This is our old blog. It hasn't been active since 2011. Please see the link above for our current blog or click the logo above to see all of the great data and content on this site.
One day after Roy Halladay made his historic post-season debut for the Phillies, Tim Lincecum has burst onto the scene for the Giants. Not only did Linceceum and Halladay put up 2 out of the top 3 game-scores for a post season debut, they also became just the third pair of pitchers to post game scores of over 90 in the same post season. Actually, one of the previous seasons was really just the same guy twice. Here are the 2 previous post-seasons to feature multiple games with game scores of at least 90.
The Twins lost their 11th consecutive post-season game tonight. This ties the Phillies for the second longest post-season streak. Of course they're not quite comparable; the Phillies' streak occurred over 62 years and the Twins' streak in just 7. Here are the longest streaks before today.
As an extension of Andy's post from earlier today, here are the pitchers with the highest game scores in their first career post-season game. Halladay is tied for second.
Hopefully you know about our Play Index by now, but did you know there are ways to filter the results to only include postseason games? It's like having an entirely different set of finders that apply just to the playoffs.
Take for instance the Pitching Game Finder. If you wanted to look up postseason no-hitters after Roy Halladay's gem last night, go to the finder, set up the query you want (in this case, Role-->Starter-->CG, H=0) and change the radio button selection on the left side of the box from "Regular Season" to "Postseason"... Then, voila! Halladay joins Larsen as the only pitchers to spin a postseason no-no.
These examples are just a few of the nearly infinite number of searches you can run using the Play Index, so give it a whirl, and as always, let us know what you think in the comments below or with our feedback form.
The 2010 Yankees-Twins ALDS represents just the 8th time in the WS era (1903-2010) that the same two teams faced each other in a postseason series 4 times in 8 seasons... The Dodgers & Yankees played each other in 4 world series from 1946-53, 48-55, and five times (!!!) from 1949-56. The Yankees and Royals faced off in 4 series from 1973-80, and the Braves & Astros had two different 8-year stretches with 4 playoff showdowns in the late nineties/early 2000s (1997-04 and 1998-05). The Red Sox and Angels capped off a 4-series-in-8-years stretch last season, and now the Yankees and Twins have joined that group with ALDS faceoffs in 2003, 2004, 2009, and 2010.
Yesterday I gave a big-picture overview of all the features we have in our Postseason Section, so today I wanted to talk about a really cool, underrated feature of our playoff boxscores...
As you probably know, our regular-season play-by-play data stretches back to 1950 -- which is amazing and to the credit of Retrosheet that anything close to that amount of information is available. But did you know that our postseason boxscores have play-by-play accounts for the entirety of the World Series era?
So if you ever wondered how much WPA Babe Ruth cost the Yankees when he was caught stealing to end the 1926 World Series, we can answer that and many more questions. Play around for a while in the Postseason Section, and you may find a whole new way to look at games that happened a century ago.
The playoffs are finally going to be upon us this Wednesday, so now seems like as good a time as any to point out that we have an extensive Postseason Section here at Baseball-Reference.
First, we have complete boxscores and play-by-play records for every postseason game ever played (if you don't believe me, check out the first World Series game ever). Not only that, but the play-by-play accounts even feature Win Probability.
And that's not all. Beyond the box scores, you can take a broader view of each playoff matchup in history using our series pages, which contain basic linescores for each game of the series, as well as composite series pitching and batting stats. These pages are current as of the previous day's action, so by Thursday we will have generated pages for all of the 2010 matchups.
Also, be sure to take a trip around our leaderboards to learn about all-time postseason records:
Batting and Pitching Leaders for World Series Career and Single-Series
Batting and Pitching Leaders for LCS Career and Single-Series
Batting and Pitching Leaders for Division Series Career and Single-Series
Batting and Pitching Leaders for Playoffs Career and Single-Year
One of the themes in the media during last week's World Series was the "core four" , the four players who linked the Yankees championships of the '90s to this year's team. Several of those players moved up the charts for playing time in the World Series and I thought it might be interesting to see whom they passed and who is still in the lead.
Those 18 wins came over 249 IP in 40 games and starts. So that's a little over one regular season's worth of starts, and he's managed 18 wins, which is very good. (Remember that in the post-season, you're facing all good teams, so he has no doormats with which to pad his win total. Winning at a rate of 15-16 games for a full-year equivalent is impressive.)
This table summarizes the baseball playoffs nicely. In the Wild Card era, there are so many more games that all the records belong to modern guys, and over that same period, it's been pretty much all Braves, Yankees, and Red Sox.
However, 5 of the top 10 guys above actually allowed homers at a higher rate than Pettitte (including, obviously, Jaret Wright--wow!) Catfish Hunter sticks out as the only holdover from prior to the Wild Card era.
Anyway, the bottom line is that Pettitte has been very impressive. He's pitched in 8 World Series (including with Houston in 2005.) True, he's been lucky to be on such good teams, but A) he had a lot to do with them being so good and B) regardless of how he got the opportunities, he has done well with them.
It's interesting to debate his Hall of Fame credentials. His position as a top pitcher on 8 World Series teams goes a long way, in my opinion. He's got the 63rd-highest win total of all time, but only the 229th-highest loss total (translation: he's got a great winning percentage.) He has two 20-win seasons (actually 21 both times) and finished in the top 6 in Cy Young voting in 5 different seasons.
The marks against him are primarily these:
He has only 229 career wins (as mentioned, 63rd all time) which would be a very low total for a Hall of Famer.
His excellent W-L record seems to be at least partially a product of playing on such good teams. He came to the Yankees in 1995 when they made the playoffs for the first time in a long time and has never pitched for a poor team. His ERA+ is only 116 which, while very respectable, is not excellent. His neutralized pitching totals tell the story. They say his record should be (gulp) 162-146, a whopping 67 wins fewer than he has. This means that if he hadn't been on the Yankees, he'd be much closer to a .500 pitcher in all likelihood. This would give him numbers more like Tim Wakefield, Livan Hernandez, or Kevin Millwood. These are all good pitchers but clearly not HOFers.
