2015 NL Cy Young Award winner Jake Arrieta is one of the twelve pitchers below to record a certain single game pitching accomplishment in the past twenty seasons (since 1996). What is this unusual feat?
- Jake Arrieta
- John Danks
- Brian Anderson
- Kris Benson
- Jamey Wright
- Brian Moehler
- Ross Detwiler
- Aaron Laffey
- Francisco Cordova
- Glendon Rusch
- Kevin Millwood
- Esteban Loaiza
Hint #1: Roger Clemens is the only other Cy Young Award winner to accomplish this feat.
Hint #2: Since 1914, no pitcher has accomplished this feat on his birthday.
Looks like this one was a stumper. The key to the solution was observing that these twelve pitchers were born on only 6 dates, two pitchers per date. In fact, only these pitchers have started a game since 1996 in which the the two starters shared a common birth date (i.e. born same day and year). More after the jump.
Here is the complete list of games since 1914 in which the two starters shared a common birth date, with the pitchers from the quiz highlighted.
| Birthday | Year | Starter | Starter | Games | |||
| 16-Jan | 1891 | Marv Goodwin | Ferdie Schupp | 1917-08-18(1) | |||
| 06-Mar | 1986 | Jake Arrieta | Ross Detwiler | 2012-06-24 | |||
| 15-Apr | 1985 | John Danks | Aaron Laffey | 2009-09-28 | |||
| 26-Apr | 1972 | Brian Anderson | Francisco Cordova | 1998-09-03 | 1999-09-14 | ||
| 31-Jul | 1892 | Art Nehf | Erv Kantlehner | 1915-09-24 | |||
| 04-Aug | 1962 | Roger Clemens | John Farrell | 1990-06-03 | 1990-06-08 | ||
| 11-Aug | 1907 | Bobo Newsom | Gordon Rhodes | 1934-05-18 | |||
| 01-Oct | 1894 | Ray Kolp | Duster Mails | 1922-05-07 | 1922-07-02 | ||
| 07-Oct | 1939 | John O’Donoghue | Phil Ortega | 1965-05-04 | |||
| 19-Oct | 1965 | Mike Gardiner | Dave Haas | 1992-09-21 | |||
| 07-Nov | 1974 | Kris Benson | Glendon Rusch | 2002-06-08 | 2003-07-09 | 2004-09-24 | |
| 17-Nov | 1933 | Orlando Pena | Dan Osinski | 1963-05-26 | 1963-06-10 | ||
| 24-Nov | 1967 | Cal Eldred | Ben McDonald | 1992-09-13 | 1993-09-17 | 1994-06-22 | 1995-05-03 |
| 24-Dec | 1974 | Jamey Wright | Kevin Millwood | 2000-05-23 | 2005-06-16 | ||
| 31-Dec | 1971 | Brian Moehler | Esteban Loaiza | 1999-08-30 | 2000-05-30 | 2005-09-28 |
Thanks to Richard Chester for the idea for this quiz. Richard had read on another blog the assertion that one of these games had not occurred since 1992. That, of course, is not the case as, with more teams and games, this quirky event has become more commonplace in recent years.
When will the next of these games occur? Watch for Henderson Alvarez and Anthony DeSclafani to meet up sometime next season.
Complete game shutout and perfect day at the plate.
Can’t be a CG or Shutout, since Laffey doesn’t have any of those. Laffey and Detwiler are probably the two to look at, since they have the shortest careers.
And wow, Aaron Laffey is still in the majors? I remember being excited about him as an Indians prospect, but he flamed out just like every other soft-tossing lefty that’s come through our system in the past 16 years or so.
And it says it is a pitching accomplishment.
Hint #2 is an interesting one. Maybe it’s something weird like comparing strikeouts to birthdays.
Maybe it has to with some stat higher than 31.
Birthdays are definitely something too look at.
I was considering something with Age and Game Score, but I can’t find anything that would be nearly this exclusive. Age = GS gets you hundreds of games.
Same story for Age = BF.
Nothing to do with Game Score or Batters Faced.
Is related to Age, in the way that birthdays are related to age.
Detweiler’s birthday is March 6, which is in Spring Training. His half birthday would therefore be September 6. He débuted on September 7th, and has made only one appearance on September 6th; he pitched the 7th that year, retiring the side on 15 pitches.
Danks has his birthday in April (as well as his MLB début) and has not pitched deep enough into October to reach his half birthday.
Much simpler than that.
Wow. I usually don’t attempt the quizzes because I don’t know enough and I’m not a B-R subscriber, but because Aaron Laffey had so few games to review, I devoted time to this one. It seems to me you’d almost have to guess the answer in order to track down the first clue, although since the list is pretty limited, perhaps good familiarity with the players would have called up a picture of some facing one another.
I’m not sure why this is so rare. It seems to me the odds are that this would happen about once every 500 games (25% chance both pitchers have baseball season birthdays, and about a 1/125 chance their birthdays would match when they do), maybe four times per year – but my last math class was 50 years ago (and I also recall baseball birthdays are not evenly distributed).
The notion of baseball birthdays not being evenly distributed is certainly consistent with the pattern here, with 11 of the 15 birthdays in the last 5 months (plus one day) of the year.
The rarity is also to do with the fact that we’re not looking for any two players born the same date, but two pitchers who are starters. Then, have to factor in how often their teams meet in a season, and then have to have the starting rotations synchronized just right. In other words, the stars really have to be aligned!
Well, the odds that the visiting team’s starter’s birthday will not match the home team’s starter’s is 364.25/365.25 – almost a certain non-match. But if we roll those dice 253 times, the odds are just about 50-50 that one of those rolls will be a match: [1-((364.25/365.25)^253)=0.5002]. (My calculations about the two starters needing to have summer birthdays was actually irrelevant – that would only apply if the match-up had to occur on their birthdays, and then the odds would be truly astronomical.)
There are about 2430 regular season games a year, so the odds as I calculate them (probably wrongly) are that it’s just under 99.9% likely that you’ll get a match in the course of one year: [1-((364.25/365.25)^2430)=0.9987]. (I think that the clustering of birthdays would actually increase the odds.)
Which apparently is wrong.
. . . I had really great high school math teachers, and the only reason I know they won’t be disappointed in me is because they don’t read HHS, having gone to their rewards many years ago.
I think the flaw in your calculations is that those 2430 games are started by a much smaller number of pitchers. For example, 124 pitchers started 20 or more games in 2015, totaling 3492 starts, more than 70% of the season total of 4860. So those 4860 game starts are not uniformly distributed among a large population with a representative distribution of birthdates. Rather, they’re heavily weighted to a small number of pitchers with specific birthdates.
Going back to those 124 pitchers in 2015, assuming half for each league and assuming most will have a birth year within a ten-year period, then you’re really looking at the chance that you’ll get a birth date match among two of 70 or so pitchers with a possible 3650 or so birthdates, and further that those two will actually meet at some point, not in the 2430 game season, but only in a specific subset of 6 to 18 of those games. Seems likely pretty long odds to me.
It’s actually simpler, Doug. I simply hadn’t registered that you were talking about birthdates rather than birthdays. It’s not my math teachers who’d be disappointed, it’s my neurologist.
The blog that I originally read was on the baseballgauge web-site. It mentioned that the Eldred-McDonald game listed above was the last such game. I did a little research and found the Gardiner-Haas game, also listed above. Doug has found the 6 others since then. I suspect he deliberately went back to only 1996 for the quiz because otherwise I might have come up with answer if the 4 names I mentioned in this blog appeared on the list. But then again I might not have.
I went back to 1996 just to limit the number of players in the quiz. Also, so that I had a topical connection to the current CYA winner as a lead-in.
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