Carl Crawford / Presswire

Following on Graham’s original post (which itself expands on an idea tweeted by Buster Olney), I’ve decided to go through baseball’s 30 teams and talk about who might be on each team’s Mount Rushmore.

Much like the real Mount Rushmore, the criteria used for selecting the 4 honorees isn’t totally straightforward. Just like with presidents, it’s tough to rate who was “best” in any measurable way, and similarly tough to figure who was most well-liked, most important, or most influential.

I’m also going to run down these teams in reverse order of length of franchise existence, so the first few are going to be toughest. You’ll see what I mean right away when we look at the Tampa Bay Rays.

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Relief pitching as a specialization has become increasingly refined in the past 50 years. Today we have closers, setup men, long relievers, middle relievers, loogies and possibly other sub-specialties.

However, in the live ball era since 1920, these are the only relief pitchers to accomplish two related feats.

What are those two related feats that no other relievers have accomplished since 1920?

Congratulations to John Autin and Brandon who jointly identified the feats that only these eight pitchers have accomplished since 1920. These are the only pitchers with seasons of 30 or more relief appearances and no starts that include one of more seasons averaging less than one inning per appearance and also one or more seasons averaging two or more innings per appearance.

Nationals 2, @Reds 1: Jordan Zimmermann (HQS with 9 SO, 1 BB) trimmed his ERA to 2.14 in 7 starts and even got his 2nd win in the bargain. He has 33 starts since 2011, a season’s worth. Here are his numbers and where they rank out of 101 pitchers with 30+ starts in that span: 2.95 ERA (13th-tie), 130 ERA+ (13th-tie), 1.11 WHIP (14th), 1.7 BB/9 (8th) and 4.0 SO/9 (9th-tie).

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A few day-game notes and assorted leftovers, but first:

Happy 87th Birthday, Yogi! Number 8 usually enjoyed his day during his career, hitting .316 with .658 SLG and 3 HRs in 9 games. He struck out just once in 39 PAs — in his final birthday AB, against Frank “Yankee Killer” Lary. (By the way, Lary really deserved that nickname, going 28-13 against them from 1955-63. Against all other teams, Lary was under .500, at 100-103. In 1958, he beat the champs-to-be 7 times in 8 starts; no other pitcher beat them more than 3 times that year.)

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@Rangers 10, Angels 3: No foolin’ — at the exact moment that I flipped over from Mets postgame to the MLB Network, that man was up to bat. Five seconds and one pitch later, he had another HR — his 2nd of the game, 8th in 18 times up over 5 games, and 17th of the year. This is the Rangers’ 33rd game, Hamilton’s 30th.

• The Angels have 18 more games with Texas, and they may need to win ’em all to get back in the race. More likely, the ref stops this fight on cuts.
• Hamilton tied the mark for most HRs in the team’s first 33 games, set by Cy Williams in 1923 and by Frank Howard in 1968. Hondo had a similar barrage, homering in 6 straight games from #28-33 for a total of 10 HRs.
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The title says it all…here are the guys since 1918 to have such a game:

This post was suggested by reader Paul E who remarked on the defensive accomplishments of Brett Lawrie of the Blue Jays. Toronto acquired Lawrie from the Brewers after the 2010 season, and brought him up to the big team in mid-summer last year. Other than a week missed to injury at the end of last season, he’s been the Jays’ regular third baseman since.

As of this writing, Lawrie has a career of slightly less than half of a 162 game season. Yet, he is in a tie for 13th place since 1901 among all non-pitchers in WAR fielding runs accumulated in the first two seasons of a career.

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[No, not this guy.]

In Baltimore Thursday, the Orioles hit 5 HRs in the first game of a doubleheader, accounting for all their runs in a 6-5 win over . All the runs and HRs came in 7 innings’ work by Colby Lewis, who allowed no other hits. Afterwards, Lewis said, “It seemed like one of those days where you have really good stuff and then you miss your spot or something and it’s just not a hit, it’s a homer. You can’t really look at it any other way. It was just kind of a weird game.”

I’ll say. This was one of the oddest pitching performances you’ll ever see.

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Recently, John Autin coined the term “disaster start” to denote starts where a pitcher allows more runs than innings pitched. So far this year, there have been 119 such starts, or about 3 a day. In 2011, there were 54 games where both starters were a disaster.

After the break, I’ll take a closer look at disaster starts and the pitchers most prone to them.

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From the beginning of the 2008 season through last night’s ninth-inning win, the Tampa Bay Rays have a .571 winning percentage in regular season games (388 wins, 291 losses). That’s the third best record in the majors over that period, behind the Yankees (.590) and the Phillies (.585).

To maintain at least a .571 record for the period 2008 through the full 2012 season, the Rays would have to finish with at least 95 wins this season, which is tough but possible.  They did won 97 games in ’08 and 96 games in 2010, and they are already at 20 wins in 31 games for the 2012 season, the second-best record in the majors at the moment.  As discussed after the jump, that .571 level over five seasons of play is an unusual level of sustained success for a franchise created after 1960. Continue reading →