The Night Nolan Arenado Made History
Some say it’s all been done before. That’s perhaps mostly true, but as something only mostly true, all of it has not actually been done before. This is especially true if you are willing to include qualifiers. Take this example: Before last weekend, no player had ever completed a cycle with a walk-off homer when the team was trailing at the time of the blast, per Baseball-Reference’s Play Index. Nolan Arenado has now eliminated that previous distinction.
Cycles are fairly rare, occurring 255 times, per Baseball-Reference, roughly once every 700 games, and this decade has been in line with that average. Since the beginning of last season, there have been 99 walkoff wins that ended in a homer, about one in 35 games. Of those 99 walkoffs, just 19 were come from behind homers, and only 13 came in the ninth, roughly one in 266 games. Put those two together, and we have about a one in 750,000 chance of both happening in a game. Given we’ve had about one quarter of that many games played over the last 100 years, it seems reasonable we’ve waited this long.
There have been a few other similar games over the years if you relax some of the requirements. There were only nine games in the Baseball-Reference Play Index where a player hit for the cycle and had the game winning hit in a walkoff. Many might have seen that the last player to hit a walkoff homer to complete a cycle was Carlos Gonzalez in 2010. He hit his shot to break a 5-5 tie against the Cubs. Hopefully the seven year difference between occurrences adds to the perceived rarity as opposed to making it seem commonplace. Read the rest of this entry »