Those Bees are none other than youngsters Jackie Bradley Jr., Xander Bogaerts and Mookie Betts who, with help from Boston’s over-30 mainstays Hanley Ramirez, Dustin Pedroia and David Ortiz, have propelled the high-flying Red Sox to the top of the AL East standings.
More on Boston’s hot start after the jump.
Arrêté is French for stop, and that’s what Jake Arrieta did to the Reds on Thursday, holding Cincinnati hitless as the Cubs pounded their opponent by a 16-0 count. It’s the first no-hitter of the new season, the second of Arietta’s career, and his second in eleven regular season starts. The win pushes Arrieta’s record to a perfect 4-0 in four starts this season, with a microscopic 0.87 ERA.
More on Arrieta’s gem after the break.
Two weeks into the new season and the clubs with the longest current winning streaks are the Braves and Twins. Which is interesting because both those clubs lost their first 9 games, only the second time since 1913 that two teams have stumbled so badly out of the gate.
More quirky tidbits from the young season are after the jump.
Google translates “arenado” as Spanish for “sandblasted”. Leaving aside the sand, Rockie third baseman Nolan Arenado had a breakout year in 2015, recording one of the more impressive under-the-radar seasons in recent memory, leading the NL with 42 big blasts, and leading the majors with 130 RBI and 354 total bases.
More after the jump.
This post was first published early in 2016 to identify batteries (pitcher and catcher) with 200 or more regular season starts together. It is based on the Defensive Lineups pages for each team and season on Baseball-Reference.com. At that time (early 2016), those seasons only went back to 1914, whereas now (in early 2021) there are data for the entire modern era, back to 1901.
As I’ve received several queries about this article, I decided to update it to include the 1901-13 seasons and also, of course, the 2016-20 seasons as well. Doing so has increased the number of qualifying batteries from the original 26 up to 35 for the entire modern era. More on these long-term batteries is after the jump.
As a follow-up to my earlier post on 300 game infields, this piece looks at outfield trios that have played together most often. With one less position, there are more outfield groups with 300 game starts than in the infield, but this is still a very unusual occurrence.
Three hundred games is less than two seasons worth, so it may not seem like a lot. But, with the reality that outfielders tend to be quite interchangeable, having the same set of three outfielders start as many as 300 games together is still quite a rarity.
More after the jump.