This one gets trotted out every year, so why not now? On September 27, 1963, the Houston Colt .45’s started an all-rookie lineup, all age 21 or under. Here’s their box score, with age (years.days), year in MLB, career game number, and a few notes: Continue reading
If asked to name a team with a young starting lineup, you might think of last year’s Royals (with 2 first-year players, and no regulars over age 27); or one of the famous “fire-sale” remnants like the 1999 Marlins or 1917 Athletics (neither had a single PA by a nonpitcher who had seen his 30th birthday); or the 1950 Phillies‘ “Whiz Kids”; or maybe the ’78 Tigers, breaking in Alan Trammell (20), Lou Whitaker (21) and Lance Parrish (22) alongside veterans Jason Thompson and Steve Kemp (both 23).
You probably know that if you type a search term into Google, it will give you a few autocomplete suggestions for that search, giving you an indication of the most popular searches done by the public.
Here’s an example: Continue reading
It’s hard to believe that Jorge Posada and Jason were once considered to be in a similar class. But through most of the early-to-mid 2000s, the two players were often lumped together as star catchers for teams that were in contention every year.
However, looking at each guy’s final line, they ended up worlds apart. Continue reading
If a pitcher never gets more than 17 wins in a season and retires at age 34, what are his chances of winning 200?
Since 1945, eleven pitchers have reached 200 wins by their age-33 season. Ten of them had a 20-win season by the time they won #200, and nine did it more than once, totaling forty-four 20-win seasons. The 11th guy just plugged away: Continue reading
When Tim Wakefield decided to call it a career, he retired as 1 of only 8 pitchers to win at least 200 games in the majors without racking up a 20 win season. In fact Wakefield won his 200 games without ever winning more than 17 games in a season. The other pitchers in this small club are:
In honor of this stat, I thought it might be interesting to examine the career records for all pitchers at each career high win number. Who had the most wins winning only 1 game a season? Which 20 game winner had the fewest career wins (a question that came from Tmckelv on another thread) How many pitchers have won 19 games in a season, but not 20? If a pitcher wins 15 games in a season, how many career wins can we expect him to have? etc. Continue reading
It’s been years since people learned to look at OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage) to judge a player’s season. Let’s say a player qualified for the batting title with a .750 OPS. Was that a good season? Continue reading
Graham, our friend over at Baseball Past and Present, has embarked on a cool project to find the 9 best players in history (by position, obviously.) He’s narrowed down the choices on a ballot to make it easy, such as picking the best center fielder among Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, and Ken Griffey. Easy, right?
He’s also commissioned an artist to make a set of team cards for the winning players. Neat stuff–go over and fill out your ballot today!
Note: I’ve added a 4th graph at the end of the post, covering only the years 1982-2011.
A couple of graphs relating bWAR/age, and OPS+/age. I’ll leave the observations to you folks.
(1) As a general followup to the graphs in my Ryan Zimmerman post, here’s a graph showing the number of seasons of four different WAR levels, for all position players, for the years 1901-2011:
Brett Myers / Icon SMI
The Astros have announced that Brett Myers is going to be their closer in 2012. Is it a good idea? Continue reading