Baseball 2014

[Valmy]

Valmy, you catch the Horns - Owls game?  2-0 in the regionals now.  Rice was butthurt and didn't want to shake hands. 

I thoroughly enjoyed being brutally sunburnt between homeplate and the home dugout.  That was a shockingly easy Super, Augie has these guys playing elite level baseball.

Oh and you posted below my post on the Super thread on Shaggybevo.

[MadBurgerMaker]

Oh and you posted below my post on the Super thread on Shaggybevo.

Man, I still can't figure out why the pitchout is apparently something Doug Glanville is seeing for the first time today.

[Valmy]

Here we go MBM

[HVC]

Seems like a bad move to centre your poster with two constipated pitchers

[Sophie Scholl]

Lonnie Chisenhall having a hell of a night.  5-5 so far with 3 hr, a single, and double.  9 rbi.  I'm hoping he somehow manages to tack on a triple with an rbi.

[Valmy]

Seems like a bad move to centre your poster with two constipated pitchers

It's called intensity and competitiveness

[Valmy]

Hey MBM here are the guys on the way to Omaha, they arrived there yesterday morning.  Can't wait for tomorrow 

[MadBurgerMaker]

[Valmy]

That loss on Saturday was a perfect encapsulation of this season    Still have hopes they can mount a run.

In other baseball news Tony Gwynn died this morning 

RIP to the one of my all time favorites.

[derspiess]

Damn, that sucks.  Didn't realize he was sick.

[MadBurgerMaker]

I totally forgot about the game on Saturday.  Like...I didn't remember it was even going on right up until I read your post, Val.   

[The Minsky Moment]

Knew he was sick - thought he had already passed on.   

My favorite Tony Gwinn stat: averaged over his entire career he had 21.4 at bats for every strikeout.

Since he retired, no player has reached that rate in a single season.'
Last year the league leaders were at 14.9 and 9.8.

Unless there are big changes to game there will literally never be another like him.

[jimmy olsen]

Gwyn was so awesome.  He was such a nice guy.

So many amazing stats

So here are 19 incredible facts about No. 19, Mr. Padre, the illustrious Tony Gwynn:

• Gwynn's rookie season, in which he played in 54 games, is the only year of his career that he didn't hit .300. He hit .289. His 19 consecutive .300 seasons are second to only Ty Cobb, who had 23.

• Gwynn's career .338 batting average is of a different era. As Yahoo Sports' Jeff Passan notes, every other hitter with an average of .338 or above started his career before 1940.

• From 1995, the year he turned 35, to 2001, the final year of his career, Gwynn hit .350, with 937 hits. He never stopped being productive at the plate.

• For his career batting average to slip below .300, Gwynn would have needed to add 1,183 hitless at-bats to his total — roughly the equivalent of two full seasons. (Via @AceballStats)

• Of the 12 top batting seasons since the expansion era began in 1961, Gwynn owns four of them. Those are: .368 in 1995, .370 in 1987, .372 in 1997 and .394 in the strike-shortened 1994 season. (via Baseball Reference)

• In 1994, Jeff Bagwell hit .368, the 13th best season since 1961, but didn't even win the NL batting title because Gwynn was nearly 30 points better.

• Gwynn had nine five-hit games in his career. Only Pete Rose had more, with 10. Gwynn also had 45 games with at least four hits. That puts him 10th on the all-time list.

• In 2,440 career games, Gwynn had only 34 multi-strikeout games. So, the odds were better that Gwynn would get four hits than striking out twice. Let that sink in.

• Gwynn's 434 career strikeouts are an amazing mark for a player who had 10,232 career plate appearances. Paul Waner is the only member of the 3,000 hit club to do better. He struck out 376 times in 10,766 plate appearances from 1926-1945.

• For comparison's sake: Adam Dunn has struck out 486 times since the start of 2012. Mark Reynolds struck out exactly 434 times in 2009 and 2010.

• In 1995, Gwynn struck out only 15 times in 535 at-bats. That's insane. As Aceball Stats points out, 27 current MLB players have already struck out than more than 15 times in June.

• Eleven times in his career Gwynn managed to not strikeout for 20 consecutive games. The longest streak, 34 games, came in 1995.

• Only once in his career did Gwynn have a three-stikeout game. Eerily, it came against Bob Welch on April 14, 1986. Welch died last week at age 57. That was quite a game. Welch pitched 9 2/3 innings, striking out 12, but the Padres won 4-3. Gwynn had a hit earlier in the game, then reached on an error in the 10th inning and scored to tie the game at 3. The next inning, the Padres won on a walk-off homer.

• More on Gwynn's lack of strikeouts: He faced some great pitchers, but even the cream of the crop had trouble getting him out. Neither Pedro Martinez nor Greg Maddux ever struck him out. Maddux faced Gwynn 107 times and Gwynn hit .415 off Maddux.

• As Yahoo Sports' Eric Edholm dug up: Gwynn had 323 career at-bats against Maddux, Martinez, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz and struck out only three times. Glavine got him twice. Pete Abraham of the Boston Globe notes that Curt Schilling managed to strike out Gwynn twice in 43 at-bats.

• Gwynn never hit for .400 in one season, though he came close to matching Ted Williams. In that strike-shortened 1994 season, Gwynn finished at .394 through 110 games. He was hitting .423 in the second half of the season, so it was very much a possibility.

• Gwynn did top .400 for a 179-game span between July 3, 1993 and May 9, 1995. He hit .403 in 697 at-bats.

• In two-strike counts, Gwynn hit .302. That's a statistic that's only been measured since 1988, and since then, Gwynn's mark is easily the best. Wade Boggs, next on the list, hit .260 in two-strike counts. (Via @Castrovince)

• From 1984-1999, there was only one season that Tony Gwynn wasn't named an All-Star. That was 1988. But he won the NL batting title that year, hitting .313, so he got the last laugh.

[The Minsky Moment]

No one has ever hit over .400 while striking out more than 50 times; most .400 hitters struck out less than 40.  Which is basically impossible in the modern game.  That is why we haven't seen a .400 hitter in the modern era and are unlikely to see one again soon - along with extraordinary skill you need a certain amount of "hit luck" and that requires balls be put into play.  Gwynn came the closest because he was such a throwback but there is no one like him on the horizon.  Mauer was probably the closest but his K rate is still a lot higher.

[Valmy]

1994 was such an amazing baseball season.  Just tragic that was the one that had to be wiped out.