1997 he had a 107 ERA+ over 683 IP. Those are some decent numbers if we throw out the horrible 78 ERA+ over 227 IP in 1990 and 1991.

Don Carman is remembered by a lot of Phillies fans as the "ace" of a really bad starting staff in the late 1980s. Fewer fans remember that he was actually quite good in 1985 and 1986 with a 138 ERA+ over 220.2 IP. As I have noted before, Carman was perhaps the worst hitter in major-league history, with by far the fewest times on based for any player with at least 230 plate appearances since 1901.

Joe Horlen had a nice career for the White Sox and had a fairly remarkable year in 1967. He won the AL ERA title at 2.06 (good for a 146 ERA+) despite striking out only 3.6 batters per 9 innings over 258 IP. That's one of the top 10 seasons by ERA+ since 1950 where the pitcher threw at least 200 innings with a K/9 rate of 4 or less. See who else is on there? Mark Fidrych, plus a few other guys whose careers didn't match their early major-league success (Allan Anderson, Bill Lee, etc.)

MLB.com has the story, courtesy of David Vincent. The Giants just set the record for most consecutive solo home runs.

Here are their last 21 homers, which includes the 20 solo jobs:

Bruce Chen threw a nice game for the Royals last night, and it got me to wondering which lefties have been around the longest.

Here are left-handed pitchers marked as active who have pitched the most seasons in the majors:

Rhodes and Oliver take the cake. While those two were teammates on the Rangers this year, I wonder where they ranked in terms of oldest pair of relievers on a team.

Rick Honeycutt and Dennis Eckersley were on the 1996 and 1997 Cardinals together. In the latter year they were 43 and 42, respectively. Any other old combos?

-- Matt Cain was a 2-1 loser [yawn], leveling his season record at 9-9. Eight of his 9 losses came when the Giants scored 2 runs or less (2-8, 3.42 in 12 games), but that's old hat by now. SF has scored 2 runs or less in 71 of his 195 career starts; his performance in those games was better than in other games (3.23 ERA to 3.48 otherwise), but his record is 10-48.

-- Carlos Zambrano is a bad joke once again, and I don't even mean his mound work (8 runs in 4.1 IP). Zambrano was ejected after throwing way inside to Chipper Jones in the 5th, just after back-to-back HRs by Dan Uggla (his 2nd of the game) and Freddie Freeman, which brought Big Bad Z's game total to 5 HRs, including Chipper's 3-run shot in the 3rd. Zambrano isn't the only hot-head in the game, by a long shot, but he's the only one I know of who's getting paid $18 million a year. Read the rest of this entry »

Friday in the Bronx, 5 different Rays ripped a solo HR off CC Sabathia in his 8 IP.

In 347 career starts before Friday, Sabathia had never allowed more than 3 HRs. The most he'd given up in his last 143 starts was 2 HRs. He'd yielded just 8 HRs in his first 25 starts this year (2 in 12 home games), and no more than 1 in any game.

The Yankees as a team had not allowed 5 HRs in a game since a May 2010 win over Boston. For the Rays, it was 1 shy of their club record for HRs in a game, last done in May 2010. (That game is most notable as the only time since 1998 that Mariano Rivera allowed 2 HRs.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Mariano Rivera has had a tough time lately.

Here are his longest career streaks allowing at least one earned run per relief appearance: Read the rest of this entry »

By winning his 5th straight start tonight (and 13th in his last 15), Justin Verlander not only put a little more air between Detroit and Cleveland, took sole possession of the MLB wins lead, and notched his 20th game of 10+ Ks. He also reached 100 wins in 191 career games -- faster than all but 12 pitchers since 1919. (Note: All tables exclude tonight's games.)

Read the rest of this entry »

In his 16th career game tonight, Cleveland 2B Jason Kipnis went 5 for 5, with a double and a HR (his 6th in 61 ABs) in Cleveland's 10-3 rout of Detroit.

Here are the other 25 players since 1919 to have a 5-hit game by their 16th career game.
Spot the surprise name (and I don't mean Mark Reynolds), and check out the career of the lone repeater:

Read the rest of this entry »