Wang might be the nicest guy in the majors but he's off to the worst start of all players this year.

Since 1954, here are all the teams with at least 3 games among their first 12 where the starting pitcher went no more than 4 innings and gave up at least 7 earned runs:

 Tm  Year Games Link to Individual Games
+---+----+-----+-------------------------+
 MIN 1994     4 Ind. Games                
 SFG 2001     3 Ind. Games                
 SDP 2006     3 Ind. Games                
 NYY 2009     3 Ind. Games                
 BOS 2006     3 Ind. Games                

If you click through on each "individual games" link, you'll see that the Twins had 4 different pitchers "achieve" the feat. The Giants had 3 different guys. The Padres got 2 such games from Dewon Brazelton and one from Jake Peavy of all guys. The Red Sox had 3 different guys.

Only the Yankees had the "feat' achieved by just 1 guy in these three starts:

  Cnt Player            Date          Tm   Opp GmReslt App,Dec    IP   H  R ER BB SO HR Pit Str GmSc IR IS BF AB 2B 3B IBB HBP SH SF GDP SB CS Pk BK WP   ERA
+----+-----------------+-------------+---+----+-------+---------+----+--+--+--+--+--+--+---+---+----+--+--+--+--+--+--+---+---+--+--+---+--+--+--+--+--+------+
    1 Chien-Ming Wang   2009-04-08    NYY @BAL L  5-7  GS-4  ,L   3.2  9  7  7  3  0  1  73  40   12       21 17  4  0   0   0  0  1   0  0  2  0  0  0  17.18 
    2 Chien-Ming Wang   2009-04-13    NYY @TBR L  5-15 GS-2  ,L   1    6  8  8  3  1  0  61  34    7       12  8  2  0   0   1  0  0   0  4  0  0  0  0  72.00 
    3 Chien-Ming Wang   2009-04-18    NYY  CLE L  4-22 GS-2  ,L   1.1  8  8  8  0  1  1  52  34    7       12 12  3  0   0   0  0  0   0  0  0  0  0  1  54.00 

Those are some really ugly stat lines, especially for a guy who's had so much success so far in his career as one of the top game-winner from the last few seasons. I hope there's some sort of mild physical issue that Wang needs to recover from and he'll get back to his competitive form. I'm a big fan of international players in MLB and it's far too soon for Wang to leave the field.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 8:23 am and is filed under Game Finders. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.