Here are the leaders in four-hit games since 1954:

                   Games Link to Individual Games
+-----------------+-----+-------------------------+
 Pete Rose            73 Ind. Games                
 Paul Molitor         62 Ind. Games                
 Wade Boggs           62 Ind. Games                
 George Brett         61 Ind. Games                
 Rod Carew            58 Ind. Games                
 Hank Aaron           49 Ind. Games                
 Kirby Puckett        47 Ind. Games                
 Roberto Clemente     47 Ind. Games                
 Willie Mays          46 Ind. Games                
 Tony Gwynn           45 Ind. Games                
 Al Oliver            44 Ind. Games                
 Willie Davis         43 Ind. Games                
 Ivan Rodriguez       42 Ind. Games                
 Maury Wills          41 Ind. Games                
 Lou Brock            41 Ind. Games                
 Dante Bichette       41 Ind. Games                
 Carl Yastrzemski     40 Ind. Games                
 Ichiro Suzuki        40 Ind. Games                
 Luis Aparicio        40 Ind. Games                
 Eddie Murray         39 Ind. Games                

Ichiro registered his 40th such game last night to pull into a tie for 17th place. I found the 1 other active player on here, I-rod, a bit of a surprise.

If you're curious, the next active players on the list are A-rod with 37 games, Johnny Damon with 34, Todd Helton with 33, and Derek Jeter with 32.

Going back to the list above, it's interesting to compare the total number of 4-hit games to the total number of games each guy played.

I went ahead and calculated the percentage of a player's total games that ended up as 4-hit games, and ranked them by highest percentage:

Ichiro Suzuki    3.0%
Kirby Puckett    2.6%
Wade Boggs    2.5%
Dante Bichette    2.4%
Rod Carew    2.3%
Paul Molitor    2.3%
George Brett    2.3%
Maury Wills    2.1%
Pete Rose    2.0%
Roberto Clemente    1.9%
Al Oliver    1.9%
Tony Gwynn    1.8%
Ivan Rodriguez    1.8%
Willie Davis    1.8%
Lou Brock    1.6%
Luis Aparicio    1.5%
Willie Mays    1.5%
Hank Aaron    1.5%
Eddie Murray    1.3%
Carl Yastrzemski    1.2%

There are a lot of neat (if rather obvious) conclusions here:

• Ichiro is AWESOME.
• More recent players do better because with more offense, the number of PAs per game has gone up and therefore the ease of getting 4 hits in any particular game has also gone up
• Guys like Yaz, Aaron, and Eddie Murray make this top 20 list because they were good but also because they played in a lot of games
• Pete Rose, despite being way in the lead for games played compared to most of these guys still makes the middle of the pack, telling us that he was pretty damn good too.
• This stat also favors leadoff hitters since they get a higher number of PAs per game on average than anybody else.
• Just think for a moment about the difference between Ichiro's 3.0% and Yaz's 1.2%. Both of these guys make the top 20 for most 4-hit games since 1954 but Ichiro has done it almost 3 times as often as Yaz did it. (Of course, that's not totally fair to Yaz since Ichiro's rate is likely to slow down over the remainder of his career.)

It's amazing what you can learn when you dig just one level deeper into some of these numbers.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 9:00 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.