RBI Magazine brings us Ten Things About Jamie Moyer’s 505 Home Runs…

…and one more reason to not like George W. Bush:

221
For his career, Jamie Moyer has given up a home run during five different presidential administrations…the most being 221 during the 2001-2008 run of George W. Bush. The other presidents that occupied the White House while Moyer toed the rubber…Ronald Reagan (58 home runs), George Bush (21), Bill Clinton (164) and, of course, Barack Obama (41 and counting).

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Lee Panas of Tiger Tales makes a good case for better use of MLB’s premier relievers.  He uses his Tigers’ Jose Valverde as a case study but it goes for all closers of high talent. 

This is the basic crux of his argument:

Instead of having Valverde enter a dozen or more games in very low impact situation just to get work, wouldn’t it be better if Leyland picked his spots using him only when the game was on the line?  I’d rather see him enter a tie game in the eighth inning or with the bases loaded in the seventh than see him get a three out save with nobody on base and three run lead.

I’ve pleaded similar arguments to my baseball friends to no avail.  There’s something simple about the “save” rule and there’s no getting around managers desire to saving their best guy for the ninth inning regardless of the actual impact the closer will have. 

I know Lee isn’t the only one exploring this issue.  Is the Save a dying stat?  Perhaps not.  But once we stop relying on it as the sole value of a closer, maybe they will be used in a more effective manner.

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It’s nothing new even to the casual fan that complete games have taken a drastic dip in the last 15-20 years.  But it just occurred to me that statistically, 2009 was a landmark year.  With the retirement of Randy Johnson at the end of the year, we no longer will have an active pitcher who has at least 100 career complete games. 

Johnson retired at the end of 2009 with 100 complete games on the nose.  With his departure, Roy Halladay became the heir of the CG active leader throne.  Even at that, Halladay has a ways to go.  At this point in the season, Roy has 54 complete games in 13 seasons.  If you look to the second man on that list, it’s Livan Hernandez with 48. 

Certainly, by the end of 2010, we will end up with a active career leader in complete games under 100 games for the first time in major league history. 

If you want a good visual on the decline of complete games through baseball history, Baseball Reference’s Progressive Leaders page might be of help. 

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Maybe this is common knowledge but I just came across another useful tool at BaseballReference.com.  It now allows you to total up range of years’ stats of any particular player on fly.  Very handy!

It’s done just by clicking on the first year in the range then the last year in the range.  By doing that, a stat window pops of with the range totals you wanted. 

Here’s an example using Hank Aaron.

You do need to enable this feature and it’s done at this page.

Another reason why Baseball Reference is as good as it is.  Sean and team there continue to make it better.  And another reason I don’t hesitate to throw a couple bucks their way every year.  As much as I use it, it’s worth it.

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The invaluable stat resource Baseball-Reference.com is conducting a survey now on how they can improve their site.  If you use B-R, I encourage you to hop on over there and fill out their survey form. 

I just took it myself.  It took me just 5 minutes to fill out but it does ask some great questions especially in terms of what areas you would like for them to focus their energies on in the future. 

So, if you can spare five minutes of your busy day, take Baseball Reference’s Survey.

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Kudos to Baseball Reference again, this time for their “Share” feature that they just implemented in their stat pages. 

The Share feature does what it implies… it allows people to share any stats on almost any Baseball Reference stat page in a variety of formats. 

The formats available are html table, bbcode, a javascript widget, an html iframe, pre-formatted text, comma delimited file or just simply a hyperlink.  Those baseball bloggers, forum posters and stat hounds who frequently cite baseball statistics will find this very useful. 

Just browse to the stat page you want to quote and click the “Share” link. Since Clyde Vollmer was born today, I’ll use his batting stats as an example.  The “Sharing Toolbox” will then come up. 

This is where the best feature comes up.  Don’t want to display the CS stats?  Not interested in the age of the player?  Not to worry, BR has allowed for us to customize the display of the table by deleting columns or rows that you want.

Just click on the red X of any unwanted column or row and it won’t appear in the final result.  There’s also a red X within an arrow on each row and column that will delete trailing ones. 

In Vollmer’s case, I’m going to make his table a simple one with just homeruns and rbis.  I’ll click on the red arrow on the rbi column deleting everything to the right of it.  I then deleted every other column except Tm, Lg, HR, and RBI.  Not being interested in per team stats I deleted every row below his career stats, too.

Don’t forget, stat tables in Baseball Reference allow you to click on stat column headers to sort by stat categories.  In my example with Vollmer though, I’ll keep it in chronological order.

Once you get the stat table the way you want it, click on the format type you want.  A window will then pop up giving you the code or link you need. 

In the Vollmer case, I clicked html table and was given html code for a table. 

Here is the result for Clyde Vollmer’s homerun and rbi totals for his career:

There you go.  A reasonably good looking table that was easy to generate (probably easier than I made it sound).  It’s easy enough to go into the code and remove the link to B-R but why be a tool?  It’s the least I could do.

It should be emphasized that this feature works from almost any stat page in Baseball Reference.  Splits, Game logs, team stats, you name it. 

Oh managers pages too.  I just used it in a recent post about Bobby Cox.

In this day and age when MLB is trying their best to lay claim to baseball statistics as a commodity, it nice to see Baseball Reference making it easy to share them.  Keep up the good work, B-R!

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When comparing baseball stats between seasons, I sometimes catch myself when I come across a stat from maybe 1994 or perhaps 1981.  Then one second before I realize “Oh yeah, the strike-shortened year” or whatever. 

So for my own edification then anything, here are the list of baseball seasons that were shortened by labor strikes, lockouts, or whatever reason and the number of actual games played that season.

Disclaimer:  The amount of games played indicated are approximate figures.  Obviously in the cases of mid-season interruptions, some teams played more, some less.

The season was shortened due to World War I.

Team owners decided to shorten the season to 140 games in 1919 in anticipation of low attendance (because of WWI in the previous years).  Attendance actually surprised them and was high and they turned a profit.

Due to the 1972 Major League Baseball Strike.

Due to the 1981 Major League Baseball Strike.

Due to the 1994 Major League Baseball Strike.

The 1995 season was abbreviated to 144 games because of the strike the previous year.

Also note that in the years 1901-1903 in both leagues, the seasons only consisted of 140 games. 

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Interesting piece on ESPN Chicago about Cubs OF Sam Fuld.  Not only is he a decent outfielder but he is a stathead too. 

"He was only 5 or 6 and he was already computing batting averages and ERAs," (father) Ken said. "He’d sit in the bathtub, and I’d say ‘If a guy goes 17-for-37, what’s his batting average?’ What struck me is that he’d perform these operations in very creative ways — not just that he got the right answer, but his methodology, adding in a factor and then dividing by 10, etc. I’d watch him and say ‘wow,’ just like I said ‘wow’ when he used to hit."

The love for stats apparently continued as he grew up.  Fuld, an economics major at Stanford, even interned at Stats Inc. 

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Playing around with Baseball Reference’s Play Index today, I decided to see which hitters were hitting the long ball but not driving in so many runs.  Here are the five batters from the first half of 2009 with the lowest rbis totals with at least 15 homeruns.

     Batter            RBI HR               
    1 Chris Davis        33 15
    2 Troy Tulowitzki    37 16
    3 Jay Bruce          41 18
    4 Hank Blalock       42 19
    5 Curtis Granderson  43 18

Here is the full list with all stats.

Granderson gets a bye here since he primarily leads off but the others need a better excuse. 

No surprise here.  We find batters with low batting averages (Bruce-.207) or worse a low  batting average AND a high strikeout rate (Davis- 114 Ks and a .202 BA). 

As for Tulowitzki, his .164 average probably accounts for his low rbi total.

Just for kicks, if I dial the homerun requirement down to 10, here are the results:

    Batter             RBI HR
    1 Josh Willingham    26 12
    2 Ken Griffey        26 10
    3 A.J. Pierzynski    27 10
    4 Mike Jacobs        30 12
    5 Scott Hairston     31 11

Again, the full list is here.

Some surprises here.  I wouldn’t have expected to see Josh Williamham (.304) on this list though playing for the Nats could account for this.    Griffey and Jacobs both are having sub-par years in their other stat categories (ok, maybe sub-par is the wrong term to use… Jacobs is having about the year we would expect). 

AJ is hitting .299 playing for relatively offensively-minded team.  He is hitting .226 with RISP.  Not good but at the same time but four of his 10 homers have come in this situation.  Strange.

If you’re wondering, Alfonso Soriano comes up #8 on this list with 33 rbis on 14 homers.

And to add some historical perspective, I cranked up some all time Wasted Power numbers.  This time I took the homerun requirement up to 30.  So here is the top ten list of the lowest amount of rbis for any batter who hit 30 or more homeruns:

    Batter              RBI HR 
    1 Rob Deer           64 32 1992
    2 Felix Mantilla     64 30 1964
    3 Hanley Ramirez     67 33 2008
    4 Brad Wilkerson     67 32 2004
    5 Chris Young        68 32 2007
    6 Brook Jacoby       69 32 1987
    7 Alfonso Soriano    70 33 2007
    8 Jose Valentin      70 30 2004
    9 Rocky Colavito     72 30 1966
   10 Mark McGwire       73 32 2000

Full list here

Like Granderson, last year’s Hanley Ramirez and 2007’s Alfonso Soriano can be excused because their managers deemed them fit to lead off instead of using their power in a more useful spot. 

Otherwise, you find hitters I would expect.  Rob Deer.  Mark McGwire in his waning days.  Jose Valentin who loved to swing.  Bad Brad Wilkerson who struck out 152 times in 2004.  Oh yeah, there’s Chris Young again. 

I’ll probably revisit this topic at the end of season and see how the numbers how they’ve changed.  By the way, if you haven’t tried out Baseball Reference’s Play Index and you like goofing around with baseball stats, give it a try. It does cost a little but it’s worth a bit in my mind.

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Sean Forman has implemented a new search modification to his Baseball Reference database. 

For those searching on a common player name (or part thereof), you can put the word “the” in front of the search term and the database will bring up the most popular searched player.

From B-R’s blog:

I just added a mod to the search box on the site. With the addition of all of the minor league pages, getting to someone like Alex Rodriguez’s page via a search “A Rod” returns like 50 people. Now, if you type in “the A Rod” it looks through our db and returns the most popular major league player who matches the search “A Rod”. Adding “the ” to the front of any player search will send you to the most popular player matching that search.

I did my own test.  I searched for “ramon martinez” and got back three results including two minor leaguers.  When I searched for “the ramon martinez”, it took me directly to the page of Ramon Martinez who pitched for the LA Dodgers.

This trick works with initials too though your mileage may vary.  “the jason v” did return Jason Varitek as I intended it too.  For that matter, so did “the j v”.

Anyway, this mod might save a few mouse clicks for those of us who search Baseball Reference’s database on a frequent basis. 

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