Prolific Teammates – the one-two punch |

In a recent post about Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez joining the 500 doubles club in the same month, there was discussion about which pairs of teammates may have accumulated the most counting stats together. So, just for fun, I’ve compiled a table of prolific teammate accomplishments.

Take a look after the jump, and please let me know of any I may have missed.

Some preliminaries. The following table shows combined counting stats by teammates, only when they were teammates. This means:

Full season stats for both players are included in totals for any season when both played for the same team, and no other
Partial season stats for one or both players are included when one or both players played for multiple teams in the same season. Partial season stats are based on game logs for periods when both players were playing on the same team.
No adjustments are made for first or last seasons, during which players may not have been teammates for the entire season. Principle is adjustments are made (as described in preceding bullet) only for periods when both players are active but playing on different teams.

So, here’s what I’ve found.

[table id=57 /]

Notes.

1. Totals for Honus Wagner and Fred Clarke are computed as described. However, player-manager Clarke ceased being a regular or even an occasional player after the 1911 season, not playing at all in 1912 and appearing in only 12 games total in 1913 to 1915.

2. Exact count for Wagner and Leach not known, as Leach moved to a new team in mid-season of 1912 (before game logs are available). Thus, Wagner’s partial totals for 1912 season are omitted.

3. WAR count for Mays and McCovey excludes partial season of 1972, as WAR is not calculated for individual games. Difference of total shown to “true” total is negligible.

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joeyogi

11 years ago

Superb! thanks. i and my baseball buddies cant get enough of your stuff.

kds

Great stuff! Now that you’ve spoiled us could you do SB and maybe some negative categories like outs, GIDP, also games, AB and PA. And then pitching! 🙂

bstar

Wow, Doug, a whole group of us tried to tackle doubles a while back. Astounding that you’ve done the same with most basic hitting stats. Well done.

a related,but tangential, question,if you will. Hank Greenberg and Rudy York -in how many games did both men homer together? many thanks,if you have time.

Richard Chester

Reply to joeyogi

My analysis showed that they homered in the same game 22 times. I am going to double-check tomorrow when I have more time.

Author

Doug

Joeyogi, this will get you started – http://bbref.com/pi/shareit/1l7De .

It’s a list of all games with 2 or more Tigers homering, during the years when both Greenberg and York played for Detroit. You can match up these games with each player’s HR log to find the common games.

Reply to Doug

Here are the common games:

1937
Aug.30

1938
May 5
May 19
May 25
May 30
June 23
July 8
July 10
Aug 19
Aug 23
Aug 28

1939
Sep 24
Sep 30

1940
May 21
June 8
July 15
July 29
Aug 11
Sep 14
Sep 18
Sep 19

1945
Aug 1

Reply to Richard Chester

many thanks. maybe we should label this site NSFW-b/c it’s gonna get me fired!

Editor

John Autin

Doug, this looks like great stuff.

FWIW, I get an error/warning message when loading this page, whether I use Chrome or Firefox: “DataTables warning (table id = ‘wp-table-reloaded-id-57-no-1’): Requested unknown parameter ‘5’ from the data source for row 1.”

Reply to John Autin

I know – I get the same message. Don’t know what it is or how to get rid of it.

Just have to click OK a couple of times, and it goes away. But, it is a nuisance.

e pluribus munu

FWIW it’s worth it. Great work, Doug!

no statistician but

Longevity of association is the hidden element here, meaning that, with free agency and the bottom line as driving forces, baseball is unlikely to see many additions to the stats in Doug’s charts. The biggest surprise to me is Jeter and Posada making one of the lists in a year beginning with a 2.

Hell may not freeze over before this happens again, but the damned souls in the lower depths may get pretty chilly before it does.

Blandman

May be a little weaker than these prolific stats, but Jermaine Dye and Paul Konerko both hit their 300th career homers in back-to-back at bats in 2009. Kind of crazy. Have there been any other big milestones that were broken in the same game before?

Reply to Blandman

In the 5th inning of the 1st game of a double-header between the Phils and the Giants on 10-5-29 Lefty O’Doul hit a HR which was his 251st hit of the season breaking Rogers Hornsby’s seasonal NL record. The next batter, Chuck Klein, hit his 43rd HR breaking Hornsby’s NL seasonal HR record.

Good Lord, Richard! How do you find these things? Or did you just know this one?

Reply to e pluribus munu

I get a lot of information from reading Charlton’s Chronology which can be accessed via baseballlibrary.com.

I found the Greenberg-York HRs By pasting their HR logs into a spreadsheet, one above the other, and then sorted by date. Then by using the =IF(…) command I found the locations where two or more dates appeared on consecutive rows.

I’ve often thought of finding more time to pore over the chronology. (If it had existed when I was a kid I would have flunked out of school early and saved myself a lot of boring homework.) But retaining that information and having it ready for a post like this is what’s so impressive. (Not to mention teaching me how to use the if-function in Excel . . .)

epm: That chronology is really rich with facts and the history of the game, both the dark side and the light side, but at the same time there is a liberal sprinkling of errors. I try to verify the facts when I can.
You wouldn’t some of things that happened in the early part of the 20th century.

O’Doul finished with 254 hits for the year. The next year Bill Terry tied that mark, still the NL record. Klein’s 43 as tops lasted less than a year, falling to Hack Wilson’s 56 in 1930, although it held onto second place (tied by Mize in 1940) until the Mize/Kiner 51s in 1947.

Hartvig

I was surprised that Trammell & Whitaker didn’t make the list more than once even though they played positions that were primarily defensive. They were within 10% of making the list in a few more categories.