The end of August is supposed to signal the start of the pennant chase in baseball. It is the stretch drive toward division championships and Wild Card berths to accord entry into the playoffs where then a pathetically small number of games will determine for most people what team was the best for that season. If this year’s crop of contending races seems a bit lacking in drama that is not entirely the product of your imagination.

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The Mariners won today, beating the Indians by a 9-2 score. Jokes about the Mariners inept offense aside, there’s not much usually inherently interesting in the typical line score of a 9-2 game. Where this game picked up a noteworthy angle was in the last column of the line score, the errors. The Mariners committed four of them while the Indians were charged with zero and yet, the Mariners still won and won handily.

Four errors in one game does not happen all that often, and the team winning happens even less often. In fact, digging into Retrosheet, there were 1,021 such games in their records and the error-happy team had prevailed in only 191 of them for an 18.7% winning percentage. As a side note, there was no meaningful split between the home and road winning records here.

My initial research was spurred by a request for similarly errored games, but if I open it up to games with four or more errors for one team and zero for the other then the sample size expands to 1,342 and a 17.3% winning percentage for the erroring team. It’s merely two data points – and there are far more robust studies showing the same effect – but it makes sense that as the sample lets in games with more errors, the winning percentage drops. Errors are not the greatest measurement tool we have given their subjectivity, but they do have a correlation with losing.

Of course, I had to carry it to the logical conclusion and find the game or games with the largest disparity between errors. That turned out to be this game between the Oakland Athletics and the Kansas City Royals with the Royals (of course) committing a whopping eight errors to Oakland’s zero. Unsurprisingly, the Royals were trounced 11-2 in that game, although only four of the Athletics’’ runs were deemed due to the errors. The widest spread still resulting in a victory for the sloppy team circles back around to the Mariners in this game where despite seven errors and a 7-2 deficit to the Brewers in Milwaukee, the Mariners came back and won 10-8 on the road. Now that’s winning dirty.

A five home-run game has never happened for a hitter, but it has happened for pitchers plenty of times. It’s certainly less of a positive achievement there, but just as notable. Or more notable because it’s actually happened and I can note the times that it has. It happened another two times already tonight, as noted by Jeff Sullivan.

CC Sabathia surrendered five home runs to the Rays, all from different hitters, and Carlos Zambrano gave up five to the Braves, two coming from Dan Uggla and his now 32-game hitting streak. On their own, they are worth noting and then moving on. A pitching giving up five home runs is certainly unusual but it’s not incredibly rare. James Shields, Tim Wakefield and R.A. Dickey have allowed six in a game once and that’s only looking at the past decade. All in all, there have now been 34 instances of a five-homer game since 2000. For reference, over the same time period there have been a total of 39 triple plays turned. What I did notice however, is that Sabathia’s five home runs were all solo shots and that’s a much rarer event.

In the entire Retrosheet era, there are only 22 other cases of a pitcher giving up at least five solo home runs in a game. James Shields ruins a bit of the fun by having done it so recently as 7 August 2010 when five of the ultimately six home runs hit off him were solo dingers. More fascinating is that Tim Wakefield has actually done it twice. In the aforementioned six home run game in 2004, five of the home runs were solo shots in Detroit. The other was a two-run shot and Wakefield only allowed 2 non-HR hits over his five innings that game. Prior to that, in 1996 pitching at Fenway to the White Sox, Wakefield served up solo home runs to Frank Thomas (three times), Danny Tartabull and Robin Ventura. Similar to the other game, Wakefield only allowed a single hit that wasn’t a home run and completed six innings. Amazingly, the Red Sox won both those games.

Turning from the opposite of solo home runs, in case you needed another daily fun fact, the most amount of runs allowed by a pitcher via the long ball in one game is 11. Gio Gonzalez was responsible in July of 2009 by the Twins in Oakland of all places (and Oakland won despite being down 12-2 at one point) and Shawn Chacon was brutalized by the Angels in Colorado in 2001, which makes way more sense.

I wrote a post yesterday on Lookout Landing concerning Luis Rodriguez and his perception as that of a “battler” at the plate. I had seen and heard that adjective tossed about for him quite often and decided to try to come up with a reasonable definition for the term as I interpreted it and then check to see if Rodriguez did in fact deserve the praise. I also wanted to see if others agreed with what I came up with for a formula equivalent of battling and nobody seemed to object, so I am willing now to subject it to another audience for feedback.

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I noticed last night that the Mariners were the only team left in baseball that had yet to play an extra-inning game this season. Division-mate Oakland has already played eight. Sometimes I am content to let a little nugget like that pass off into the twitter-verse and let it die, but in this case I got intrigued enough to head to Retrosheet and see if I could dig up some context. I restricted the search to seasons starting in 1962 when the expansion to 162 games took place and started the season earlier in the year.

The best that I could do was to go by calendar dates. I would prefer to go by game counts, but that was not available to my database at this time. Luckily, calendar dates are a reasonable proxy for how many games a team has played. And the winner for the longest it has taken to play extra innings goes to the 2005 Boston Red Sox who didn’t go beyond nine until their 99th game of the season on July 25. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes you come across a player that is putting up such ridiculous numbers that you just want to share him with others. “Hey, check out so and so,” you text or tell to the friends that you have that you know would appreciate immediately the incredibility of that person’s stats. I had that happen when I came across Glenn Abbott’s 1979 season wherein he struck out fewer than 5% of batters he faced that year. It was made even funnier that Abbott was the Mariners’ Opening Day starter that year.

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Faster players get more hits on their ground balls. That should be no surprise. There is a benefit to having speed in that you can beat more infield hits than slower players. That’s a fairly straight forward assertion, but ultimately I was a bit surprised that the gap is actually quite small.

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A pitcher’s hitting ability often goes unremarked upon. For roughly half the league, that’s fine since pitchers don’t hit. In the National League they do however, and while nobody ever expects much out of them, pitchers do occupy a spot in the batting order and what they do with it is part of the overall package of value that they deliver to the team.

On its own, that’s never a surprising statement to make. What I think is surprising is the range in values of hitting value that pitchers display. Granted they are always over small seasonal samples so I am taking care not to mention skill or repeatability here. Nevertheless, pitcher’s plate appearances do matter and managing not to be a federally declared disaster at the plate can be a stealthy way for a pitcher to add a significant amount of value.

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I am a relatively young baseball fan. As a consequence, there are a lot of players that I missed out watching first hand. Lucky for me that baseball is a sport steeped in numbers. People are biased in their recollections, but past numbers are static and simply awaiting for us to come along and figure out ways to interpret and compare them.

Sure there are the enduring numbers stuck forever on the backs of old baseball cards, but one of the revelations that comes from diving into the rabbit hole of sabermetrics is the realization of how little those oft-quoted numbers actually tell. It’s not just the standard RBI and pitcher Wins are overrated stats mantra, but the importance of era-context that’s left to the individual consumer to internalize and adjust for, if he or she is even aware of it.

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The Mariners completed one massive comeback last night against the Blue Jays. Down 7-0 in the seventh inning with one out already, the Mariners had a win expectancy of 0.3%. They came all the way back and won it with a walk-off “single” in the bottom of the ninth. What sparked their comeback was the eighth inning when, with the bases loaded, Octavio Dotel entered the game and walked Luis Rodriguez and Milton Bradley. Dotel was yanked for Marc Rzepczynski but he walked Jack Cust next. Three straight hitters drew bases-loaded walks. That piqued my interest. How often does that happen?

As it turns out that feat is not unheard of, though certainly rare. As far back as our Retrosheet data goes, there had been 108 games featuring at least three consecutive walks or hit batters (also known as “free passes”) with the bases loaded. Read the rest of this entry »