A familiar television advertisement from years ago featured the actor John Houseman as pitch man for the investment firm Smith Barney. The tag line had Houseman solemnly intoning “Smith Barney makes money the old-fashioned way – they earn it!”.
In this post, I’ll look at pitchers who, apart from their run support, earn their losses, and can thank their defense for helping out with their wins.
As a complement to Andy’s Mount Rushmore series, this post looks at the most durable teammates for each club. This idea was inspired by a discussion in the Royals’ Rushmore thread. That discussion aroused my curiosity and, I’m guessing (or hoping), the curiosity of other readers as well.
As a preview to future Mount Rushmore posts that Andy will soon be directing his attention towards, the longest tenured teammates for the original 16 major league clubs are after the jump.
Below are matched pairs of pitchers. What feat connects each of these pairs of pitchers?
Congratulations to Cubbies and Ed! They identified that, since 1922, these are the only pairs of pitchers who, in the same season, recorded fewer strikeouts than runs allowed, with a minimum of 125 strikeouts. Here are those seasons, and the pitchers’ stat lines.
In this quiz, we have two lists of players.
Congratulation to Tristram12 who identified that in the pairs of players below (the lists are matched up now) each player homered in his first WS game, and both in the same game. Those games are here.
Later this season, Scott Rolen, Adrian Beltre and Chipper Jones could all pass the 2000 mark for career games at third base. Actually, barring injury or retirement, it’s a virtual lock. How unusual is that? Let’s find out.
Relief pitching as a specialization has become increasingly refined in the past 50 years. Today we have closers, setup men, long relievers, middle relievers, loogies and possibly other sub-specialties.
However, in the live ball era since 1920, these are the only relief pitchers to accomplish two related feats.
| Player |
|---|
| Jeff Russell |
| Alan Mills |
| Rich Gossage |
| Bill Henry |
| Ryan Franklin |
| Andy Hassler |
| Eddie Watt |
| Moe Drabowsky |
What are those two related feats that no other relievers have accomplished since 1920?
Congratulations to John Autin and Brandon who jointly identified the feats that only these eight pitchers have accomplished since 1920. These are the only pitchers with seasons of 30 or more relief appearances and no starts that include one of more seasons averaging less than one inning per appearance and also one or more seasons averaging two or more innings per appearance.
This post was suggested by reader Paul E who remarked on the defensive accomplishments of Brett Lawrie of the Blue Jays. Toronto acquired Lawrie from the Brewers after the 2010 season, and brought him up to the big team in mid-summer last year. Other than a week missed to injury at the end of last season, he’s been the Jays’ regular third baseman since.
As of this writing, Lawrie has a career of slightly less than half of a 162 game season. Yet, he is in a tie for 13th place since 1901 among all non-pitchers in WAR fielding runs accumulated in the first two seasons of a career.
Recently, John Autin coined the term “disaster start” to denote starts where a pitcher allows more runs than innings pitched. So far this year, there have been 119 such starts, or about 3 a day. In 2011, there were 54 games where both starters were a disaster.
After the break, I’ll take a closer look at disaster starts and the pitchers most prone to them.
Jered Weaver’s no-hitter last week was actually part of an occurrence even rarer (at least, recently) than the no-hitter itself. What was this occurrence? The answer is a shutout streak – a team recording consecutive complete games with no runs allowed.
After the jump, I’ll take a closer look at this vanishing phenomenon.