TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Saturday, July 03, 2004

Broken-bat homerun?!

If you watched Baseball Tonight or Sportscenter this evening then you saw that Detroit's Eric Munson hit a broken-bat homer at Coors Field. Let me say again that I really hope that Vinny Castilla doesn't make the All-Star team. Check out his home/road splits. Through Saturday's games, Castilla has a 1.141 OPS at Coors and a .640 OPS on the road. Seriously, check it out.

But my fear is that those 16 homers and 65 RBI might make Castilla the choice for the Rockies' representative, given that Todd Helton is probably only #4 among NL first baseman. And those three guys he's behind, Albert Pujols, Jim Thome, and Sean Casey, are all deserving, and the guess here is that Thome and Casey are in front of Helton on the reserve 1B list.

That would be a shame, as after Scott Rolen, there are three other 3B I can think of who are much more deserving than Castilla: Mike Lowell, Aramis Ramirez, and Adrian Beltre (one of the few quibbles I have with The Crank's list of All-Star snubs based on his method for choosing rosters). You really can't go wrong with any of those three guys, and of course Rolen would be the NL MVP if the season ended today, and is a good bet to win it when the season is completed as well. Maybe the fact that Casey is hurting means that Helton will slip in front of him, but maybe not. We'll soon find out, I suppose.

posted by Tom Renbarger 9:27 PM

Friday, July 02, 2004

As the sun set on July 1, Barry Bonds had an OBP of .619 and the Giants had 83 games remaining. Assume about 300 more plate appearances on the season for Barry, what would his OBP for the rest of the year have to be to hit certain season marks?

Target	Needs	Comments
600	583	This is looking more and more possible
582	547	What he needs to break his own OBP record
553	490	This would be good for #2 ahead of Ted Williams
545	473	Beats Ruth for #3
512	410	This is Mantle, the highest non-Bonds/Williams/Ruth in the modern era
500	387	Getting on base seems like a mortal lock
400	190	He'll get this done on walks
377	143	Ken Griffey Jr's lifetime OBP

In 289 PA this season, Barry has 116 walks. If we wave a magic wand and turn all of his hits into strikeouts, this would drop his OBP to .412. Looking at the team roster, the highest non-Barry OBP on the Giants by a hitter who qualifies for the batting title is .369 by Michael Tucker. Scary...

While looking up the second highest OBP on San Francisco, Ichiro ended up a line above Tucker. Interesting comparison...

Ichiro .320 .369 .402
Tucker .272 .369 .444

Ichiro has many more singles, but nearly 100 more at bats. Ichiro has 19 steals, but 6 CS for only 7 net. I don't know how Safeco plays, but Pac Bell is a pitcher's park. Ichiro is seen as a superstar, but he's floated down to the same territory as Michael Tucker... Tucker makes $1.5M, Ichiro $6.5M

posted by David 11:01 PM

No Time Like the Present

Bob Brenly was fired today as the D'Backs manager, having compiled a record 41 games over .500 in his three and a half years as manager and having taken his first team to a World's Series championship. I won't belabor the question yet again of managerial responsibility -- after all, it was Bucky Showalter who'd built the team, much as he built the early part of the Yankees dynasty for which Brian Cashman and Joe Torre get credit.

But usually these kinds of firings are done at the nadir of a team's performance. The Diamondbacks indeed had an 11-game losing streak broken this week -- followed by a two-game winning streak.

So I have a "tracer" type of question to ask -- how many managers have been fired following a team victory? How many were fired on a winning streak? How many have been fired with a winning record overall? And how many have been fired with a winning record during the season they were fired? (This last obviously doesn't apply to the Diamondbacks and Brenly.)

Anybody? Post on the message board.

posted by The Crank 1:26 PM

Filling out the All-Star Team

Be prepared for the annual round of teeth-grinding in the next week about who gets left off the all-star team, why we need bigger or smaller rosters, the wisdom of allowing fans to vote or the managers to pick their own team favorites, and the one-player-per-team rule.

Joe Torre has a history of cronyism in selecting a number of his own players for the bench, but he's not really different from most managers other than he has an unusually large number of opportunities to manage his league. Jack McKeon had to wait long enough to get here, so he can go nuts, too, as far as I'm concerned. But I reserve the right to select my own teams when they make me commissioner.

It's actually a fairly simple mechanistic formula if you want to select on this year's performance:

1. Select the best player on each major league team to get the hard part out of the way first.
   
2. Add in players selected by the fans.
   
3. Add in any players among the top ten hitters and pitchers not represented by (1) and (2).
   
4. For any position without a backup, select the best available player at that position.
   
5. Fill in your roster with cronies or deserving candidates. For my team, I decided to choose the latter.
   

Every year the "snubs" tend to be at OF and 1B, largely because of the outsized offensive production focussed in those areas and the requirement there be backups at all the positions. Nothing -- nothing -- can be done to prevent snubs short of adding another 200 players to the roster.

So, let's go through my formula.

1. Take the best player from each team. (Asterisk indicates a player who wouldn't "normally" "deserve" to be on the All-Star team, but makes it because you have to have one. Anybody not in the top five at his position in the league, or top 15 pitchers, we would so designate.
   
   American League
   Yankees - tie between A-Rod and Javier Vazquez, A-Rod gets the coin flip.
   Red Sox - Manny Ramirez beats Curt Schilling
   Tampa Bay - Carl Crawford based on secondary average
   Toronto - Vernon Wells
   Baltimore - Melvin Mora
   White Sox - Frank Thomas
   Twins - Joe Nathan
   Cleveland - CC Sabathia
   Tigers - Pudge Rodriguez
   Royals - Ken Harvey* [Note Beltran can't represent the Royals!]
   Texas - Kenny Rogers (with all due respect to Hank Blalock)
   Seattle - Ichiro
   Oakland - Mark Mulder
   Anaheim - Vlad
   
   National League
   Philly - Jim Thome
   Florida - close tie between Pavano and Penny, we'll go with Pavano
   Mets - Tom Glavine
   Atlanta - JD Drew
   Montreal - Livan Hernandez*
   Cardinals - Scott Rolen
   Cubs - Aramis Ramirez
   Milwaukee - Ben Sheets (beating Overbay)
   Reds - Sean Casey
   Houston - Roger Clemens
   Pittsburgh - Jack Wilson
   Giants - Jason Schmidt (yes, better than Barry, relatively, I think, but Barry gets on anyway later)
   Arizona - Randy Johnson
   Colorado - Todd Helton
   LA - Eric Gagne
   San Diego - a tough one, since it's been a team effort this year, but we'll go with Trevor Hoffman
   
   
2. Add in players voted in by the fans.
   In the AL, that's Jason Giambi, Alfonso Soriano, Derek Jeter, and probably Hideki Matsui. In the NL, add Mike Piazza, Albert Pujols, Jeff Kent, Edgar Renteria (probably), Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey, Sammy Sosa.
   
   
3. Add in top-ten players who are all-stars on their own hook, fleshing out the pitching staffs in the process since the fans don't vote on pitchers.
   
   My AL list: Curt Schilling, Javier Vazquez, Tim Hudson, Jake Westbrook, Pedro Martinez, Mariano Rivera, Francisco Cordero, Eddie Guardado.
   
   My NL list: Johnny Estrada, Brad Penny, Carlos Zambrano, Odalis Perez, Matt Clement.
   
   
4. Add the best available at each position for which you need a back-up.
   
   AL: Juan Uribe at 2B, Carlos Guillen at SS, Jorge Posada at C.
   NL: Todd Walker at 2B (leading the majors in HR by a second baseman).
   

Here's the list of all-star snubs:

Notable will be Beltran, who, having been traded prior to the all-star game, won't have stats to justify an NL selection, and can't be his former team's representative. Hence Ken Harvey gets on the team.

In the NL, your snubs: Bob Abreu, Lance Berkman, Adam Dunn, Mike Lowell, Lyle Overbay.

In the AL: David Ortiz, Hank Blalock, Travis Hafner, Paul Konerko, Gary Sheffield.

Of course, it seems unlikely Mike Lowell will be left off the NL squad, and I suspect Torre will pick Sheffield and a few other Yankees to bump off a few random others above. And I'd be shocked if Torre selected Pedro Martinez, who, if not the Pedro of old, is still certainly among the top ten pitchers in performance.

So here are your squads:

Position	NL	AL
C	Piazza, Estrada	I Rod, Posada
1B	Pujols, Thome, Helton, Casey	Giambi, Thomas, Harvey
2B	Kent, Walker	Soriano, Uribe
SS	Renteria, J. Wilson	Jeter, Guillen
3B	Rolen, A Ramirez	A Rod, Mora
OF	Bonds, Griffey, Sosa, Drew	Vlad, Manny, Hideki, Ichiro, Crawford, Wells
P	Pavano, Glavine, Livan, Schmidt, Hoffman, Johnson, Ggne, Sheets, Clemens, Penny, Zambrano, Od. Perez, Clement	Rogers, Mulder, Nathan, Sabathia, Schilling, Vazquez, Hudson, Wetbrook, Pedro Martinez, Mariano Rivera, Francisco Cordero, Guardado

posted by The Crank 10:16 AM

Thursday, July 01, 2004

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus

...the Loudon County taxpayers will be stuffing the major league stocking before the end of next week, when MLB announces the "permanent" home of the Expos.

As I wrote the other day, one of several reasons why MLB focussed on our nation's capital was to remove the need to realign divisions. The elephantine types among our readers may remember that it was the proposed movement of just a single franchise -- the Chicago Cubs -- from one division to another that brought down the Fay Vincent Regime. Under the Selig Regency and Reign, of course, there have been 13 changes in division membership, 15 if you count expansion inserting two new teams.

So a looong time ago, back in 1997, Commissioner Selig proposed what was then called "radical realignment", a proposal that was seriously considered by owners in 1998. Since Selig got what he wanted when the Brewers were transferred between leagues, restoring to Milwaukee the seemingly more prestigious national league imprimatur, radical realignment was shelved.

At the time, being a knee-jerk conservative in several areas in baseball, I was adamantly opposed to the idea of shuffling up the leagues. Our sport has such a long and involved relationship with its traditions, and fan identity at one time was so tied up with being a "national league" or an "american league" fan that people actually rooted for one side or the other in the All-star game, they'd always root for "their" league in the World Series regardless of whether their favorite team was playing or not. There were perceived differences between the NL game and the AL game: the NL was a "fastball" league, while the AL was a "breaking ball" league, the NL was a "speed and little ball" league, the AL was a "three-run homer and slugging league", the NL was fast and the AL was slow, etc. Umpires in the NL called the high strike; umpires in the AL called side to side strikes on the black. There were even NL families (the Carpenters, the O'Malleys, et alia) and AL families (the MacPhails, the Yawkeys et al).

Of course, many of these differences had more to do with inertia on the part of general management and ownership, a little with separate umpire groups, and some differences in the types of ballparks being played in (more astroturf multipurpose stadia in the NL, a few more bandboxes in the AL).

What we've seen since the radical realignment concept was first floated is a more or less complete erosion of any meaningful differences between the leagues -- save the DH. Free agency certainly mixed up the leagues from the get-go, but the relaxation of interleague trade rules starting in the 1970 also accelerated the decreasing distinction between an "AL" and "NL" "type" player. Now upwards of a hundred players a year switch leagues. Nationwide satellite TV and interleague play have exposed players to nationwide audiences, and the purported differences turned out to be a bit less than fans might've expected. The NL and AL offices have been elminated and replaced by a central MLB organization; AL and NL presidencies are largely ceremonial. A single umpiring pool is used and the umpires rotate among NL, AL, and interleague games. The strike zone, insofar as it could be called "consistent", is thus uniform across the leagues. I for one don't feel as beholden to "my" league as I once did. And the destruction of an ancient league has a precedent: baseball oversaw the dismantling of the venerable American Association when AAA was contracted to two leagues.

In short, we're effectively playing one big league now -- again, with the exception of the DH, which is nevertheless trotted out to fans of the NL during interleague, and "old school" pitchers batting is exposed to AL fans.

I don't mean to revive the never-ending DH debate here, but it's the only substantive rule that's different between the leagues. And certainly there is just no real difference between styles of play and the basic ground rules.

So whatever objections I had to radical realignment -- and I can't rightly remember the rational ones, now -- would seem to be a bit unreasonable at this point.

To digess just a bit, I've contended for a while baseball should expand to 32 teams and stick there for a while. (I see our colleague Rob Neyer has a link to an article on that subject, but I don't pay for "insider" information from competing web sites, so TDA readers will have to summarize for me.) I feel that with properly-distributed markets -- another team in New York, another team in the Pacific Northwest -- there's enough market for 32 profitable teams, and having a number of teams that is a power of two provides many, many more scheduling and playoff options.

That, however, is a hypothetical that's not going to happen while the owners are crying poor mouth and raking in the bucks (as opposed to the last two periods of expansion, when the owners maintained all was well but really, really wanted the expansion fees.) But radical realignment does begin to make some sense when you consider the eccentricities that the current balanced/unbalanced and interleague play schedule requirements produce (such as teams flying from Seattle to San Juan and back to San Francisco, team vs. team season schedules being played out in the course of two weeks, and a host of others I could mention.) There's an economic justification in grouping teams closer together geographically: reduced travel costs, to be sure, but also a likely improvement in TV numbers as more clubs are able to play more of their games in their "local" prime time.

I'm not averse to joining in hypotheticals, of course, so I thought it would be fun to take a look at a potential realignment scheme or two, if we assume the Northern Virginia group will win the Expos franchise.

Northeast	Great Lakes	Southern	Midwest	Old West	Pacific
Yanks	Det	TB	Min	Ari	S F
Mets	Cle	Flo	Mil	Col	LA
Phi	Cin	Atl	Cubs	Hou	Ana
Bos	Tor	VA	Chisox	Tex	Oak
Pit	????	Bal	St. L	KC	SD

Of course, there's two problems with this. Seattle is homeless, unless we want to have asymmetrical divisions and stick a sixth into a Pacific division and leave the Great Lakes at only four. This is the case with the NL Central and the AL West right now, of course, and it's one of the more glaring problems with "fairness" for fans of the NL Central teams right now and their 20% reduced chance of making the playoffs on day one of the season.

One might suggest the following riff, though: move Pittsburgh into the Great Lakes division. Put Seattle into the Pacific division. Then move the Oakland franchise to New Jersey and the Northeast division.

With the exception of the "Old West" division, every club within each division above would play its division rivals within the same time zone.

Baltimore, by the way, while close to Philadelphia was historically a more southern city by a long shot. I haven't been to Baltimore in ten years, so I can't comment on what it's like now, but it seems like a reasonable grouping.

Of course, the first time a franchise moves cities, this might get messed up. But remember Major League baseball's anti-trust exemption allows it to control the movement of franchises.

This doesn't quite address the alleged big-market/small-market gaps, but I think it's pretty close.

Retain the current play-off system, I'd assume -- "natural" divisions are easier to come by in groups of five right now, anyway. But the schedule could now be "balanced" with unbalanced divisional rivalry play as follows.

Each team could play two four-game home-and-away series with all non-division teams. That's 100 games. Wipe six games off the schedule to make the players happy. For the remaining 56 games, play each of your four division rivals 14 times - a three-game home series and three-game away series, a four-game home series and four-game home series.

Properly set up, such a schedule could cut total travel miles in half.

The wild card becomes more fair because everybody is facing exactly the same opponents outside of the division.

posted by The Crank 5:30 PM

Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Olympics Watch: Go Team, er, USA!

Peter Angelos, owner of the Baltimore Orioles, has been instrumental in putting together the Greek National Olympic baseball team. You can read all about it on the Baltimore Orioles web site, which is doubling up for a Greek team site.

Of course, what the Greek team is going to be -- just check out that roster, featuring great old Greek names like Bellinger, Kingsbury, Harris, Brack, et alia -- is the best American baseball players who have any kind of Greek ancestry whatsoever. You don't have to be a citizen of Greece to qualify for its Olympic team, you just have to have "Greek Blood", a strangely old world concept. (This is not anything new: the Italian baseball team in 2000 was made up largely of Americans.) The Greeks, of course, get a team in the tournament because they're hosting the games, and the host country is allowed to put in a team in whatever event it wants without qualifying through international competition.

Team USA, which consisted at the time of a hodge podge of amateur players and minor leaguers playing winter ball, lost to Mexico in the olympic qualifying tournament in Panama last November. It was described in the media as a stunner, but the only people who were stunned were the ones who took it for granted, without checking, we'd be defending that gold medal Tommy Lasorda finally won (with some small help from an all-star team of minor leaguers) in Australia in 2000. We haven't taken international baseball competition very seriously, in large part because it's hard to keep a meaningful team together for any length of time when the players have better things to do (go to college and play, earn a living). If you're a genuine prospect, and you get hurt playing for a piece of metal, you're out of luck forever. I'm not sure national pride was enough of an allure to attract a lot of talent to the team when the competition would be ignored by the majority of their countrymen, especially when the tournament experience will consist of shuttling between security lockdown in their hotels through the greek smog to play in stifling heat before sparse audiences in slipshod fields.

However, I tip my cap to Angelos for supporting Olympic baseball. No matter that he seems to be doing it out of ethnic pride, not national pride for the US of A. It's the most you'll see Major League Baseball supporting international "amateur" baseball this quadrenniad.

Speaking of Peter Angelos and the American Way, it seems likely that MLB will be selecting Northern Virginia as the next venue for the Canada-Puerto Rico Expos. The focus has been heavily-centered on the nation's capital, with three different venues -- Dulles, the District of Columbia, and Norfollk -- vying for the Expos franchise. Dulles appears to me to be the front-runner, because they've lined up a way for taxpayers to pay for a new ballpark (via a Pittsburgh-style Plan C that won't require voter approval), and despite issues surrounding traffic, congestion, and the lack of a real 'center' to the area, it should be feasible. Commissioner Selig likes nothing better than a publically-financed ballpark.

The reason why Washington is the focus of a new ball club, of course, is that MLB wants to continue to cozy up to the people who keep its anti-trust exemption alive. It's another example of how the power elite of the country and the power elite of baseball walk hand in hand, and feed off the taxpayer along the way. Angelos has objected to the territorial incursion, and baseball will likely duck his objections via the Northern Virginia route via loopholes (Virginia was not "assigned" to Baltimore when the Senators left town for the second time - for Texas). Angelos is also a significant outsider within the baseball ownership. He's been on the losing side of many ownership votes, often all by himself. He's argued the move for a new franchise would hurt him as much as the Giants say Oakland moving to San Jose would hurt them. But Angelos is also a Democrat, capital D, in a sport that is very tight with the Corked Bat administration, and that's going to leave him squeezed out of the decision-making.

(And as for why Portland, Las Vegas, and Monterrey will be cut out -- beyond more substantive differences in those cities' plans for new ballparks, Commissioner Selig would have a huge realignment headache in trying to relocate a team from the NL East into a Pacific or Mountain time zone. That's doomed them from the start, although I suspect Oakland will be asked to move to one of those locales sometime in the next decade.)

Incidentally, I didn't see too much coverage today on either Sports Center or CNN about an incident at the Yankees-Red Sox game last night. Vice President Cheney emerged from an undisclosed location long enough to hang out with Gov. Pataki and former Mayor Giuliani in a luxury box, and then made his way down to the field for a photo opportunity during New York's now-celebrated seventh-inning stretch rendition of "God Bless America". George Steinbrenner (whom, I should remind our readers, is a convicted felon -- he funneled illegal campaign contributions to the Nixon re-election campaign in 1972 -- I wonder if he, as a Tampa Bay resident, can vote legally in Florida?) obligingly arranged for Cheney to be shown on the jumbotron during the half inning. The crowd booed him -- booed him loudly, roundly, and intensely -- and they quickly cut away from him.

I'm definitely rooting for the Greek-American national team at Athens this year. So many battles are fought and won by proxy.

posted by The Crank 11:07 AM

Monday, June 28, 2004

...and this is a footnote?!?

With all the hoopla over Junior getting to 500 HRs, and even over Jim Thome getting to 400 HRs, a far more significant milestone went nearly unnoticed Sunday. Barry Bonds scored his 2000th run -- only the seventh man in major league history to do so. He's now just 62 behind Willie Mays. If he plays two more years, he'll almost certainly pass Pete Rose (2165), and Aaron and Ruth (tied at 2174). Ty Cobb (2246) and Rickey Henderson (2295...and counting?) would require three years from Barry, and that's quite a bit more speculative. Bonds would have to be committed to passing Aaron and just a bit short at the end of the 2006 season to envision that coming about.

What's fairly remarkable about this is Bonds does not have a single season for runs scored in the all-time top 100. His career high is 129 (done three times). Then again, neither do Aaron (127) or Mays (130), although everybody else around the top is on the single-season top 100 someplace.

Still, just when you thought you'd seen all the amazing stats there were to see about Barry, chew on this one: Bonds has more runs scored (59) than hits (58) (thanks to those 109 walks).

Mark McGwire in 1998 had 130 runs scored and 152 hits. That's the closest season I can find from recent times.

That celebrated statistical outlier, the freakiest freak of lopsided stat lines ever, Rob Deer, came very close in 1991. He walked 89 times, got 80 hits (only 24 of them homers), struck out 175 times, hit .179, and scored 64 runs, a differential of only 16. I did an article back in 1993, which I can't find around anymore, about Deer's RBI to Hit ratio, which was threatening to approach 1 at several points. It was hit or miss with Rob, literally.

Tony Phillips came within 19 in 1995: 118 runs on 137 hits (and "only" 113 walks). Phillips was pesky as hell.

Ed "The Walking Man" Yost had 94 runs scored and 119 hits, the year he hit his career high in walks of 151 in 1956. Yost was my father's favorite player, a long-suffering Washington Senator who was viewed as light-hitting at the time when OBP wasn't very well appreciated. He managed a career OBP of .394 -- good enough to be 77th on the all-time career list, right behind none other than Big Mac -- with a career slugging percentage of only .374.

Eddie Joost (not to be confused with Eddie Yost) got within ten in 1949, with 128 runs scored on 138 hits (and 149 walks). Joost had a pretty mediocre career for some pretty lousy teams. I'd like one of the old-timers to explain to me how he finished 10th in the MVP voting in 1948 on the strength of a .250 BA, 16 HR, and 55 RBI. Remember, this was before the Cy Young award and pitchers got a lot more votes in the MVP back then.

Eddie Stanky (what is it about Eddies?) in 1945 came pretty close, with 128 runs scored in 143 hits (and 148 walks). Stanky's remembered mostly for his role on the 1951 Giants in their celebrated pennant race with the Dodgers. Stanky was the leadoff man for the Giants on the final playoff game against the Dodgers -- and went 0 for 4 with no runs scored.

Babe Ruth, who had an amazing number of high run-scoring seasons, and certainly walked a lot, never came within 30 differential between runs and hits, except for 1921. In his unreal 1921 season, he scored 177 runs (the modern era record) -- on 204 hits and 145 walks. The King of Swing, the Babe of the Base on Balls, had a differential of 27. They swang away back then.

Ever heard of Jimmy Sheckard? I sure as heck hadn't until just now. He scored 121 runs on 149 hits in 1911, aided by a then-record 147 walks. Sheckard turned 31 that season, and had 122 walks the season after, but previously in 11 major league seasons had relatively unremarkable walk totals ranging from 83 down to the low 40s for full seasons. I thought he might've been a, shall we say, height-challenged person who decided to stoop down in the strike zone a la Eddie Gaedel, but the reference works say he was 5' 9", a little short for a ballplayer of the era but an average height nevertheless. He did end with over 2000 hits, so I should've heard of him before. Another fact I gleaned from reading his line: he was apparently named after celebrated 1876 Presidential loser Samuel J. Tilden (Sheckard's full name was Samual James Tilden Scheckard). Having been born in 1878, to put this in perspective, I suppose this is about the rough equivalent of my naming my infant son Al Gore Crank. (I did not.) Tilden lost Pennsylvania, whence Sheckard came, so one can only surmise his parents were proud minority (or, as with the case of both Tilden and Gore, majority) voters. In any event, the deadball era was not known for walking, so Sheckard is the closest of his ilk to having had more runs scored than hits.

Going all the way back to the original leadoff man, Slidin' Billy Hamilton, who had five 100 walk seasons but was more typically in the 70s and 80s, he got within 17 on one occasion (his rookie year, 1889). In 1894, when he set the all-time record for runs scored with 192 (in 129 games!), he got 200 hits, 126 walks, batted .404 and had an OBP of .523 -- but a slugging percentage of "only" .528. Slidin' Billy had 44 extra base hits including 15 triples and 4 HRs -- all inside-the-parkers. If you're not familiar with Slidin' Billy, he's pretty much the only man with a legitimate case on Rickey Henderson as greatest leadoff man of all time.

But already we're getting so far back the statistical record is partial. Tom Brown of the 1891 Boston Reds scored (we think) 177 runs on 189 hits for a differential of 12. Brown's another guy who seems to have had a great career, ending in 1897, but I've only barely heard of him. Brown went the other route to get that high ratio: he lead the "major" leagues of the time in strikeouts five times (although his career high was 94, if you want to know how far contact has come in 100 years). Brown had a teammate, shortstop Paul Radford, who had 102 runs scored on 118 hits. In any event, we're not only in partial statistical records, we're back in years where the scoring rules changed, the mound was differing distances away, etc. so it's not going to be fruitful to look further back.

If anybody else has some good examples of high runs to hits ratios, please post them on the message board.

That's about all I can find for any player who played close to a full season. It seems likely that if Bonds continues this walk pace, he'll have an obscure record ratio of runs scored to hits, which may exceed 1.0.

Oh yeah, and he scored his 2000th run in 2004, too.

posted by The Crank 12:18 AM

Sunday, June 27, 2004

Final Ping
Congrats to the Cal State Fullerton Titans on their sweep of Texas to take the College World Series. I didn't see nearly as much college ball this year as I wanted to. I saw plenty of Stanford, but outside of seeing both Texas and Fullerton, I didn't see many other top-flight programs this year. I missed Rice when they played San Jose State, and elected to spend time with my grandmother rather than seeing Long Beach State.

With a side note to mention that Stanford went 5-1 against the two finalists in the CWS, I was a little surprised with this year's finals results. When I saw Fullerton, it was early in the year, in fact, it was one of the first games they played. They didn't look good, and in fact played only about .500 ball for their first 30 games. Texas, on the other hand, was mucho scary. They brought big bats, good starting pitching, and unbeatable relief. You had the feeling that after six, any lead was safe. Except that Fullerton was able to bust up the pen twice in two games to take it all.

Well, that's it for "ping!" for another year. I'll be getting out my camera sometime around the Superbowl and we'll start all over again.

posted by David 11:24 PM