New Stat

On Tuesday night, Josh Hamilton grounded into 3 double plays during a 3-2 loss to the Mariners.

In honour of that, I think its time to talk about a new stat - OPPA, or Outs Per Plate Appearance.

Even good hitters have bad nights, and bad hitters probably have more bad nights, but it takes a special confluence of opportunity and execution to create more outs than plate appearances.

To continue my apparent obsession with GIDPs, and how funny I apparently find it to be when hitters ground into multiple GIDPs, this post is all about the most-GIDP games ever. Unfortunately, triple plays are not as easily accessed, so if a batter created triple play outs I am going to ignore that for this post.

The methodology here is pretty simple:
1. Find all the batters who have GIDPed 3 or more times in a game
2. Count the number of outs they produced
3. Divide those outs by plate appearances.
4. Notice other interesting things.

That search returns 109 batters that have accumulated 3 or more GIDPs in a single game, with the first coming in 1934. So maybe every time I say "of all time" I don't really mean it.

Surprisingly, only one batter ever has GIDPed 4 times in a game. That batter is likely going into the hall of fame... as a manager. Need more clues? He goes by the name of J Torre. No wait, that's too obvious. Joe T.

Weird Numbers

I will start with a question: based on the two seasons of pitching below, who would you rather have?

If you know or care what these stats mean, you might have one of three reactions:
1. I will take the first pitcher - he gives up fewer home runs and has a better FIP
2. I will take the second pitcher - he strikes out more batters and walks fewer batters!
3. I will take both and probably make the playoffs - these guys are both aces.

By these so-called "advanced" stats, these two seasons are not that different. Now let's play that game again:
Pitcher 1: 22-3 over 223 IP in 31 starts.
Pitcher 2: 6-9 over 211 IP in 30 starts.

Now, it's a no-brainer, right? You take pitcher 1. It's not even close.

I think I'm too obvious to actually "blow your mind" here, but... pitcher 1 in the two sets of data is the same! Pitcher 2 in both sets of data is the same! Woah!

Ádám Lind

I thought I knew how to spell Adam Lind, Jays DH (who plays 1B because he's somehow better at it than Edwin Encarnacion. Pardon me. Edwin Encarnación.)

According to Yahoo!, I didn't quite have it right:

This is a joke, right?

And now for the Worst...

I recently published a Web Log about WPA and the best WPA games. Here are a few notes about the worst WPA games.

The best WPA game for a batter was +1.503 by Art Shamsky, 1966.
The best WPA game for a pitcher was +1.675 by Vern Law, in 1955.

The wosrt WPA game for a batter was -0.820 by Juan Rivera, in 2003 for the Yankees. He managed to go 0 for 6 (with a walk!), but what sunk his performance below all others was the 3 GIDP* in a 10-9 17-inning Yankees win.

Joey Bats Wins a Game by Himself

I was unlucky enough to be working during yesterday's late-afternoon Jays/Rays matchup, but I was following by the At Bat app on my iPhone (which is great by the way). It was surprising enough to see the Jays tie it up in the ninth, let alone win it in extras. That is a rare day in Toronto. It was only after checking out just how they won that I could not help but see that Jose Bautista completely dominated this box score. Whether or not it showed in the game is another thing, but I can't imagine you could walk away with any other impression.

4/4 With 2 HR and all 4 RBIs in a 4-3 win is good enough. A look at the Fangraphs WPA for the game though, tells just how crucial Joseph Bats was to the win. I know, I'm pretty excited about this baseball game and I haven't even seen a replay yet.