plunks around the majors - midseason update
The All Star break might not always fall exactly in the middle of the season, but it's still a good time to look at the first half and see who's likely to break some interesting plunk related records this season.
The Colorado Rockies pitching staff have managed to hit 59 batters this year (54 of whom were not Craig Biggio) in 87 games, which projects to slightly better that 109 for the season. 109 hit batters in a season is the all time record, held by the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, who had their franchise contracted at the end of the year as a reward. The Rockies have an excellent shot at challenging this record even though they have no more games against the Astros.
The Toronto Bluejays lead all teams in plunks received with 49 in 88 games. They'll have to do some work to contend with the '97 Astros modern record of 100.
League wide plunks look to be dropping off from the last couple of years, but the 2005 season still projects to rank 4th all time. The 2001 season holds the record with 1890 hbps.
Juan Castro of the Twins has continued to hold onto his title as the active player with the most plate appearance in an unplunked career. He's up to 1,937 plate appearances and has still never taken a major league plunk. He still has a long way to go to catch Mark Lemke's all time record for a plunk free career - Lemke had 3,664 plate appearances and never got hit.
The single season record for plate appearances without an HBP is 739 by Sandy Alomar (Sr.) in 1971 - the same year Ron Hunt set the modern single season record for getting hit with 50. While no one is even close to contending for Hunt's record, Ichiro, Darrin Erstad and Johnny Damon are all in the running this for Alomar's this year. None of them have been hit by a pitch so far, and they are all on pace to have over 700 plate appearances. None of them are quite on pace for over 739 PAs this year, but all 3 have had at least that many in a season once before. A 740+ plate appearance season has only been seen 55 times in history.
7 Comments:
"The Colorado Rockies pitching staff have managed to hit 59 batters this year (54 of whom were not Craig Biggio)"
Does this mean that Biggio is actually five different batters?
5 different hit batters, yes. In this case "batters" refers to each instance at bat.
Also, I reserve the right to butcher the English language as I see fit on the grounds that there are many many people worse than I.
We need a blogg-er, not a bell-y butch-er.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
You really should've
Oh. That's cool, then - I can get into intentional butchering, especially when it causes amusing misunderstandings.
Now if you ask me, and plenty folks do now and again, the English language is as easy to butcher as a legless narcoleptic hog. Just the other day me and Mama was down at the Chesterfield County Feed and Grain Mill to get us some rabbit food on account of that new parakeet the twins brought home from the school carnival, see it don’t like bird food and prefers them compressed rabbit pellets made famous by Flatworm Jackson and his radio advertisements. Anyhow, we got us the package of rabbit food for the bird and commenced to go on out to the parking lot to get back in the black Mariah, that’s what we call Mama’s automobile on account of it being the laughing stock of the trailer court, anyhow we got out to the parking lot and Mama said, “Bubba” because that’s what she calls me, she said, “Bubba” and I looked at her and said “Mama what you won’t?“ And that is when she lit in to me about talking the way I do and demanded that I clearly enunciate my words and stop speaking as if I had a mouth full of pebbles when I talks, but seeing as how I hail from Chesterfield County, and seeing as how that is the accepted dialect in these parts, I find it rather triflin’ to clearly say “Mama what you want?“ rather than “Mama what you won’t?“ The boys down at the icehouse would commence to start pokin’ fun at me if they heard me speak all sissified like that. So clearly I can attest to this language being one that is quite easy to mangle. But that ain’t the point at hand, the point at hand is that our man Craig “Target” Biggio has gone many a day without getting plunked and I’m fixin’ to get comfustigated with anticipation.
I certainly don’t want him to suffer no pain, and Lord forbid if he should be taken out of the line up on account of some slack jawed, raw boned, green horn letting loose with some kind of crazy pitch that gets out of control and zeros in on his tender spots, but I truly would like to see him go ahead on and clean up this mess of two different sets of statistical consideration, i.e. one before 1900 and one after 1900.
Once again Cletus, you have shown us the way. Good to hear from you - we were getting a little worried that the powerful international cabbage cartel had tracked you down to silence your campaign against the use of cabbage in baseball uniforms. They stand to lose millions if they can't open up the personal cooling device market as a new source of revenue.
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