The @baseball_ref Play Index challenge – click for rules and prize info!

For those of you who have been following High Heat Stats on Twitter, you’ll already get how this game works. For those who haven’t, here’s the deal.

I am challenging our Twitter followers to come up with a player who I cannot get to appear at the top of a Play Index search. The first person who can come up with such a player wins a 1-year subscription (or subscription extension) to Baseball-Reference.com’s Play Index.

If you’re not familiar with the Play Index, you should definitely follow @HighHeatStats, as I’ll answer every challenge with a link to a search result so you can see how we find lots of different things.

Here are the rules:

1) Submitted players must have appeared in MLB in at least 3 different seasons OR 250 total plate appearances(over 1 or more seasons) OR 100 innings pitched (over 1 or more seasons).

2) The challenge will be the first eligible player name tweeted @HighHeatStats after this post, or after I successfully respond to the previous challenge. Your tweet should also include the word “challenge”, or “PI”, or something so I know you are participating.

3) To win, you must be a follower of @HighHeatStats

4) I will limit my challenge responses to players who had the most or the fewest of something (or was the most recent or distant in a certain timeframe) out of a group of at least 10 players. I will not resort to stuff like “so-and-so was the only player with 26 doubles, 3 triples, 72 walks, and 86 strikeouts in the 1986 season”, which is really lame.

5) I will acknowledge the current challenge. Any other player names submitted after that will be ignored until I solve the current challenge. I make no promises about how much time I’ll take to respond, but if I can’t get an answer within 30 minutes of actual working time, I’ll declare a winner.

For readers of this blog, you need to be on Twitter to participate. Comments on this post will be ignored, with respect to the actual contest itself.

Let’s go…first person to tweet a name is our first contestant! Let’s give away this prize.

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Voomo Zanzibar
Voomo Zanzibar
12 years ago

And those of us who do not use twitter should just bang two rocks together and pray for rain.

bstar
12 years ago
Reply to  Voomo Zanzibar

I just tried that and uttered my guess, “Biff Pocoraba”, skyward. As of yet, no luck.

Doug
Editor
12 years ago
Reply to  bstar

I’ll play the quiz with us non-Twitter folks.

Here’s the P-I query that put Biff at the top of the list:

For single seasons, From 1901 to 2011, Played 5 games at C, (requiring G>=54, G<=57 and At least 130 plate appearances), sorted by greatest Seasons matching criteria

bstar
12 years ago
Reply to  Andy

It’s kind of hard to get Biff’s name out of your mind once it enters. The Pocoraba adds a Ricardo Montablan-sort of elegance to it.

bstar
12 years ago
Reply to  Andy

Wow, Biff Pocoroba(I managed to misspell his name twice) actually made the NL All-Star team in 1978. Must have been a tough year for catchers: I don’t know what prompted Tommy Lasorda to pick him as a reserve(maybe no other Brave made the squad) but his 4 HR, 24 RBI, and .262 avg at the break certainly wasn’t it. He must have been an injury replacement for Johnny Bench, who didn’t appear in the game. Biff did make it into the game as a defensive replacement but got no at-bats. I can’t tell from the box score but it looks… Read more »

Ed
Ed
12 years ago
Reply to  Andy

Yep Bench was elected to start but didn’t play as a result of injury. Garvey was the MVP, though Carew’s 2 triples was more impressive:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_Major_League_Baseball_All-Star_Game

TheGoof
TheGoof
12 years ago
Reply to  Andy

My brother and I used to pretend to hit each other and make the sounds from the Batman TV show. But after a while, all that survived was “Biff” followed by “Pocoraba!”

AlbaNate
AlbaNate
12 years ago

It’s hard for me to imagine that there are any players who one can’t come up with a convoluted enough collection of metrics to place him #1 on a search.

Jeff Allen
Jeff Allen
12 years ago

My guess for this type of thing is always Carlos Baerga. I know he has no black ink other than fielding, which is not in the P-I. Not on Twitter, so I’m just banging rocks together.