Of major league history’s five longest hit streaks (that is, sequences of consecutive games with at least one hit), three have come with the hitter hitting zero homers through the entire streak.

The five longest hit streaks in the majors have been:
Joe DiMaggio (1941), 56 games, 15 homers
Willie Keeler (1896-97), 45 games, 0 home runs
Pete Rose (1978), 44 games, 0 homers
Bill Dahlen (1894), 42 games, 4 home runs
George Sisler (1922), 41 games, 0 home runs

More on homerless hit streaks after the jump. Continue reading →

So far in 2012, more major league homers have been hit from the third spot in the order (346 homers) than the fourth spot (337 homers).  It is quite rare over a full major league season for the cleanup spot not to be the place in the batting order with the most dingers.  Over the past seventy full seasons, only in 1955 and 2001 has any spot in the order other than cleanup been the source of the most homers in the majors.   But the percentage of homers that are hit from the fourth spot, as compared to the rest of lineup, has been headed generally downward for decades.    Some details after the jump. Continue reading →

Beginning next season, Houston will move to the AL West and there will be two leagues of 15 teams, each with three five-team divisions. Although my plan for how to handle this new arrangement is no more likely to be adopted than a re-make of Love Story with Roger Clemens and Brian McNamee in the roles of Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw, I’ll share it after the jump. Continue reading →

Writing about the traditional Triple Crown of baseball — one hitter leading his league in batting average, homers and runs batted in in the same season — may seem like a corny throwback to some readers on this site, as many of you have long since learned to replace batting average and RBI with more nuanced statistics for evaluating player performance.  But nostalgia and tradition have their own attractions, and perhaps once we become sufficiently comfortable with the fact that batting and RBI are simply eccentric old stats that are more trivia than important measures of talent, we can also relax and have a little harmless fun with them.

In that spirit, I propose to revive the old Triple Crown, which seems to have become well nigh un-achievable in its traditional, league-leadership form, by moving it to the division-leadership context, where a Triple Crown remains very difficult to pull off in contemporary baseball but is at least possible.  It seems to me acceptable to treat the six divisions as the equivalent of the old pre-1969 leagues in this respect.  After all, the divisions have served much the same purpose since 1969 as the leagues did from 1901 through 1968.  The six divisions are the current settings for the race to first place over the long regular season, just as the leagues were before 1969.  If a player can lead his division over a full season in BA, HRs and RBI, I would argue his achievement is reasonably comparable to the league-wide Triple Crown of pre-division days.  Details, including the historical division Triple Crown winners,  after the jump. Continue reading →

It is a logical assumption that it’s tougher to hit in the post-season than in the regular season, with back-of-the-rotation starting pitchers disappearing from view and the workloads of the very best pitchers being rationed less carefully.  No longer are the top arms being saved for more important occasions — those post-season games are the most important occasions.  The numbers back up the logical assumption, as you can see after the jump. Continue reading →

From the beginning of the 2008 season through last night’s ninth-inning win, the Tampa Bay Rays have a .571 winning percentage in regular season games (388 wins, 291 losses). That’s the third best record in the majors over that period, behind the Yankees (.590) and the Phillies (.585).

To maintain at least a .571 record for the period 2008 through the full 2012 season, the Rays would have to finish with at least 95 wins this season, which is tough but possible.  They did won 97 games in ’08 and 96 games in 2010, and they are already at 20 wins in 31 games for the 2012 season, the second-best record in the majors at the moment.  As discussed after the jump, that .571 level over five seasons of play is an unusual level of sustained success for a franchise created after 1960. Continue reading →

We don’t know where Josh Hamilton will end up in terms of career WAR, but after the jump you can see where the other guys who hit four homers in a game ended up. Continue reading →

Bill “Moose” Skowron passed away on Friday.  Skowron was one of the first baseball players I was ever aware of, going back to when I was maybe four years old.  I don’t think I knew anything about him as a ballplayer, but the nickname was irresistible to a four-year-old. I probably thought he was an actual moose of some sort, though at the time that would, as far as I knew, have meant Bullwinkle or a stuffed animal. Continue reading →

“In Defense of the RBI” was the title of Graham Womack’s provocative post here at HHS on Thursday, a post that led to much interesting discussion on the topic of Runs Batted In and alternative statistics. Let’s suppose we want a stat that does what the RBI stat does, but narrowing some of its flaws. How might that be done? One approach is after the jump. Continue reading →

The Angels faced Jim Kaat as a starter 57 times, more times than they have faced any other starting pitcher.  That does seem like a lot, being more than a third of a full season worth of games and 0.7% of all the regular season games the Angels franchise has ever played.  But how does it compare to the number of starts accumulated by the most frequent starting pitcher opponent for other franchises?  The answer after the jump. Continue reading →