The Worst No-Hitter

Yesterday evening I was packing and decided to throw on a baseball game as background noise. Since the Yankees were playing on the West Coast, I went for the Arizona-Tampa Bay contest. I turned off the game in the third inning, after Edwin Jackson weaseled his way out of a bases-loaded jam. I thought nothing of the game until I saw on Baseball Tonight that he had thrown a no-hitter! My first thought was, is this the worst no-hitter of all time?

Jackson walked eight batters in the game, and threw a career-high 149 pitches, just 79 of them for strikes. At one point in the third inning, the Win Probability actually favored Tampa Bay, thanks to Jackson walking the bases loaded! With two outs in the ninth, Jackson walked pinch hitter Willy Aybar on four pitches, which was Aybar's seventh walk of the season. No doubt about it, Jackson pitched rather poorly and still picked up the no-no. Is it possible to have a worse no hitter than Jackson?

First of all, some ground rules: Major League Baseball defines a no-hitter as a "a game in which a pitcher, or pitchers, gives up no hits while pitching at least nine innings. A pitcher may give up a run or runs so long as he pitches nine innings or more and does not give up a hit."

This excludes some rather infamous no-hit performances, such as this one by Andy Hawkins, who allowed four (unearned) runs in a 4-0 loss while pitching for the hapless 1990 Yankees. In a baseball-reference play index search, I asked for games of 9 IP or more since 1920 with zero hits. I then sorted this list by ascending Game Score, a measure invented by Bill James to assign a single number to a starting pitchers' performance. The best nine-inning performance since 1920, according to Game Score, is Kerry Wood's 20K game in 1998, with a score of 105. The measure is very results-oriented, since it places high value on the number of innings pitched and the number of runs-- shutouts are practically guaranteed to be above 80.

Click the link for the results, which show Jackson's game last night to be the fourth-worst no-hitter on record, in Game Score. Three games tied with a game score one unit worse:

George Culver, July 29, 1968 Pitching for the Reds, his second of what would be five teams in the pre-free agency era, Culver was nothing short of mediocre in this game, for someone who pitched a no-hitter. He walked four in the game, but faced 34 batters, one of the extra men (Dick Allen) getting aboard thanks to a throwing error by third baseman Tony Perez, and reaching second on another error by shortstop Woody Woodward on the same play. Allen then reached third base on a groundout and scored on a sac-fly by Cookie Rojas.

Culver allowed another unearned baserunner in the third inning, with Phillies' starter Chris Short reaching on Catchers Interference by Pat Corrales. Culver then retired eleven straight before walking two men with two outs in the sixth, needing a strikeout to get out of that jam. Culver's final two baserunners got on via walk to open the eighth inning, but Culver induced some ground balls to get out of that one, and breezed through the ninth for the no-hitter.

Bill James calculated how likely it was for each pitcher to have thrown a no-hitter, and George Culver came out as one of the ten men least likely to have a no-no.

Ken Holtzman- August 19, 1969. Of the three no-hitters with a Game Score of 84, Holtzman's seems the most impressive. Facing Phil Neikro and staked to a 3-0 lead after the first inning, Holtzman walked just three in his no-hitter. The reason this game has such a low game score is that Holtzman struck out precisely zero hitters! Not exactly Nolan Ryan, Holtzman struck out just 5.0 per nine innings in his career, despite playing in an extremely pitcher-friendly era. Only one other no-hitter since 1920 has featured zero strikeouts, by Sad Sam Jones in 1923.

Sabermetrics has taught us in the Gospel of Three True Outcomes; that a pitcher can only (really) control three results of an at bat: a strikeout, a walk, and a home run. There are fine tunings in there, such as GB/FB rate, and his own fielding ability, but once the ball is put in play, a lot is left up to his defense. On that day in 1969, the Cubs' defense shined, and Holtzman never allowed more than one baserunner in an inning. Twelve groundouts, twelve flyouts, and three pop-outs formed an even split among the batted balls in this game. Interestingly, while giving up fly-balls tends to influence home-run rate and therefore is bad for the overall success of a pitcher, if one wants to pitch a no-hitter, a flyball is far more likely to turn into an out.

The shimmering defense was on display no finer than on the last out of the seventh inning, in which outfielder Billy Williams climbed the ivy at Wrigley to pluck a home run away from Henry Aaron. Holtzman wrote in Chicago Cubs: Memorable Stories of Cubs Baseball that the home fans were reminding him that he had a no-hitter every inning following the third (so much for jinxes!) Holtzman would go on to throw another no-hitter two years later for the Cubs, and was later elected to the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.

Joe Cowley, September 19, 1986 From the box-score, this is my vote for the worst official no-hitter on record. Cowley registered seven walks (and eight strikeouts), and among the 145 no-hitters on record with Game Scores below 100, Cowley's is only one of two in which the no-no-man gave up an earned run. Much like Jackson, Cowley walked the bases loaded to start the sixth, and then gave up three straight fly balls, the second of which scored Reggie Jackson. Cowley also had two men on in the third, and like Jackson walked a man in the ninth, though this runner was erased on the game-ending double play.

In fact, Cowley threw the worst no-hiter of all time, and then never won another big league game. He lost his next six decisions and was out of baseball within a year of this game. Hopefully, Edwin Jackson can avoid this same fate.

The Quest for Quarter-Million

I was making my daily visit to baseball-reference.com when I noticed a new feature on the main page: an all-time major league home run tracker. Would you believe that through the games of August 25, 2008, there have been 249,650 home runs hit since 1876? Personally I found that number to be a bit low, but I suppose when you're dealing with numbers that large, they can be deceiving. Let's take a look at the history of the home run, and see if we can't project where and when the historic homer might come.

According to the SABR Encyclopedia, the first major league home run was hit on May 2, 1876 by second baseman Ross Barnes of the Chicago White Stockings. Barnes hit just two home runs while playing in the National League; he had played for Boston in the amateur National Association (the precursor to the NL) prior to 1876. The inaugral home run came off of Cherokee Fischer of Cincinnati in the fifth inning. This was the only full season in which Fischer appeared in the NL, he threw 229.3 innings as the Reds' backup pitcher. The home-run came in the fourth game of the season for Chicago; by my count this was the eleventh league game of the season. Just forty homers came from the National League's first season, led by George Hall with five.

Most fans are familiar with the home run environment until Babe Ruth's uppercut swing changed baseball in the 1920s. Indeed, it was not until after the beginning of the American League that the 10,000th home run was hit, in 1903. (Baseball-Reference estimated which home run was hit based on the start of game times and the inning in which they were hit.) It was Joe Tinker, of Tinker-Evers-Chance fame, that knocked a homer off the Cardinals' Mordecai Brown in he 8th inning of a game on September 5. Interestingly, the early seasons of the 20th century saw a sharp decline in home runs. To illustrate this, I've plotted the first fifty years of the NL with respect to At Bats per Home Run:

As we've covered here before, there was a major rules change in the National League at the turn of the century; for the first time, a foul ball counted as a strike. The result was a large jump in strikeouts and a huge drop in total offense, home runs included. For comparison, the 1902 American League saw 147 at bats between home runs, while the National League averaged more than double-- 389 AB/HR. The following year, while the American League tried out the new foul rule experimentally, the numbers were much closer: 203 AB/HR for the AL and 251 AB/HR in the NL. The American League continued to show a slightly higher home run rate throughout the Dead Ball Era. One thing that's interesting is that the precipitous drop in HR rate occured in both leagues around the time Babe Ruth started playing first time. This suggests that although Ruth was certainly transcendent, his approach was not unique in baseball at the time.

It was around this time that Wally Pipp hit the 20,000th ML home run, off of the Senators' Joe Martina in the eighth inning on May 3, 1924. With the Live Ball Era in effect, each of the next ten thousand home runs took eight years, bringing us to the 50,000th home run, hit on June 30, 1948. It was the Giants' Johnny Mize, knocking one off of the Braves' Bill Voiselle in the sixth inning. The Pitchers' Heaven mini-period interviened and slowed homer rates a bit in the 1960s, but with the lowering of the mound in 1969, combined with expansion, baseball was primed for its 100,000th home run.

Entering play on April 30, 1970, the number was very close to 100K, and with 22 homers hit that day, the best estimate is that Atlanta Braves catcher Hal King hit the historic round-tripper in the second inning of a game against the Cubs. The Braves started their game at 8 PM and actually had a home run in the first, by Rico Carty. Fifteen batters came to the plate before King, and the entire game took just 2:33, so perhaps his homer was hit somewhere between 8:30 and 8:45. Five homers were in this game, two by Carty, and one by someone you may have heard of-- Hank Aaron. Unfortunately, the start time of the other games that day are unavailable, so it is unclear how close we came to the milestone being held by one of the best ever.

The second hundred-thousand home runs took considerably less than 90 years, it would come in 1999, in an interleague game. According to baseball-reference, it was in this game, when the Yankees' Paul O'Neill hit one deep to right centerfield, clearing the wall at Dolphins Stadium to lead off the top of the fourth inning. Livan Hernandez was the victim, and also gave up two other homers in the game. Incredibly, forty-eight home runs were hit on June 12, 1999, eleven of which came in day games (the Marlins-Yankees game started at 7:06 EDT). There were a number of early home runs in the night-games, but b-r.com feels that O'Neill's home run is the milestone.

This year, home runs have fallen from their incredible pace in the late-1990s. In 2007, the AL hit homers at a rate of 33.1 AB/HR, and the NL at 34.8 AB/HR. The rates are similar this season, and work out to almost exactly one per game for each team. So with 350 home runs to go for a quarter-million, will the milestone be passed this season? Through August 25, teams have played 3,928 games of the scheduled 4,860 (remember, I'm counting each contest twice, once for each team playing). With about 932 games left to play, it's almost certain that the milestone will fall sometime in September. Can we pinpoint this?

Based on the number of scheduled games according to mlb.com, there will be 342 games played between August 26 and September 7. If the number of homers continues at an average rate, it's likely that the milestone will occur sometime that Sunday afternoon. If that's the case, count on Immaculate Inning to do a liveblog of the events of the day, remote in hand. (Of course, with my luck it will happen on Fox Blackout Day...)

In the meantime, follow along with the Quarter Million Homer Widget, now featured in the sidebar.

Mariano Rivera: Greatest Pitcher of All Time

In a mop-up role, having not pitched for four days, Mariano Rivera took the mound in the ninth inning, facing the heart of the Baltimore Orioles' lineup. It started poorly, as Aubry Huff knocked Rivera's fourth cutter into the right field seats. But Mo settled down to retire Melvin Mora, Jay Payton, and Kevin Millar in order, vaulting himself into the history books.

That one inning pitched last night in Baltimore gives Mariano Rivera 1000.33 innings pitched for his career. By reaching this plateau, Rivera now qualifies for the all-time ERA and ERA+ leaderboards, according to Baseball-Reference.com. First, the classic statistic-- earned run average. Rivera now ranks 17th all time, tied with Jim Scott. Four of the pitchers ahead of Rivera had their careers end before 1900; the latest anyone ahead of him pitched was 1933 (some guy named Ruth), pitched seriously- 1927 (Walter Johnson).

If there's one thing the statistics revolution has taught me, it's that athletes are best judged relative to their peers. For while raw statistics are impressive, their true meaning only comes from studying how much better a great athlete was, compared to his competition. And so we reveal the new career adjusted ERA+ leader: Mariano Rivera. According to ERA+, Rivera has, since 1995, been 98 percent better than his peers, measured by ability to prevent earned runs. Rivera not only takes the top spot; he dominates it. Which raises the question: is Mariano Rivera the greatest pitcher of all time?

Clearly, mlb.com does not think a reliever should enter the discussion. Officially, to qualify for the career ERA title, one has to pitch 2000 innings, double the amount required by baseball-reference. A starting pitcher probably could eclipse the lower mark (1000 innings) in four or five full seasons; indeed Jake Peavy (7 seasons, 1202 IP) and Brandon Webb (6 seasons- 1235 IP) already grace the Active ERA leaderboard. But none of them have an ERA+ anywhere near the range of Mariano Rivera. Is his elevated ERA+ a factor of being a relief pitcher?

The short answer is: perhaps. Goose Gossage, whose recent election to the Hall of Fame might finally open the door for closers, finished with 1809 IP and an ERA+ of 126. All-Time saves leader Trevor Hoffman, who will soon match the 1000 IP plateau, has a career ERA+ of 144. Rather than try and name everyone; here is a list of all pitchers who relieved at least 80% of their games and threw at least 750 innings. Even with a lowered standard, only one other pitcher eclipses Pedro Martinez's record for career ERA+ by a starter (157)- Billy Wagner at 181. Rivera well out-paces Wagner's 181, although it lends some credence to the theory that relievers have inflated ERA+ that shouldn't be quantitatively compared to that of a lifetime starter.

Still, one has to expand the field to include all pitchers with 200 IP to find a single player who eclipses Rivera's ERA+ mark (and I didn't like who I found there either). Whatever the adjustment made to Rivera's numbers, due to his pitching role, it cannot completely erase how Rivera's peers have failed to come anywhere close to his production. Among pitchers with 1000 IP, Rivera is also in the top 25 in Strikeouts 9/IP, all time. Since 1995, no pitcher has prevented home runs better than Rivera. For fourteen seasons, Rivera has compiled a resume that I believe allows him to be compared with the starting pitchers, and statistically he rises as the best. And of course Rivera is, without a doubt the greatest relief pitcher of all time.

But if we can define "greatness" by performance relative to one's peers, no pitcher is greater than Mariano Rivera.

Who cares to challenge this?

Photo credit

Long and Winding Road (Records)

It is with tireless enthusiasm that we here at The Immaculate Inning stand strong against inaccuracy in sports journalism. Short-tempered mainstream media like Buzz Bissinger and Stephen A. Smith like to criticize blogs because we don't have training and access. Yet, along with more famous blogs such as Fire Joe Morgan or Dodger Thoughts, it is up to us to take to task those who, despite training and access, can't even do a simple Google search. For me, the journey is just as interesting as the valid goal of achieving accuracy, and many of my posts here recently have been inspired by the mistakes of others.

So, standing on the wobbly shoulders of behemoths, I offer this Red Sox-Yankees series preview. This particular piece has Matt Brown of Yahoo Sports on the by-line, but the story was taken mostly from the Associated Press. The puzzling sentence:

Trying to improve on their mediocre 23-23 road record after sweeping
Minnesota and Oakland at home, the Yankees will send Joba Chamberlain (2-3,
2.52) to the mound.

Also appears here (Minneapolis Star-Tribune), here (NorthJersey.com), here (ESPN.com), and here (Connectiuct's theday.com). The Associated Press was convinced, without much evidence, that a 23-23 road record was "mediocre." It sure seems so, compared to the team's 56-45 overall record, and brightly contrasted the six straight games they'd won in Yankee Stadium leading up to the series in Fenway. Yet, a simple check of baseball-reference.com tells a different story: The Yankees (now 25-24 on the road) have the second-best road record in the American League! In fact, the team that they were trying to "improve on their mediocre" road record against, the Boston Red Sox, have one of the worst road-records in baseball, at 24-32. It is puzzling, even disappointing, that a news agency as distinguished as the Associated Press didn't bother verifying its numbers.

Meanwhile, my "Random Baseball Stat" wheels were already churning- a .500 record is second-best in the AL? Is that an odd happenstance? Many baseball analysts point to the home-road splits of individual players to look for evidence that their home ballpark is to credit/blame for their performance: Matt Holliday is a Coors creation; Jake Peavy benefits from the large stadium in Petco. What, then, is to be made of an entire team that underperforms on the road? If the team is constructed in such a way as to benefit the home ball-park, it's certainly possible that their performance on the road will suffer more than normal. But, we must first determine what is normal.

I've tabulated the total and road records for each team in the past two seasons. You can play with the spreadsheet yourself by going here. The average AL team, in 2008, sees a winning percentage drop of 0.059 when playing on the road. The Red Sox, meanwhile, suffer a drop of .142, third-worst in all of baseball. Curiously, the two teams below the Red Sox in this category are the Rays and the Cubs, who each have higher overall winning percentages. Might having a poor road performance be not all that damaging to a team's playoff chances?

Looking at 2007, the first thing to notice is that the American League showed, overall, a lower dropoff between overall, and road winning percentages. (0.045 versus 0.059 this year) The 2007 playoff teams are all over the map, from the Angels (0.086 difference) to the Red Sox (0.037 difference). The National League is similar, especially when you consider the Mets, who lost the division in the last week of the season despite a better record on the road than at Shea.

In 2006, the story is similar. The difference in the average team's overall record versus the road record were about the same as in 2007; 0.045 for the AL and 0.046 in the NL. In the American League, the playoff teams were slightly biased toward being road warriors; the Tigers, Yankees, and Angels all had better than average road records, while the Twins were below average. The NL, meanwhile, had teams two teams above and two teams below average, including the World Champion St. Louis Cardinals, who had one one of the worst road records in baseball.

It would definitely take an examination of all 14 wild-card era seasons to make a conclusion about the relationship of road performance and playoff appearance. In addition, it would probably be helpful to look at each team from a runs scored/runs allowed perspective, to see if any team got unlucky on the road. Still, the lesson remains that "mediocre" is a term to be applied to relative status, not absolute status. It is clear that teams which underperform their overall record while on the road are not rare.

Pitcher as Fielder

In response to Matt's post about near-Perfect games, jl25and3 wrote

"I'll disagree with you on Dick Bosman. The pitcher-as-fielder is considered separately from the pitcher-as-pitcher, and that's the way it should be. You're judging his pitching performance, and his fielding isn't relevant.

Think of it this way: if a batter reaches on a pitcher's error, would you count that in the pitcher's DIPS? Of course not, because it had nothing to do with his pitching.

Once the ball is hit to him, he's no longer a pitcher. He's just another infielder. That infielder's bad play shouldn't affect any evaluation of the pitcher's performance."

I started to write a response but then figured it deserved it's own post. I disagree strongly with jl. The purpose of the pitcher is to prevent the other team from scoring runs. It is extremely arbitrary to say his job as a pitcher ends as soon as the ball leaves his hand.

If a pitcher is a complete liability on defense then he cannot be a successful pitcher. A pitcher who can pitch well but cannot field his position isn't any more useful to his team than a pitcher who can't pitch well. I'd argue that batters who get on base due to errors by the pitcher should count as earned runs if they come around to score and should count toward a pitcher's WHIP(more reasonable to make a new stat called WHEPIR Walks + Hits + Errors by Pitcher / Innings Pitched).

Let's consider 3 possible results from a 3-2 count.
1) The pitcher misses the zone and the batter walks.
2) The pitcher leaves the ball up and the batter gets a single.
3) The pitcher makes a decent pitch and the batter hits a dribbler to the mound. The pitcher misplays it and the batter gets to first.

Scenarios 1 and 2 are considered the pitcher's fault as a Pitcher. In scenario 3 it's considered the pitcher's fault as a Fielder. In all three the batter is on first due only to the actions of the pitcher. I don't see the purpose of separating pitcher's pitching statistics and pitcher's fielding statistics outside of a thought experiment. The pitcher's job before he pitches is to prevent runs and the pitcher's job after the ball leaves his hand is to prevent runs. The player who throws the ball to the catcher and the player who fields the 1 position are one in the same so why should stats treat them as different people?

Look, A Baseball Post!

Now that I've finally recovered from my duel battle with a fever and March Madness (solution: More Cowbell), I can return to making regular posts. Baseball season starts in less than one week, and everyone is wondering who this years' breakout players are. Projection systems such as PECOTA and ZiPS use millions of data points to predict future production based on past results. However, a lot can happen to a baseball player physically and mentally between seasons, and some look towards spring training to get an inkling of who's gonna bust out. Traditionally, spring training results are seen as the combination of small sample size and not caring. Hitters are trying to get their timing back (after all, hitting is timing) and in general swing a lot more than they would in a real game- leading to depressed on base percentages and a lot of strikeouts.

However, a tidbit I picked up reading a Baseball Prospectus article today was that there is some support for spring training results predicting regular season success. Specifically, a high slugging percentage in spring games has some correlation to "breakout seasons" by hitters. So I trotted over to the trusty statistics at mlb.com to check out who has been slugging up a storm in 2007. I picked an arbitrary cutoff of 45 plate appearances, and here is the Top 15 Sluggiest Players in spring training:

Taking a look at some of these players: Raul Ibanez had a solid yet quiet season for the last place Mariners, hitting 33 homers and 33 doubles. He'll turn 36 this season so I wouldn't expect a huge breakout, but its a good bet he could equal that production this season. Khalil Greene had a fairly average season last year, which follows an equally average season in 2005. I'm doubtful that this strong spring showing indicates a return to the form he showed in his first full season, when he hit .273/.349/.446. Despite the depressed rate stats the last two seasons, Greene has hit exactly 15 home runs in each of his three full seasons, so he's got that going for him, which is nice.

Scott Hairston has gotten a lot of at-bats for the Diamondbacks in spring training, and marks the first player on the list that I've never heard of. According to this article, Hairston stands a chance of making the Opening Day roster for the DBacks, after a very strong performance in AAA last season. While his career minor league OPS of .972 would be much more useful at second base, if he can keep up that level of production as a corner outfielder, its good news in Arizona. Derek Lee, Chase Utley, Aramis Ramirez, Vernon Wells, and Adam Dunn aren't really candidates for "breakout seasons" as they are established hitters; however, Lee had a bit of a down year in 2006, so maybe this indicates a turnaround.

Brad Eldred gets the award for the least likely to replicate the numbers in the regular season. Stuck behind Sean Casey and his bellyfullofguts, Eldred likely won't see more than 70 AB in the majors in 2007. And in those 70 AB, Eldred might strike out in 30 of them. Baseball Prospectus notes that Eldred might have a shot with a decent hitting coach as a DH, but in the National League his utility might be in pinch hitting. Yawn.

Ryan Zimmerman and Brad Hawpe are both looking to prove that their rookie and sophomore seasons, respectively, were not flukes. This sort of disqualifies them from the "breakout season" search, as they've already had this- it's unlikely that either player will match his 2006 slugging percentage. This is also sort of true for Ian Kinsler, who wins the "2006 starter I've never heard of" award- if Kinsler can keep up a .800+ OPS as a second baseman, that is very valuable for the Rangers. Michael Cuddyer, in addition to having a funny name, also had a "breakout" season in 2006, increasing his EqA to .296 from .267 in 2005; perhaps the strong spring indicates a continuation of this performance.

This narrows down the "breakout" candidates on this list to Brandon Phillips and Johnny Estrada. At age 34, Estrada is unlikely to refind the power he had in 2004, though a change of scenery to Milwaukee could do the trick. Phillips, meanwhile, could be an interesting case. The Reds' second baseman had an above average campaign in 2006, his first full season in the majors. Nothing in Phillips' past suggests slugging prowess: in seven minor league seasons, he slugged .418, though his best year came at a high level- AAA Buffalo in 2004 (.430). PECOTA thinks that Phillips' 2006 should be a typical level of production for the 24-year-old, but perhaps there is some room for improvement, based on his spring-training numbers.

Congratulations to Brandon Phillips, who shall be The Immaculate Inning's First Annual Breakout Candidate. For winning, Phillips receives a lifetime supply of Clearasil products. Enjoy!

More Immaculate Inning Fun

So, in the spirit of starting off this blog, I decided to update the Immaculate Inning page at wikipedia, by adding the victims from many more feats. With the help of www.retrosheet.org I was able to complete the list back to 1959 (before then retrosheet does not have play by play data). I was plugging along nicely until I discovered something possibly alarming to the purity of the list. Lynn McGlothen had been listed as achieving this feat on August 15, 1975. However, the play by play clearly shows that Tony Perez led off the inning with a single. I feel this betrays the spirit of the immaculate inning, so I deleted this entry from the Wiki page. I also sent my evidence to Baseball Almanac, from which the Wiki list was gathered . Pending a response by the experts, I believe we can now say that there have been 39 immaculate innings by 36 different pitchers.

Some trivia: While only three pitchers have ever pitched two Immaculate Innings, four players have been victims of the feat: Jose Vizcaino, Carlton Fisk, Jeff Reed, and Greg Luzinski.. Further, if McGlothen's inning is excluded, then in all of the instances of the feat, one thing will be common: no pitcher has retired all three batters on a called third strike.

Yeah, so baseball statistics have pretty much been life consuming since I was about five years old, and I even have the picture to prove it. I might post it sometime, if you're lucky.