Game of the Week: 4/13-19

In addition to our regularly scheduled commentary, us writers here at Fangraphs will be implementing a few different weekly specialty posts. The others should debut this week, if not today, but we will kickstart my Monday morning series right now, revisiting a really interesting game from the previous week of action. For the inaugural post, join me in a trip back to Saturday, to the new Yankees Stadium, where things, well, didn’t go as planned for the Bronx Bombers. The game graph says it all:

The Yankees actually had a decent shot at winning this game… in the first inning. Then everything fell by the wayside as the Indians absolutely torched Chien-Ming Wang and Anthony Claggett in the second inning. After a Mark Teixiera jimmy-jack (that term needs to be used much more!), the Yankees boasted a 65.9% win expectancy. One grueling half-inning later, the Yankees had but a 1.5% chance at winning the game.

The plummeting slope in the game graph represents the Indians scoring 14 runs in the top of the second frame. Travis Hafner singled and promptly moved up to second base when Jhonny Peralta followed with a single of his own. Shin-Soo Choo then knocked the ball out of the park, giving the Indians a 3-2 lead.

After Ryan Garko fouled out, Ben Francisco doubled and came around to score on an Asdrubal Cabrera single. Grady Sizemore doubled, advancing Cabrera to third, but neither would stay put very long as Mark DeRosa continued to showcase power, knocking both runners in with a double. At this point, the Yankees had retired just one hitter and now trailed 6-2.

Wang uncorked a wild pitch allowing DeRosa to move up ninety feet. Victor Martinez then singled DeRosa in, increasing the lead to 7-2, and ending Wang’s abysmal outing. Hafner then stepped in for his second plate appearance of the inning and smashed a double. Martinez held at third but both he and Hafner soon scored on a Peralta 2-run double. The Indians now led 9-2, and the Yankees had a win expectancy of just 4.6%.

With Peralta on second, Claggett walked Choo and surrendered a single to Garko to load the bases. Francisco finally provided that second out by striking out, but Claggett could not parlay that into further success as Asdrubal Cabrera hit a grand slam. With the bases empty and the Tribe up 13-2 the heels of a salami, Grady Sizemore just added insult to injury by launching a solo homer. Claggett fanned DeRosa to end the inning, but the proverbial damage had been done, with the Indians turning a 2-0 deficit into a 14-2 lead.

Though they would eventually win the game by a score of 22-4, the second inning is what made this particular game earn the weekly honor. The Indians plated 17 batters in the top of the second, scoring 14 runs in the process. I checked my Retrosheet database to see how rare it was for this many batters to come up in a specific half-inning.

From 1954-2008, there have been 4,466 half-innings with 10+ batters. Just 17 of those innings featured 17+ batters. Just 8 of those 17 saw 18+ batters come to the plate. The top of the second inning in this Indians-Yankees affair became just the eighteenth half-inning since 1954 to feature 17 or more plate appearances. The most plate appearances in this returned resultset was 20, belonging to the Reds on 8/3/1989.

Relative to runs scored, only three games since 1954 have featured teams scoring 14+ runs in a single inning: the Red Sox scored 14 in the bottom of the first against the Marlins on 6/27/03; the Reds scored 14 in the bottom of the first against the Astros on 8/3/1989; and the Rangers scored 16 in the bottom of the eighth against the Orioles on 4/19/96. The second inning for the Indians marks just the fourth time this occurred.

This self-appointed game of the week might not have seemed all that great for the Yankees faithful, but for historical purposes and sheer rarity of the events involved, this GOTW honor is bestowed upon the 4/18 Indians-Yankees matchup.