The Porkchop Express said:

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AgRyan04 said:

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Luis Gonzalez has more career HRs than Ryne Sandberg.


Bobby Bonds was a 30/30 player for three different teams.

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Gonzo home runs 1996-2001, can you detect a pattern?
15
10
23
26
31
57

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Kirby Puckett

Home runs, first three seasons:

Zero
4
31

That stat always baffled me.

And another I'm suprised by....Johnny Bench only hit .300 once

Fair point!

AgRyan04 said:

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And another I'm suprised by....Johnny Bench only hit .300 once

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From a historical perspective, his career is a bit a of a disappointment. At age 22 he had 45 HR and 148 RBI and hit .293 and at 24 he had 40 HR and 125 RBI. He never got past 33 homers again and didn't even get to 400 for his career. He hit the injury/beatdown wall pretty early around age 31, and retired at 35.

That is interesting...makes sense from position standpoint. I imagine if he was the in AL, they would have protected him a bit as the rule was introduced.

Something else I saw on Bench - he is one of three players win win a Gold Glove in each of his first ten full seasons in the bigs (Ichiro and Arenado are the other two)

Jim Bunning is the only player voted into the Hall of Fame and the US Senate

I know it's not THE least impressive stat line ever but I saw Zoilo Versalles's numbers from his 1965 MVP campaign and was a bit suprised at how pedestrian it was.

Versalles: 182 H, 126 R, 19 HR, 77 RBI, 27 SB, .273/.319/.462

For comparison, the NL winner was Willie Mays
Mays: 177 H, 118 R, 52 HR, 112 RBI, 9 SB, .317/.398/.645

In his defense, his defense was good - he was the GG winner at SS, but man it coulsnt have been THAT good. No one since has won an MVP with a lower BA and almost every winner since who had a sub-.300 BA has had 30-45 HRs.

So the guy with the longest game streak also played in the longest game? Wut?????

The New York Mets played the 1974 season at Shea Stadium…but so did the New York Yankees as Yankee Stadium was under renovation.

The New York Jets didn't play a home game until mid October.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/n/nolanth01.shtml

Someone on the History Forum posted an interesting oddity about Don Gullett. He passed away this past Wednesday.

I'm guessing a lot of people now aren't familiar with him because he had his career cut so short by injuries. But he was on the fast track to the HOF. Finished with a career record of 109-50, an era of 3.11 and won four World Series rings with first the Big Red Machine and then the Yankees.

What he did to make him worthy of this thread is that he gave up Willie Mays' final HR, no. 660. And then he gave up Hank Aaron's 660th homer.

This one gets me on Immaculate Grid. I can never get this stat through my brain.

I never even knew Robb Nen's dad played in the bigs!

From 1901-1955, there was only one member of the 30-30 club in MLB. That was Ken Williams, who in 1922 had a monster year for the St. Louis Browns, leading the league in HR (39), RBI (155), and total bases (367) while stealing 37 bases, hitting .332 and finishing with a 1.040 OPS. Despite that success, he finished his career with just 196 HR and 154 SB.
In 1956, Willie Mays became the 2nd member of the club, and the first in the NL with a 36-40 season, and hit 35-38 the next year. The AL would go 48 years between Williams' feat in 1922 and its next one, which came from Tommy Harper with the Brewers in 1970 (31-38). All told, the NL has almost lapped the AL in # of membres, with 41 compared to 23, with Carlos Beltran split between the two leagues with the Royals and Astros in 2004.

Jose Canseco was famously the first 40-40 guy in 1988. He and A-Rod (1998) are the only two guys in AL history to have a season of at least 40 homers combined with at least 30 steals. Meanwhile, in the NL, the 40-30 club includes Hank Aaron in 1963, Barry Bonds in 1996, Ellis Burks in 1996, Larry Walker, Jeff Bagwell, and Bonds in 1997, Bagwell again in 1999, Alfonso Soriano in 2006, Ryan Braun in 2012, Ronald Acuna in 2019, Christian Telich in 2019, and Acuna again 2023.

List of all the Major League Baseball Teams | Baseball-Reference.com

The Giants will join the Cubs this season as the only teams with 100,000 all time runs scored, and the Cards should make it 3 as long as their offense isn't historically bad.

In 2025, the Cubs should become the first team with 200,000 hits.

Also this season, the Rangers will be the first expansion era club with 10,000 home runs.

They just don't make pitchers like they used to. Most pitchers won't ha e that many CGs in their career.

I didn't realize teams were still using 4 man rotations as late as 1972. That alone makes a pretty significant difference in the number of games a starting pitcher appears in (up to 41) vs a 5 man rotation (33 or 34).

So, who had a better year, Carlton in 1972, or Bob Gibson in 1968 - 34 GS, 22-9, 1.12 ERA, 28 CG, 13 Shutouts, 268 strikeouts. 23 CG is his last 25 starts. IIRC, the only games where he didn't finish, he was lifted for a pinch hitter.

Found this one today: the 1968 All-Star Game, the only ASG without an RBI.

Quote:

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It's not that there weren't plenty of Hall of Fame-caliber hitters playing, but the 1968 All Star Game remains the only American League-vs.-National League mid-summer classic ever played without an RBI. The NL won 1-0 on today's date in 1968 in the Astrodome.

Willie Mays of the San Francisco Giants scored the game's unearned run in the first inning on a double play ball. NL pitchers held the American League to only 3 hits and no bases on balls while striking out 11. The NL's starter, Don Drysdale who pitched the first 3 innings, took the victory. Also pitching for the NL were Juan Marichal, Steve Carlton, Tom Seaver, Ron Reed and Jerry Koosman.

AL pitchers Luis Tiant, Blue Moon Odom, Denny McLain, Sam McDowell, Mel Stottlemyre and Tommy John held the NL to 5 hits and 6 bases on balls while striking out 9. Tiant took the loss.

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In the entire history of MLB, there has been only on instance of a pitcher-catcher battery both hitting grand slams in the same game.

Buster Posey and Madison Bumgarner, SF Giants vs Arizona Diamondbacks, July 13, 2014.

And now that both leagues are using the DH, it will never happen again.

Fuzzy Dunlop said:

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They just don't make pitchers like they used to. Most pitchers won't ha e that many CGs in their career.

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They just don't throw the same pitches.

I am addicted to Trevor Baur's youtube channel which if you haven't watched gives the most detailed look into the mind of a pitcher that I have ever seen. My son and all of his teammates watch religiously. Anyway you will not hear him talk to much about spin rates and only a couple of times a game tries to throw the ball as hard as he can.

When all of those pitchers started complaining the other day about how the pitch clock is increasing injury risk I laughed. How about learning how to throw a changeup instead of worrying about your RPMs.

Yeah, my kid is a big fan of his also.