not-at-all-trivial trivia 2013

Guest:
I wonder what the most career hits is for a player to have > 50% XBHs? Right now, Stanton has 955 career hits, 477 singles, 478 XBH, which seems insane to me. Instagraph?

Jeff Sullivan:
Stanton is in second place all-time! From 2 through 5, it goes Giancarlo Stanton, Russell Branyan, Chris Carter, and Khris Davis

But while Stanton is second at 955, Mark McGwire is first, all the way up at 1,626

McGwire finished with 52% extra-base hits, mostly because, by the end, he could hardly leg out a single

For the first time ever, the four most-populated U.S. cities — New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston — are represented in the American League and National League Championship Series.

Unprompted, non-topical fun fact: Yankees center fielders have averaged 5.2 fWAR per season since 1925. That's a baseline of Carlos Correa's 2017 WAR, over a span of 93 seasons.

— Ben Lindbergh (@BenLindbergh) December 4, 2017

insane

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/allow-me-to-present-an-incredible-baseball-coincidence

for some reason earlier today i was wondering about how often the ball is hit to each position over the course of a season. i figured the stat would be pretty easy to find, but my googling failed. so i tried to do it myself using fangraphs defensive data, specifically their "BIZ" stat (Ballz in Zone, which is supposed to measure how often a ball is hit into the "zone" that a player fields, which is different from the number of plays actually made.)

Position	BIZ		%
1B		6239		10.1%
2B		10662		17.3%
3B		10021		16.3%
SS		11293		18.4%
LF		6742		11.0%
CF		9367		15.2%
RF		7157		11.6%
TOTAL	61481		100.0%

big caveat: BIZ doesn't seem to include the zone of the pitcher or catcher ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(^that's for 2017)

Please direct all Zone-related questions to these three guys.

http://www.shorescripts.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/stalker-7.jpg

(Sorry--that word has been permanently hijacked for me.)

clemenza for some reason i think you'll be especially excited about this:

earlier today alfred posted a link to oyez.org, which is a database of all sorts of useful supreme court information written concisely and using plain-language. there are biographies of each SC Justice (https://www.oyez.org/justices). bizarrely, each one includes a baseball quiz(?????) at the end, in this style:

https://i.imgur.com/4aJatTn.png
https://i.imgur.com/eqnbsOw.png

the baseball quiz is included for EVERY SINGLE JUSTICE.
https://i.imgur.com/P0gF4uy.png

i can't imagine the amount of work that went into comparing every single SC Justice to a baseball figure, but it might be appreciated here at least.

That's hilarious, thanks. Just got Clarence Thomas wrong. Correct answer: Lou Pinella, because they both "provided some punch to their respective franchises" (uh, okay), and because controversy has followed them. I intuitively guessed Joe Pepitone, because in Ball Four he put a piece of popcorn under his foreskin.

My own question: the two HOF pitchers who each won a Cy Young but never got a single Cy Young vote in any other season.

Eckersley and Drysdale?

Drysdale's one of them (half of his prime coinciding with a teammate's...). With the other guy, it's not really a meaningful measure--a lot of his career is pre-CYA.

Think I found it - Dean Chance

Chance is one of a number of pitchers who won a Cy but never got Cy votes in any other season--think I spotted at least 10. I was looking for the two HOF'ers, though.

Early Wynn

Speaking of whom, some awesome home movie footage of him warming up in his last year (starts at 1:17):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FHafsz-p-k

Yes--Early, part of the original Jays' broadcast crew. (He probably would have received Cy Young votes in '52 and '54 if the award had been around...Hard to say; there was only one award for both leagues, and he didn't receive any votes in '56 for a season that was better than either of those.)

i have a bit of baseball trivia in my own neighborhood, maybe mentioned here before: the owner of a pizza joint we sometimes grabs a couple pies from (and who's usually still behind the counter most nights) is one of a dozen or so people in MLB history whose sole career hit was a home run. I believe he went 1-4 total across a few games during his cup of coffee.

https://www.foxsports.com/mlb/story/st-louis-cardinals-san-francisco-giants-doug-clarey-one-done-092215

Keith McDonald had 3 hits, all homers, in his 8 game career: http://www.baseballroundtable.com/keith-mcdonald-2018-paciorek-award-winner-made-a-career-out-of-going-yard/

yeah but how is his pizza

six players in (known) history have played with more than 700 different teammates. edwin jackson is now second, with 763. name any of the other five and guess the leader:

A few guesses: Bartolo, Julio Franco, Ted Lyons, Phil Neikro.

for longevity and multiple teams, Rickey Henderson comes to mind

rickey is indeed one of them. (and also one of edwin jackson's teammates). none of clemenza's are.

i would never have gotten the number one guy, but the others are known guys who played fairly recently. one of them is canadian

is octavio dotel one of them?

Orosco?

steve pearce maybe as of today?

i rmeember thinking "i hope pearce plays for the red sox one day so he can be a trivia question about players who have played for the entire AL east" and sure enough! dunno how to look it up but i wonder if any other players have played for every team in a division...

steve pearce *is* about to complete his AL East collection in just six years, which is sort of impressive

eric hinske was close, but never got to baltimore

not orosco either, although two of them (besides rickey) did play for the mets

was dotel one of them tho? i feel REAL good abt that one

(also i have no other guesses if colon isn't in there)

dotel is a good try; he's in the high 600s

As far as I can tell, new Boston 1B/OF Steve Pearce will be just the 5th player to play for every team in a division, with Kelly Johnson (AL East), C. Izturis (NL Central), Mark McLemore (AL West), Steve Finley (NL West).

— Tyler Kepner (@TylerKepner) June 29, 2018

Also Matt Herges in the NL West. (Thanks to Rob Morse of the Yankees' PR dept. for the correction.) https://t.co/KYOKvl5qnm

— Tyler Kepner (@TylerKepner) June 29, 2018

1. Terry Mulholland 791 (11 teams)
2. Edwin Jackson 763 (13 teams)
3. Matt Stairs 725 (12 teams)
4. Rickey Henderson 725 (9 teams, not counting the A’s four times)
5. Carlos Beltrán 719 (7 teams)
6. LaTroy Hawkins 703 (11 teams)

(Octavio Dotel 654 (13 teams))

whoa, weird to see Beltran in there

My guesses weren't very good--all I thought about was longevity, overlooked the multiple-teams factor. Ted Lyons spend hit entire career (21 seasons) with the White Sox. I think I may have actually been thinking of multiple-teams with him but got him confused with Bobo Newsom.

spend hit = spent his...

Weird question, in that technically there's not a correct answer. But there's a link on Baseball Reference for "Historical Deadline Deals" where you can look at all the transactions on July 31 year-by-year. There's one year where I think there's an unmistakable spike in the number of transactions, and from that point forward it's never not an exceptionally busy day again.

What year? (Recent enough that you might have been aware of the spike at the time.)

I remember Randy Johnson getting traded literally minutes before the deadline in 1998, for whatever reason that year really stands out for me.

It was '95. Till '86, there are annually one or two transactions on July 31. There are four in '87, and it stays in that range for the next few years. In '95, there are suddenly 10 deadline transactions, and it's stayed that way ever since (with a high of 20 in 2015).

http://www.baseball-reference.com/friv/transactions.cgi?month=7&day=31

I don't know what brought on the change. You had a couple of expansion teams added in 1993--that was probably a factor. (I'd discount 1994 because of the impending mid-August strike.) Past that, I don't know, but something changed.

It must have been the wild card -- more playoff spots, more teams looking for help at the deadline, more deals.

more delusions, more trades

Wild card, of course. Duh...(Assume the spike would have happened a year earlier if the strike hadn't been looming.)

juan soto can become the fourth *national league* rookie to hit .300/.400/.500 (minimum 250 PA) since 1945

name the other three

First two guesses: Pujols and F. Robinson.

pujols is correct!

the other two are harder -- one was in the 70s, one was earlier this century

Yeah, just looked up Robinson--monster year, but short on the slash stats.

.290/.379/.558, 38 HR, 143 OPS+ (lower than Soto right now...).