27 Responses to “8-Hitter Homers”

1. Dennis Garone Says:
   March 19th, 2011 at 3:44 pm

   I love the premise but look into the number of AB and PA for each hitter. It seems that each of these hitters hit a HR every 4 or so AB, which is almost 1 per game. I knew Crandall hit a lot of HRs down in the lineup but that's cool...D

2. Dennis Garone Says:
   March 19th, 2011 at 3:51 pm

   Never mind..I see that it represents only the games that each hitter HIT a HR from the 8th position, not overall....Cool post!!

3. Greg Says:
   March 19th, 2011 at 3:53 pm

   Looks like Crandall would have had a monster season had this had been an entire season batting 8th.

4. Jimbo Says:
   March 19th, 2011 at 4:27 pm

   Yeah I think the AB and PA should show all the AB's and PA's from qualifying games, ie any game the batter appeared in the eight hole. To show all the stats from only the games where he homered just shows a silly collection of stats.

5. DavidRF Says:
   March 19th, 2011 at 4:37 pm

   @4
   The request fails if you try to include every game. You have to add up box score since 1919 first and then sort on the HR column. The PI isn't built for that level of summing though.

   Its a valid point, though. The final table would look much cleaner with just the #-matching, Ind Games and HR columns (and perhaps MinYear/MaxYear if that's available). The other columns just distract from what is otherwise very interesting data.

6. kds Says:
   March 19th, 2011 at 4:55 pm

   The batting splits have a table showing performance while batting in each spot in the order. So do this for the players career and we have what we want. I guess PI cannot work in such a way to capture this information while sorting by an element of it. It looks as though the table above was built by games batting eigth in which a home run was hit.

7. Steve Lombardi Says:
   March 19th, 2011 at 6:32 pm

   Kds, that is correct.

8. Morten Jonsson Says:
   March 19th, 2011 at 7:30 pm

   That's a ton of catchers. I'm kind of impressed by how many of that type there have been--catchers who don't hit for average, don't get on base much, can't run if they do get on, but they're strong and every once in a while they get ahold of one. You could give an award every year for the best one of the type--call it the Del Crandall Award.

9. Jamie Wilking Says:
   March 19th, 2011 at 11:23 pm

   I'm curious to see what the 9th spot list looks like.

10. Dvd Avins Says:
    March 20th, 2011 at 2:08 am

    I think Butch Hobson would be on the 9-hole list.

11. Doug Says:
    March 20th, 2011 at 3:41 am

    Many of the recent players seem to be from the AL. Probably because you mostly have better hitters batting 8th in the AL (the worst hitter on the AL teams will bat 9th).

    Also, in the NL, the 8th hitter may not see too much to hit with the pitcher following (unless the bases are empty and there's two outs).

12. depstein Says:
    March 20th, 2011 at 9:08 am

    Makes you wonder who's hitting 8th for the Yankees this year.

13. LJF Says:
    March 20th, 2011 at 2:11 pm

    Some usual suspects, but a couple of surprises (at least to me). Campanella, Dewey Evans. Campy had more games batting 8th than at any other position in th batting order other than 4th - although it looks like he PH in the 8th spot quite a bit (252 G, 217 GS).

    Evans splits are pretty cool. He started over 100 games at each spot (1-9) in the batting order. I wonder how many players have done that?

14. Artie Z Says:
    March 20th, 2011 at 4:45 pm

    Regarding the number 9 spot, my first guess is Wes Ferrell. He hit all 38 HRs in the number 9 spot.

    The PI shows that the actual leaders are Mike Bordick and Rick Dempsey with 42. Sandy Alomar has 41, Greg Gagne has 39, and then Ferrell is 5th with 38. Brandon Inge is the closest active player to the top of the list as he has 35. Only 40 players from 1919-2010 have hit 20 HRs in their career out of the number 9 spot.

    Of those 40, there are 9 catchers, 21 "infielders" (they look to be mostly shortstops but not exclusively), 9 pitchers, and however you want to count Brandon Inge (as a catcher or an infielder).

15. Miles Says:
    March 21st, 2011 at 5:34 am

    What is also quite odd is that two of the top four are named Del....

16. Tmckelv Says:
    March 21st, 2011 at 11:33 am

    I would have never guessed Crandell batted 8th. He was on 8 all-star teams and wasn't a pure defensive catcher (he had a little pop as shown in this thread).

    @15 - Del Crandell & Del Rice were both on the Braves World series teams 1957-58 and they both batted 8th primarily when they were in the lineup.

17. John Autin Says:
    March 21st, 2011 at 12:50 pm

    Perusing Del Crandall's career splits, I was surprised to find that Crandall batted 2nd for most of the 1960 season. The progression of events that led to this is kind of amusing:

    -- In 1958, the Braves won their 2nd straight pennant under manager Fred Haney. But the top of the order was a weak spot all year, with both the #1 and #2 spots averaging a .318 OBP, 81 runs and 44 RBI; as a result, Hank Aaron's .326 BA and 30 HRs produced just 90 RBI, while Eddie Mathews had but 77 RBI with his 31 HRs.

    -- So in 1959, Haney made the highly unconventional move of putting Mathews in the #2 spot. Mathews responded with a monster year, batting .306 with 46 HRs. (All the HRs came while hitting 2nd, which I'll bet is the single-season record for that spot.) Mathews had 114 RBI and a career-high 118 runs, and Milwaukee's #2 spot was easily the most productive in MLB.

    -- But despite winning the pennant each of his first 2 years at the helm, Haney (who was not popular with some of the players) was let go after the Braves lost the '59 pennant playoff to Los Angeles.

    -- In 1960, new manager Chuck Dressen reverted to a conventional #2 hitter in the aging Red Schoendienst; after he got off to a slow start (.224/.271, no HRs in 40 games), Dressen tried Johnny Logan (.247, no HRs in 21 games). Finally, on July 5, Dressen moved his 30-year-old slugging catcher up from 8th to 2nd in the order. Crandall -- a .251 career hitter to that point, with just 3 prior starts in the #2 hole 7 years before -- batted .333/.367 the rest of the way, with 56 runs and 44 RBI in 82 games (a pace of 105 runs and 82 RBI per 154 games).

    -- Dressen kept Crandall in the #2 spot to start the '61 season. But Crandall got hurt in the 5th game of the year, and was unable to start another game for the rest of the season. His career as an unconventional #2 hitter was effectively ended.

18. Mets Maven Says:
    March 21st, 2011 at 2:54 pm

    @8
    When I was a kid, I used to believe there was some kind of rule in baseball that catchers had to bat 8th in the order (and pitchers 9th)!

19. Dave V. Says:
    March 22nd, 2011 at 7:45 am

    Any list in which Ron Karkovice ends up 3rd alltime in a category is an awesome list 🙂

20. Dave V. Says:
    March 22nd, 2011 at 8:07 am

    I was just looking at Ron Karkovice's career numbers and then playing with the Play Index. He is one of the worst players in MLB history to have played as long as he did with only 1 team. Setting the parameters to at least 900 games played with 1 franchise and at least 2900 PA's, there are 126 players who meet this criteria. Karkovice is right near the bottom in almost every category. That's why I find it funny for him to be at the #3 ranking for any list...he'll take what he can get! 🙂

21. John Autin Says:
    March 22nd, 2011 at 11:08 am

    @20, Dave V. -- On your Play Index searches involving Karkovice, were you looking only at offensive performance?

    I'm sure you know that Karko was a very good defensive catcher; he led the league in caught-stealing percentage 3 times.

    Compare Karko to Fisk in the years they shared the White Sox catching duties, 1986-92, per 1,000 defensive innings:
    -- C.F.: 80 SB, 40 CS, 33% CS, 0.2 dWAR
    -- R.K.: 56 SB, 41 CS, 42% CS, 1.0 dWAR

    During those 7 years, Fisk was obviously the better hitter, with a combined 107 OPS+ versus 83 for Karkovice. But who was a more valuable all-around player? By the WAR method, it was Karkovice: Combining offensive and defensive WAR for 1986-92, Fisk averaged 3.8 WAR per 162 games; Karkovice averaged 4.4 WAR per 162 games.

22. Dave V. Says:
    March 22nd, 2011 at 12:52 pm

    @21 John A - I should have clarified and said that he is one of the worst offensive players in MLB history to have played as long as he did with only 1 team (I left offensive out of my comment before). He did indeed have defensive value (6.6 career dWAR)...but only a 7.2 oWAR.

    I'd take Fisk over Karkovice from 1986-1992 for my team, without a doubt. There's a reason Karkovice didn't play much. He was a terrible offensive player.

23. Dave V. Says:
    March 22nd, 2011 at 1:03 pm

    FWIW, there are 1,624 players with at least 2900 PA's in MLB history going back to 1901. Karkovice ranks at 1,429 in OPS+ (right below Mike Gallego).

24. John Autin Says:
    March 22nd, 2011 at 6:02 pm

    Dave V. -- Two points (and I'm no big Karko fan; I just like to argue):

    1. Setting the search minimum at 2,900 PAs -- Karko had 2,948 -- biases the results against him. The vast majority of those 1,600+ players had longer careers than Karkovice -- and career length correlates with hitting ability.

    2. It doesn't seem quite fair to compare Karkovice to corner outfielders, first basemen and DHs. Let's compare him to other catchers. Karkovice caught in 918 games; let's compare him to all modern catchers who caught at least 500 games: Out of 295 such catchers, Karkovice's 81 OPS+ is tied for #193. Basically, 1/3 of this group were worse offensive players than Karkovice.

    One other surprising little thing about Karko: He rarely hit into a DP. In both 1989 and '94, he came up over 200 times and never GIDP'd. You might say that was because of all the strikeouts and pop-ups, and I would be inclined to agree with you. But the facts remain that GIDPs are very bad offensive events, they are not measured in OPS+, and Karko's average of 7 GIDP per 162 games is roughly half that of Carlton Fisk (13 per 162G) and less than half the rate of a lot of long-career catchers. This is part of what makes his WAR a bit better than one might expect.

    That said ... I'm sure he was often painful to watch, and I wouldn't have wanted him hitting in a big spot for my team.

25. Dave V. Says:
    March 22nd, 2011 at 11:25 pm

    JA - no worries, as a friendly discussion about a guy like Ron Karkovice is one of the great things about this site. I'm no big Karko hater myself; I just remember him being painful to watch and his offensive numbers bear that out in most categories.

    1, If the plate appearances go down to 2,000 PA's, there are 2,182 players who qualify. Karkovice ranks at 1,819 amongst them in OPS+. Something else I noticed while doing that search...he is below the immortal Duane Kuiper in OPS+.

    2. Fair enough as far as not comparing him against other positions (as done before and in point #1). In looking over those 295 catchers and the players Karko had a better OPS+ than, he did beat out the following players that I recognize from my time watching baseball:

    Alex Trevino
    Dan Wilson
    Tom Pagnozzi
    Scott Servais
    Rod Barajas
    Kelly Stinnett
    Rick Cerone
    Jamie Quirk
    Toby Hall
    Chris Widger
    Pat Borders
    Eddie Perez
    Dioner Navarro
    Brett Mayne
    Damon Berryhill
    Brad Ausmus
    Charlie O'Brien
    John Flaherty
    Gerald Laird
    Joe Girardi
    Buck Martinez
    Bruce Benedict
    Junior Ortiz
    Kirt Manwaring
    Bob Melvin
    Henry Blanco
    Mike Difelice
    Einar Diaz
    Gary Bennett
    Mike Matheny
    Andy Allanson
    Jose Molina
    Paul Bako
    Joel Skinner
    Jorge Fabregas
    Matt Walbeck

    That's not exactly Murderers' Row...but at least he wasn't the worst offensive catcher of my lifetime 🙂

    Also, that lack of DP's from Karko is pretty interesting. As you mentioned, he struck out a lot (once every 3.94 PA; as a quick comparison, strikeout king Matt Reynolds is at 2.98 and Ryan Howard is at 3.64), so that helped him in the lack of GIDP's but nonetheless, it is impressive that he hit into so few (and in those two years, none at all).

    The joys of discussing a random guy like Karko 🙂

26. MR BASEBALL Says:
    March 23rd, 2011 at 6:19 pm

    The reason Officer Karko stuck around for so long was his rocket ship arm. He always caught people stealing, hence the nickname.

    Do remember when the Sox had a, "Dress your dog as your favorite player day?" All the dogs were dressed as Karko because his percived ugliness.

    Needless to say the organization thankfully got rid of it.(At least for Karkos sake)

27. MikeD Says:
    March 29th, 2011 at 7:06 pm

    Be interested to see a version of that that list excluding the American League from 1973 forward, as that's when the DH came into play, and any hitter batting ninth would have another professional hitter behind him. The NL, as well as the AL prior to '73, would only have a pitcher providing protection to the number eight hitter.