2nd try at Miller tonight
Craig Biggio stood at the plate last night, looking out at Tomo Ohka and the Miller Park field, and said, not just to Ohka but to all pitchers, "You may have hit me with 276 of the 41,157 you've thrown me, but you're not going to hit me with the 14 pitches you throw to me tonight - and I'm going to go 2-4 with a run scored and a double. And tonight's attendance will be 12,258." And you know what? He was right. If only he could have predicted a few more runs for the Astros, who fell short in the 4-2 loss.
Tonight's starter for the Beer Barons is Ben Sheets, who hit Biggio with a pitch on June 29, 2001. Biggio has been plunked twice on May 2nd. Jim Bullinger hit him on May 2, 1995 for the Cubs, and Cory Lidle plunked Biggio on May 2, 2004 for the Reds.
3 Comments:
Isn't there some rookie who's been hit in three straight games? Is he on pace to surpass Biggio in twenty years?
Did you count all those 41,000 pitches, or are you just estimating?
I didn't count all 41,000 pitches, but I'm taking espn.com's word that someone did. Look here, scroll down to Miscellaneous Batting, and look at the column labeled "#PIT".
I suppose I should site my sources for such information more often, but most of the time I can find a pretty wide variety of places that have the raw data I use. In this case, total pitches is one of several stats that espn.com seems to have that other sites don't list. Most of the data I use comes from either espn.com, sportsline.com, retrosheet.org, mlb.com (who have been problematic recently), and the Lahman database which you can download here.
And for Josh, yes, Kevin Frandson of the Giants just started his career with a 3 game getting hit streak which ended last night. He's been hit now in 3 of his 4 games. If he can keep up that pace for as many games as Biggio has played he'll have a very impressive 1,941 hbps. Okay, that might not be too likely but the rookie record is 29 by Tommy Tucker, so he may have a shot at that, along with Kenji Johjima who has 5 hbps as a rookie this year. The American League rookie record is 21 by David Eckstein, and the NL rookie record is 20 by Frank Robinson. Tommy Tucker's 29 were from the American Association.
Also on the subject of getting hit streaks, since people have asked about it a few times and I don't yet have full answer, I have found out that FP Santangelo and Don Baylor have had 4 game streaks of being plunked. It's possible there are others, but I also confirmed that there have been no streaks longer than that within the timeframe that retrosheet.org has game-by-game data - which is back to the late 1950s. So, you can probably call 4 games the top recent performance for getting hit streaks. The same goes for Casey Fossum's 10 game streak of pitching appearances in which he hit a batter last season. That too is the best streak in recent history.
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