Thursday, April 05, 2007

day 3 - still no HBPs

Pirate Tom Gorzelanny missed a perfect opportunity to throw Craig Biggio's 8th career bases-loaded plunk, in the 4th inning last night. He also could have become the 2nd player ever to get hit by a pitch and plunk Biggio in the same game. But he didn't, and he was so frustrated by that, he hit Chris Burke with the bases loaded.

Though he didn't get plunked, Biggio did go 3 for 5 in the game, including a 9th inning homer in an attempt to start a comeback rally, but the Astros still fell one run short, 5-4. Biggio is now just 8 hits short of the 2,942 hits milestone. He moved past Willie Keeler on the all time hits list, to 30th place.

The Astros get a day off, giving them time to convince the league to move the start of the season back to April 6th this year, and have everyone just forget about those first 3 games. That would mean the season opens tomorrow night against Chris Carpenter and the Cardinals.

Willie Blair plunked Biggio April 5, 1996, and the Astros plunked Brad Ausmus in that game.

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3 Comments:

At 4/05/2007 08:35:00 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Biggio will break the Plunk record on the same day that many great accomplishments happen in Astros history: my birthday, September 8. (Notably, Darryl Kile's no-hitter in 1993.) And Biggio's record will be the greatest record broken on September 8. (Especially since Roger Maris's season homerun record still stands in minds of real baseball fans.)

He won't wait that long for his 3000th hit. He'll get that on July 7.

 
At 4/05/2007 11:54:00 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'm sure you've covered this, but I couldn't find it. Do you have Biggio's plunks broken down by at-bat number (in an inning)? I know he's second all-time in career lead-off homers, but that can't be as good as his lead-off plunk numbers, can it?

 
At 4/05/2007 01:51:00 PM, Blogger pbr said...

Biggio's lead-off homer total is 50 - but when they say that, they mean first batter of the first inning. I don't have his homer total as the first batter of any inning, at least not easily available.

Biggio has only been hit 39 times as the first batter in the first inning - so his lead-off homers have exceeded his leadoff plunks so far. There's still time to catch up! He's been hit 88 times as the first batter of an inning in all.

And yeah, I did write a post about this at some point, but I don't remember when. I think we've reached the point where the old stuff is old enough and hard enough to find that I should just start updating and reprinting a lot of it. I'm sure the plunk ABCs probably need to be updated.

 

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