Reader request
Posted: May 7th, 2009 | Filed under: Baseball | 25 Comments »
Brilliant Reader Nate points out that Albert Pujols has reached base in the first 27 games this season, and he wonders who has the record for reaching base the most consecutive games to start the season.
Well, I don’t know the all-time record but thanks to the brilliance of Baseball Reference, we can go back to 1954. Derek Jeter reached base each of the first 53 games in the 1999 season. Frank Thomas reached the first 52 games in 1996.
The Top 10:
Derek Jeter, 1999, 53
Frank Thomas, 1996, 52
Mark McGwire, 1996, 48
Alvin Davis, 1984, 47
Albert Pujols, 2008, 42
Tim Raines, 1982, 42
Toby Harrah, 1985, 41
Eric Karros, 1995, 39
Jim Thome, 1999, 37
Alvin Davis, 1990, 37
Eddie Mathews, 1961, 37
How about Alvin Davis appearing on that list twice?
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Kinda weird that 10 of the 11 are after 1980 and 7 of the 11 after 1990. Doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that would have a historic bias, unless I’m missing something obvious.
Agreed. I was going to say “How about Alvin Davis?”
Since Jeter is first, this accomplishment’s perceived value is going to skyrocket.
Some of the names on this list are surprising to me…Karros, Harrah, McGuire, Thome & Mathews. I guess walks played a great role in this. So, can the Baseball Reference people break this down into percentages? Walks/AB vs. hits/ab…??? It won’t prove a damn thing but might be fun to see if most of these sluggers reached base on walks more the lesser power guys on the list.
I had never even heard of Alvin Davis (I was born in 86) so I looked him up on baseballreference. That guy was pretty damn good for 7 years. I guess you learn someting new everyday.
Joe, if we don’t limit ourselves to the start of the season:
http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/hits_how_about_times_on_base/
Ted Williams at 84. Orlando Cabrera (!!) at 63. Jeter had at least a 70-gamer over 2 seasons.
“I guess walks played a great role in this.”
Yes, yes they do. Whitey Herzog was famous for saying that speed doesn’t go into slumps. Well, I suppose. But a good batting eye, patience, and the ability to draw walks generally don’t go into slumps either.
Alvin Davis appears twice on the list because Alvin Davis is awesome.
The getting on base in row streak is a bit strange. Orlando Cabrera, not really not for his hitting or OBP prowess, although he’s bad, got on base in something like 70 games in a row a couple years ago for the Angels. He is the only one other than Ted Williams in the top 5 such streaks, if I recall correctly.
I don’t know why, but these on base streaks are inhabited by the usuals as well as some head-scratchers.
I’m surprised Bonds isn’t on there. Maybe he pinch-hit too often on his days off? Is there anyway to redo that list and just include games started?
“Kinda weird that 10 of the 11 are after 1980 and 7 of the 11 after 1990. Doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that would have a historic bias, unless I’m missing something obvious.”
The higher the OBP, the higher chances an average player is going to reach base in a game. Now, you might say this doesn’t affect things on a team level, but higher OBP = more runners on = more plate appearances for the rest of the team. Your chances of reaching base in 1 of 5 appearances are better than they are in 1 of 4.
Err, that should say “Individual level.”
Recently I’ve taken to some researching about Pujols too. Check this out:
1901-2009. Seasons for hitters who ever hit 40+ HR’s, 120+ RBI’s, hit .300+ and struck out 50 times or less in that season. Pujols is the only modern player to be on this list of just 12 people (as of May 6, 2009)…
http://bb-ref.com/play-index/shareit/JXfB
Every player who, through their 9th season, had 250+ HR’s, 900+ RBI’s, & less than 601 strikeouts (sorted by greatest HR total). Only 6 people have made this list (as of May 6, 2009), and only one who’s played anytime after 1978…
http://bb-ref.com/play-index/shareit/B5A3
There’s more stuff I found, but I don’t want to type for 2 hours about it.
There really shouldn’t be an argument….Pujols is now the best player currently in MLB.
If by “currently”, you mean since 2006, then I agree. Though ARod is just one non-choke / non-drama season away from him.
Alex, I hear you but I’m not sure that the number of plate appearances per team has changed enough over time to explain it.
From 1954-1979 average PAs per team per game was 37.7.
Since 1980 it’s been 38.4. Since 1990 it’s 39.9.
The 1984 start by Alvin Davis is even more remarkable as that was his rookie season. He debuted in MLB April 11, 1984!
Mark W.– I was thinking the same thing. Those 47 games are the first 47 games of his career. Not a bad start!
I remember Alvin Davis because he had good power and a good batting eye. He walked ~130 more times than he struck out over the course of his career. A solid “under-the-radar” player IMO.
Alvin Davis was an excellent player at a time when the Mariners got a lot of first basemen worth having, which I think tended to hurt all of them. Phelps and Martinez were others. Everybody else on that consecutive games list was good at getting on base, either through batting average or walking, except one: Eric Karros. Not that Karros wasn’t a fine major leaguer, but there’s be arguments about whether he deserves consideration for the Hall of Very Good, let alone HOF, although to be fair Dodger Stadium at the time hurt him a lot more than it would today (more seats reduced the foul area and shortened the fences a little since the McCourts bought the team). Karros was neither a great walker nor a great batting average guy. His career high in OBP was only .369. I bet everybody else on that list topped at least .400 for career high.
Alex, I hear you but I’m not sure that the number of plate appearances per team has changed enough over time to explain it.
From 1954-1979 average PAs per team per game was 37.7.
Since 1980 it’s been 38.4. Since 1990 it’s 39.9.
Two points:
1) This is a situation where it isn’t the ‘average’ itself, but the effect of the average that’s likely significant.
To explain, if a team has exactly 37 PAs in a game, that means the leadoff man bats five times, while the other batters get four trips to the plate. With 40 PAs, that means the #2, 3, and 4 hitters all get an extra time at bat as well.
So the average hasn’t changed much, but it’s changed in just such a way as to give the best hitters in the game more chances to hit in a game, which should logically improve their odds of putting together a streak.
2) While we have what I’m assuming is the arithmetic mean average, we don’t have a standard deviation, and in this case that’s probably just as important.
To explain, the standard deviation is a way to describe how the data in a set differs from the mean. Each of the following two groups of numbers has an arithmetic mean (or ‘average’) of 5:
1) 4,5,5,5,6
2) 1,2,3,9,10
Group 2, however, has a much larger standard deviation; the values in group 2 differ from the mean much more than the values in group 1.
The reason this is significant is that I’d expect, as scoring has increased since the 1950s, that the standard deviation of PAs per game has also increased — in other words, an ‘average’ game in the 1960s might have had 37 PAs for one team, and perhaps one game in fifteen might have had 48 or more PAs for that team. In the 1990s, however, an ‘average’ game might have had 39 PAs, with one game in ten having 48 or more PAs for that team. (This, by the way, is a pure guess — I have no idea what the real numbers are.)
The reason 48 PAs is significant is that it’s the point at which the #1-3 hitters get a sixth PA in the game and again, the more PAs in a game, the greater the odds that a given batter can maintain a streak.
The combination of these two effects, to me anyway, would be more than sufficient to ensure that most long streaks of consecutive games reaching base would have occurred during the high-offense 90s rather than earlier periods.
David Wintheiser: Wow, good thinking. That makes sense, it definitely explains why so many of the streaks on Joe’s list are so recent.
Good points, David, although I would point out that plate appearances per game were actually higher during the 1950s than during the 1990s and yet many more of these streaks happened during the 1990s. Why that is I don’t know.
Just to provide you with the numbers:
1990s
4.26 PAs per player per game
36 streaks of reaching base 40+ games in a row
1950s
4.28 PAs per player per game
3 streaks of reaching base 40+ games in a row (beginning 1954)
The 1950s data is incomplete because BR only goes back to 1954, but look at that difference. I don’t know if we can say conclusively that more PAs/game necessarily means more streaks of this kind. Just for fun, here’s the current decade. PAs are up over the 1990s but the occurence of these streaks is on a pace to be basically flat:
2000s
4.60 PAs per player per game
32 (and counting) streaks of reaching base 40+ games in a row
Mikey,
A fair criticism, but I’ll point one one last thing that’s to the advantage of the players in the 1990s — sample size.
Streaks are accomplished individually, but the more opportunities there are to produce a streak, the more streaks you’d expect to see. Here’s an analogy:
Flipping a fair coin is equally likely to come up heads or tails. However, it’s possible that if you flip the coin more than once, you’ll see a ’streak’ of one result or another — it’s not at all unlikely, for instance, that flipping the same fair coin three times will result in three heads. The more you flip, the more likely you are to see a streak, and the more likely you are to see a long streak. (It’s much more likely that you’ll see a streak of ten heads in a row by flipping a coin a million times than by flipping it a hundred times.)
In 1954, there were eight teams in the American League and eight in the National League. This is sixteen teams from which you can produce a player with a streak.
In 1990, there were fourteen teams in each league, which gives you nearly the same number of players in just one league as played MLB in 1954. Again, this gives way more chances for a 90s player to put together a streak than a 50s player, just because there are more players available to go into streaks.
And of course, the absence of data from 1950-1953 means that there may be streaks there that we’re just not aware of. (Though we are aware of some pretty impressive hitting streaks from earlier than 1954.)
Now I’m not claiming that all the difference is mathematical — even if the chances of getting a streak were entirely random, I don’t see these factors as being powerful enough to completely explain why Pujols is the only player since 1999 on this list (though I do get a chuckle that the list was inspired by a reader noting Pujols’s current streak, which is still much shorter than his streak from just last season). It’s just very hard to say exactly what those factors might be without veering off into speculation (or a lot of additional study, which tangotiger is probably better suited to address), while on the other hand, the math is demonstrable.
In other words, my observations were the easy explanation.
Does anyone know what happened to Alvin Davis’ career? He has eight pretty good, bordering on excellent, years with Seattle, averaging around seventy walks per season [with one year of 101 walks!], is traded [?] to California, plays one year and is out of baseball at age 31.
Joe, I don’t know if you’re a t-shirt guy, but:
http://thesmashsite.com/shop/product.php?shirt=snuggie