Thursday, August 25, 2005

LA Dodger of Anaheim?

The Astros are in Los Angeles to play the Dodgers starting tomorrow, but the other team that calls LA home (sort of) has this season's best dodger so far. Angels leadoff man Chone Figgins has emerged as a threat to Sandy Alomar's single season record for plate appearances without getting hit by a pitch.
In 1971, Alomar, also with the Angels, collected 739 plate appearance without getting hit by a pitch. This season, Chone Figgins is up to 558. With 36 games left on the schedule for the Angels, Figgins will need to average 5.028 plate appearance per game and play every game the rest of the way. If he gets to the plate 5 times every game, and has just two 6 plate appearance games in there, he'll break the record. Unless, of course, someone hits him between now and then.
Craig Biggio's longest streak of plate appearances without getting hit by a pitch was 480, from the 6th inning on September 1, 1989 to the 2nd inning on July 22, 1990. Figgins has nearly 1000 more consecutive unplunked plate appearance. In fact, Figgins has never been hit in his 1478 major league plate appearances. He is 3rd in plate appearances among active players who have never been hit by a pitch, behind Juan Castro (1,976) and Coco Crisp (1,622). They all have a long way to go to catch all time pitch dodger Mark Lemke who made it through his entire career of 3,664 plate appearance and was never hit by a pitch.
Personally, I think these guys should take one for the team once in a while.
The Dodgers' shortstop Cesar Izturis went 728 plate appearance last year without getting hit, and had made it up to 1,958 career plate appearances before realizing the value of getting on base via the plunk on April 10th this year. He has been hit 3 times since.

1 Comments:

At 8/25/2005 12:33:00 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Here's a good question: are there any pitchers out there who really have it in for our man Biggio? We can define this, not merely by the number of times each pitcher has plunked him, but by the number of plunks divided by the number of plate appearances Biggio has had against them. Whoever leads in that category has to hold the title of Biggest Biggio Basher.

 

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