Many of us have probably been to our 20 year (or more) high school reunion. There are some people you may have stayed in touch with all those years, others may have crossed your path just a few times, but for many of your classmates it could be the first time you’ve met since high school.

It can be like that in baseball too. Except, there aren’t nearly as many on-field reunions because most players don’t stay in the game for 20 years. Even when they do, their playing time at either or both ends of their careers can make reunions with other specific players pretty unlikely. And, of course, there’s always the difficulty of being in different leagues. But, it does happen sometimes. After the break, you can take a look at pairs of players who have appeared together in games separated by 20 or more seasons. Which players do you think have had the most “reunions”?

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Giants 5, Pirates 0: Now, that’s more like a $100-million man. Matt Cain retired the first 17 batters, gave up a clean single to opposing pitcher James McDonald (an .079 career hitter), then put away the last 10 Pirates, for his third career 1-hitter. He finished with 11 Ks, 1 off his career high, and a personal-best 96 Game Score. Pittsburgh, now hitting .178 with 7 walks, suffered their second shutout this year; they’ve scored 11 runs in 7 games.

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Couldn’t get around on the High Heat yesterday, so let’s play a little catch-up.

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We haven’t had a quiz in a while. So, let’s give this one a shot.

No HOFers here. A few all-stars, some jorneymen, and maybe one or two guys you don’t recognize at all.

Some are pitchers, but most aren’t. Several played for the Dodgers, and several had careers spent with LOTS of different teams.

But, since 1919, only these players have accomplished a certain feat. That feat involves two separate events that share a common characteristic.

The players are listed after the break. What is the common link connecting all of them?

The quiz has been solved. Congratulations to Atawerdi96! These are the only players to appear in both a regular season and post-season game on their birthday.

And congratulations also to John Nacca! He got the bonus answer identifying the bolded subset of players as those having both a regular season hit and a post-season hit on their birthday.

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The blog was down most of the day today thanks to a major outage at the ISP. Oops.

I have installed a new chat widget. It appears in the right sidebar on all pages. Please give it a try so I can see how well it works. I’m sure I’ll be updating options, etc., but I need to see it in action to improve it, so please do use it.

Blogger Paul E pointed out that Jimmy Rollins and Juan Pierre are leading the Phillies attack this year with identical batting averages, on-base percentages and slugging percentages. That unusual trifecta is, of course, usually only accomplished when a player has no walks and no extra-base hits.

After the jump, I’ll look a little more into this “phenomenon”.

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In 1996, Roger Clemens had an offseason by his standards, off enough that it may have been the spur to get him on steroids.  It certainly earned him a ticket out of Boston, off to a new team and a career rebirth in Toronto, and at the time, his departure might not have seemed unwarranted. By traditional metrics, 1996 was but a mediocre prelude for Clemens to winning back-to-back Cy Young awards and going 41-13 with a 2.33 ERA over 1997 and 1998. Clemens went 10-13 with a 3.63 ERA for the Red Sox in 1996, walking the most batters of his career with 106. Pushing 35, he looked to be on the decline, a shell of his once-dominant self.

Clemens did lead the American League in strikeouts in 1996 with 257. And in hindsight, we also know that he led the AL in strikeouts per nine innings with 9.5 and finished second in WAR with 7.7. In fact, it’s one of the best  losing seasons for a starting pitcher in baseball history.

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The folks at Fangraphs have developed, and are advocating the use of, stats that seem to me to represent a major improvement, in evaluation accuracy, over the “save” and the “blown save” as methods for ranking relief pitcher performance.   The Fangraphs concept of the “Shutdown”, as a replacement for the save, is very simple in concept if you  understand the idea of “Win Probability Added” (WPA), which itself has been much discussed over the years at the baseball-reference blog that spun off into High Heat Stats. Continue reading →

SABR Biography Project - http://sabr.org/bioproj/

In a follow-up to my inaugural piece in this vein, I’m looking at trades occurring this week (Apr 9 to 15) in baseball history.

Here’s a quick look at offensive numbers in 2012 vs 2012. Both are through the first 142 games of each season.

(First number is 2011, second number is 2012, all are on a per-game basis):

             2011  2012
Runs scored: 4.56  4.02
HR:          1.06  0.99
2B:          1.65  1.61
BB:          3.20  3.13
K:           7.01  7.42
BA:           .255  .235
SLG:          .406  .385

Ummm…wow. Offense is way down so far this year compared to the same timeframe last year, and last year’s offense continued the overall trend of decline.

If run scoring remains this low for the entire season, it will be the lowest since 1981 (strike-shortened) and 1976 (full-season).

Look  in particular at the strikeouts, which are ridiculously high, up nearly 6% from last year, and last year was a record year for strikeouts!!

UPDATE:

Here are numbers through the first 172 games of each season, 2011 and 2012. All numbers are per game.

      2011  2012   % change in 2012
R     4.55   4.06    -11%
HR    0.98   0.95    -3%
2B    1.75   1.64    -6%
K     6.94   7.51    +8%
BB    3.22   3.14    -2%
BA     .256   .237   -7%
SLG    .404   .383   -5%

These numbers are even more divergent than a couple of days ago!!

Here are some pitching numbers, beyond Ks and BBs as shown above:

            2011     2012      % change in 2012
ERA         4.13     3.66         -11%
IP/start    5.86     5.92         +1%
WHIP        1.334    1.237        -7%