The Best of Spring Training Sample Sizes

Finally, after what seems like an age, the appointed heroes amongst us mortal men and women have descended upon the ebullient corner of the nation, ball and glove in hand, to throw and to catch. Yes, it still snows 12 inches every week in the Northeast, but the dream is once again here — may we all rejoice in the date of winter’s true passing.

In honor of the fine March spectacle we’re about to witness, or rather to honor the sometimes low-level professional baseball that passes for spectacle because of the state of our desperation, I thought it might be a good exercise to relive some of the glories of past spring trainings. The reason for this is twofold: to remind everyone that spring training stats are next to worthless, and also to celebrate how weird baseball can be when constrained to a small sample size. Today we’re going to revel in the fact that we’re playing the game again by looking at freak occurrences that can only happen in Arizona in March.

Further, these events are cherry-picked for their level of achievement by players unaccustomed to them: feats of baseball that happen rarely, if ever, during the regular season for these hitters and pitchers. Spanning the last five years, they are presented here for your enjoyment, and to commemorate the one-month heroes that the onset of April destroys. If video archives of spring training were a little better, we may have been treated to stretching the timeline a little further: sadly, it is not so, and those events are lost to pre-GIF antiquity. Now, onto the past five Marches:

2010: Sean Rodriguez posts an 1.373 OPS

Tampa Bay must have been pretty excited after they traded for Sean Rodriguez — owner of a career total of 14 extra base hits in limited playing time coming into the 2010 season — and watched him crush three home runs in his first four at-bats of spring training. Behold, his third home run off of Phil Hughes, where he got a lot of it:

Rodriguez would finish with 13 extra base hits in total for spring training, posting a hilarious .460/.500/.873 slash line. In what is a poignant reminder that conditions for batted balls in the Arizona desert are very hitter friendly, Rodriguez would have 30 extra base hits the rest of the season. Unfortunately for Tampa Bay, Sean Rodriguez was not the second coming of an early 2000’s Barry Bonds.

2011: Jake Fox hits 10 home runs in 74 at-bats

Remember Jake Fox? He played in 193 games in the majors between 2007 and 2011, hitting 20 home runs in total. However, he also had one month for the Baltimore Orioles — March of 2011 — when he couldn’t stop hitting them. Amazingly, Fox only had two walks during this spring training, but if I was hitting the ball over the fence every other game, I might not think about walking much either. I was able to find an intro video and two of his illustrious spring home runs for our enjoyment:

Jake Fox had a month in which 13% of his plate appearances ended with a home run. Unfortunately, that month was March. Ryan Howard had two similar spring trainings during his prime, but Ryan Howard once hit 58 home runs and won an MVP. Jake Fox was designated for assignment by June of 2011, and is currently back in the minors, where he hit 38 home runs last year — though he did garner an invite from Toronto to spring training this coming year. Do it again, Jake.

2012: Jeremy Hellickson gives up 20 runs in 20 innings

Here’s your main argument for spring stats not holding much weight: Jeremy Hellickson, fresh off of a 2011 campaign that saw him win the Rookie of the Year, promptly used the warm-up frame of 2012 to get all the bad out of his system. To be fair, most of the damage came from a March 24th start against the Twins, in which Joe Maddon mercilessly left his young starter in the game to give up 10 earned runs over three innings. In spring training. This GIF sums up how March went for Mr. Hellickson:

Hellickson then had a great year by ERA, even though the advanced, fielding-independent metrics disliked both his successful 2011 and 2012 seasons.

2013: Craig Kimbrel does very un-Craig Kimbrel things

Relief pitchers are one of the most reliable sources of small sample size oddities, and spring training of 2013 did not disappoint in that regard. Craig Kimbrel, he of the incredible control and home run suppression, hit three batters, walked seven, and gave up two home runs in eight innings of work. On March 2^nd, in his first appearance of the spring, he pitched to five batters in one inning who didn’t swing: two of them walked on four pitches, he hit one of them, and two of them struck out looking on three pitches each. The other two batters he faced, of course, swung on the first pitch.

Unfortunately, there isn’t video of any of Kimbrel’s appearances during this spring training: the archives are sadly hit or miss. However, I did listen to the radio broadcast of the inning above, and the commentators had a spirited discussion about Win Probability Added, so that should be of some comfort. The Atlanta closer would then go on to hit three batters while only surrendering four home runs in the entirety of the 2013 season, because he is Craig Kimbrel.

2014: Wily Peralta, pitcher, hits unofficial career home runs #1 and #2

Wily Peralta came into last year’s spring training with just eight hits and one walk in 71 plate appearances in his career, with only one of those being an extra base hit. No one seemed to inform Wily Peralta of that, however, as he proceeded to hit more home runs in spring training than Jay Bruce, Yoenis Cespedes, Adam Dunn, Paul Goldschmidt, and David Ortiz. Not only that, but his second home run of the spring came off of Madison Bumgarner, who had never given up a home run to an opposing pitcher and hasn’t since — though officially he still hasn’t ever given one up. If only batted ball distance statistics were available for spring training, because this, his completely unofficial second career home run, deserved to be measured:

Peralta and Bumgarner would go their separate ways after spring training, with the former hitting .053 in 2014 and the latter winning the MVP of the World Series. But one can imagine Peralta sitting on his couch watching game seven of the Series in late October, and murmuring to no one and everyone, “I hit a home run off that guy”.

And that’s really the beauty of spring training – the stats mean basically nothing, but it’s baseball, and that can only be a good thing. Wild things happen when you only look at one month of baseball. I hope you’ve enjoyed this reminder of some of the craziest occurrences of the past five spring trainings, and I’ll see you back here next year, after Eric Sogard hits 12 home runs this coming March.