On June 7, 1942, after sitting out his team’s first two encounters with Carl Hubbell, Stan Musial finally took his cuts against King Carl — and took the collar, fanning twice in a game for the first time. The Cards still won (and the fading Hubbell fell to 1-5, 5.75). But manager Billy Southworth sat Musial for Hubbell’s four remaining starts against the Cards that year.
Like most baseball folk, I’ve been thinking of how to pay tribute to the late Stan Musial. Since I like to look at baseball history through a box-score lens, and since Musial played 3,049 games (counting World Series) — in a NL career that stretched from Gabby Hartnett (1922-41) to Pete Rose (1963-86), spanning Pearl Harbor and the Civil Rights March on Washington (“I have a dream…”) — I decided to honor Stan the Man with what I do best.
What follows is an unscientific sampling of Musial box scores and related comments — often tangential, sometimes frivolous — but let’s open with a couple of broad stat-facts:
(Congratulations to ReliefMan, who answered correctly almost before the words were out of my mouth.)
These 10 players are the all-time leaders in some career batting feat in the form of “the most X without any Y”:
The MLB strikeout rate has risen 35% since 1988, climbing from 14.7% of all PAs to 19.8% in 2012. It’s not all the batters’ doing, and I’m not here to berate them, anyway. I just want to look at two basic parts on their side of the K-rate equation. Let’s show the basic rate before we break it down:
With the news of Adam LaRoche‘s new deal with Washington, I remembered his well-known history of slow starts and hot finishes. Thanks to B-R’s new batting split finder (beta), we can compare his 1st-half/2nd-half splits to those of other players.
September 2, 1918 — Senators 8, Athletics 3
There is a sort-of point to this one, believe it or not. It started with a search for the lowest team-leading home run total. Result: Three teams in modern history were led by players with exactly one home run. They are the White Sox of 1908 and ’09 — the tail end of the “Hitless Wonders,” who shocked the mighty Cubs in the 1906 World Series — and the 1918 Senators, on whom we’ll focus.
April 8 in Detroit — Tigers 13, Red Sox 12 (11 innings):
In one of the year’s wildest tilts, Detroit rallied twice from death’s door to complete an opening-series sweep. After 4 innings it was tied at 7, with both starters drubbed and departed. Boston forged ahead in the 6th when Adrian Gonzalez punished the first pitch from lefty Daniel Schlereth, and behind Vicente Padilla‘s four scoreless innings, they took a 3-run lead into the 9th. It seemed a routine first save try for the newly anointed closer, Alfredo Aceves.
A lengthy musing about Adrian Beltre and a certain legendary third sacker….
Given Beltre’s strong hitting since 2010 (combined 137 OPS+) plus two more Gold Gloves, the Hall of Fame speculation is no longer idle stathead talk. He’s already #11 on B-R’s career WAR list among third basemen, and could move up to #7 as soon as this year. (WAR values herein are from Baseball-Reference unless noted.) Even by conventional measures, his counting stats — among 3Bs, he’s already 13th in hits, 9th in total bases, 7th in extra-base hits — plus his 4 Gold Gloves puts him within sight of HOF range, before his 34th birthday.
Which HOF-caliber third baseman’s career most resembles Beltre’s? It has to be Brooks Robinson.
I swap sports magazines with my friend Z-bo. He subscribes to Sports Illustrated, while I get ESPN: The Magazine, just because it comes free with my online Insider sub. We save them up for 3-4 months and then trade, so by the time I get around to reading SI, it’s old news — which can be interesting in its own way.
From the “Hot/Not” box in SI’s June 11 issue:
I don’t want to make too much of this, but here it is: