Notes and Essays, Week Ending 5/23

5/17 N1: Baseball Reference WAR only gives a modest defensive value advantage to playing shortstop (10 runs a year) versus playing third base (think 4 or 5 runs a year) — so that third baseman Miguel Vargas is seen as worth a half win more this year than shortstop Colson Montgomery. Their OPSes are .869 and .854, respectively, Vargas having batted 10 more times. Rounding is inconvenient here, but WAR has Vargas’s edges by area 2 runs in batting, 1 run in baserunning, and 3 runs in fielding. (Those are actually some decent edges about a quarter of the way through the season.)

It’s still interesting, because I would think our trigger fingers would be more likely to give Montgomery a down-ballot MVP vote than Vargas. Our working understanding of their fielding also contains the Baseball Savant take, though, which is that Montgomery has been a much better fielder (+7 runs for him, 0 for Vargas). On Fangraphs, it is Montgomery in the WAR lead, by 0.2 wins.

5/17 N2: There is lots of combined slug in right field, but it seems there are few true right field regulars. Browsing individual innings counts for players in the field in general, I came away thinking I haven’t at all appreciated how aggressively teams use the DH to “load manage,” and the extent to which game counts for many players come with a catch. Whether DH half days are entirely what goes on with right fielders, or whether they tend to also play the other outfield positions, I don’t know, but here is some data.

If you lose on the road and also trailed in the game after 8, you only play 8 innings, so the average MLB team played 1436 innings in the field in 2025, or 8.86 per 9. You can also think of this as 159.6 full game. If 1436 is a full schedule, then, 1300 innings represents 146.7 games. Seems to me like every red-blooded American should be able to do that.

But among right fielders, only Soto, with 1374, made it to 1300 last year. With 1299 innings in right, Fernando Tatis was 2nd. Nick Castellanos, bless his heart, played 1208.1 in right despite his benching. He still came in 3rd place in right.

The picture in 2024 was far worse for us hidebound completists. Castellanos took top honors with 1363.2 innings, followed by Soto with 1277.2. But they were joined by only Adolis Garcia and Anthony Santander at 1100+, and by only George Springer and Jo Adell at 1000+ (or about 113 full games) in right.

2023 was a better year, with two guys in the 1300+ club (Ronald Acuna and Kyle Tucker), and two more less than 9 innings short of that (Lane Thomas and Castellanos). But 2022 was a bigger travesty than 2024. Soto led with with 1298.1. Only Tucker and Mookie Betts joined him with more than 1100 innings, and only six right fielders in all played 1000 innings.

We can’t necessarily just pinpoint the DH by comparing a pre-DH year. It’s just common sense that the universal DH is a huge factor, but increased load management could also be at play, as well as right field seemingly not being singled out for this kind of committee work before. But I checked 2012. That year had 5 1300+ inning right fielders (and just one in the AL). There were 12 1100+ inning right fielders. Extra-inning games were allowed to go to completion, but instead of an average of 1436 innings, the average team played 1445 innings (a difference of just a game).

Shortstop has the prime athletes now, the guys teams want out there literally every day and feel can carry the load. Seven shortstops (Geraldo Perdomo, Willy Adames, Dansby Swanson, J.P. Crawford, Elly De La Cruz, Francisco Lindor and Trevor Story) played 1350+ innings last year. With a median age of 30, this was apparently not an age thing, not a matter of the best shortstops being young at a higher rate than at any other positions, and thus apt to play more. I do the higher numbers relate to the perceived defensive value and indispensability of the position. The iron-men catchers don’t play nearly every inning, it is true, but they practically can’t. Center field does seem to show some of the specialization of shortstop in the numbers. But the way Matt Olson and Pete Alonso are at first every day does make you recognize the limits of this thesis.

5/17 N3: The three third basemen who logged the most innings last year made for an unlikely group. Their innings have plummeted, and at least with hindsight, this seems predictable. Eugenio Suarez led, followed by Ke’Bryan Hayes and Ryan McMahon. So one guy was a below-average fielder at the position, and the other two guys offensive concerns.

The Reds ended up with both Suarez and Hayes, and you know how things have played out this year. Suarez mostly DHed, then got hurt, while Hayes’ hitting has been so bad he nows sits just 16th in third-base innings.

McMahon has sat at times for Amed Rosario and is one behind Hayes in the inning standings.

Overall, last year, mixed use of third seems to have been quite prevalent, but the position was probably more settled than right field.

5/17 N4: He began the year in the minor leagues and has played seldom enough against left-handers that he can only claim one hit against them, but Sam Antonacci still has a share of the AL lead with 8 hit-by-pitches. He had 35 in the minors last year.

5/18 N1: Chuck Knoblauch is only 7 years older than I am but his uncle Eddie, who debuted in the minors in 1938, was almost as old as my grandparents. Eddie perhaps never made the majors because of World War II, and because of the abyss that was the Cardinals’ minor league system. He got no higher than ‘B’ ball, but before the war he hit .330, .335, .345, and .336. His career after the war spanned 10 years in the Texas League (Double-A), in most of which he put up solid averages, and pruduced seasons of 108. 107, 102 and 100 walks. Up until his final 1955, he had never hit more than 2 home runs in a year. So there was a lot of Eddie in Chuck. Chuck would top out at 18 home runs, but hit just 5 home runs over his first three seasons and 459 games.

Some of you will have trouble keeping a straight face because of Chuck’s throwing difficulties, but Chuck’s own dad was a minor league pitcher, Ray Knoblauch. He is a known 84-81 over 8 seasons and also finished up his career in the Texas League.

He did have awful control problems. He had seasons of 82 walks in 84 innings, and 148 walks in 226 innings. He went 20-7 in the latter season, and to compete as effectively as he did overall with his poor control, he must have had some talent.

Both older Knoblauchs were born in Bay City, Michigan, but apparently died in Texas. Chuck was born in Houston and was a late-first-round pick out of Texas A&M.

5/18 N2: Drew Rasmussen has only 9 walks in 48 innings this year and just 2.02-per-9 over a 476.1 inning Rays career. Over the last two years, almost 90% of his pitches have been fastballs and cutters, and if a pitcher can get away with that, the simple arsenal really cuts down on bases on balls.

He’s a guy that any team would want to have, and this praise deservedly issued, he’s been a bit invisible recently. In his past four starts, he’s given up 2 or 3 runs in each, with between 5 to 6 innings pitched, and 4 to 7 hits allowed.

5/18 N3: Confidence in Eury Perez now must be low, or at least impatience high. He was Rasmussen’s mound opponent on Sunday.

5/18 N4: Jacob Young homering against Brandon Young Sunday. For pitchers, the Young of chief significance is of course Cy. Among position players, whether we go by bWAR or something else, Michael seems to have been clearly the best player.

5/18 N5: I read that the 4 RBI Jake Burger had Sunday tied his career high. It seemed a pretty modest total, and Burger has very good power, 29.1 HR per 575 AB over his career. So this surprised me. On the other hand, one can well see how 4 might be a threshold, as it requires more than one RBI hit or at-bat in a game.

Trying to get a line, I first found that there have been 301 5+ RBI performances from 2024-2026. With 4,860 games a full year’s slate, there have been 11,116 games over 2024-2026. With nine starters per game, that’s 100,044 game starts in that period. Assuming (not quite correctly) that you have to start a game to get 5 RBI, that means the chances of a 5+ RBI game are about 1 in 332 (100,044/301). Burger has started 457 games in his career. So, yes, in an average case, a player would have had a 5-RBI game this deep into Burger’s career.

5/18 N6: The trendline seems to be going up with Zack Wheeler’s velocity. Both his four-seam velocity (96.3) and sinker velcocity (95.4) on Sunday were a season’s best for him. His worst averages came in the second of his five starts, when he was at 93.6 and 93.4.

5/18 N7: So much for Konnor Griffin’s being 10 for 10 in steals, Wheeler and Realmuto breaking the streak. But unless he starts taking advice from Jose Caballero (who started 10 for 10 and then went into a 3 for 8 slump), he should be o.k.

5/18 N8: Getting contributions from a lot of different places, the Twins are an improbable 7th in MLB in runs. With their pitching and/or defense poor (7th-most runs allowed) and their luck likewise (Pythagorean luck -2 games), they haven’t derived as much benefit from that as one might think. Last year, Minnesota finished 23rd in runs.

5/18 N9: Obviously, with all of my complaints about position-player pitching and different rules for extra innings, I am an extreme stickler and an unabashed champion for statistical uniformity. But in one way, we have it better than fans of old. It seems that even the shorter 154-game schedule used to be aspirational.

I was looking at the 1929-1935 seasons. The National League, at least, was very consistent in playing the 1232+ games that could be a full schedule (but even some of those were inevitably ties that needed to be replayed to really get to 154 decisions per team).

NL games by year:

1929 1232

1930 1236

1931 1236

1932 1236

1933 1236

1934 1216

1935 1234

In the American League, games played was absolutely a variable, and ran lower.

1929 1226

1930 1232

1931 1236

1932 1230

1933 1216

1934 1230

1935 1222

The AL wouldn’t seem to have a special excuse in terms of weather. Not only is weather regional, tending to hit multiple major league cities at the same time, but only three of the AL clubs (Detroit, Cleveland, and Washington) didn’t have National League counterparts.

Note as well the disconnect between the leagues in common seasons. The AL played only 1216 games in 1933, while the NL played 1236, tied for its highest total.. But then in 1934, the AL played 14 games more than the NL. 1935 was pretty much the same situation as 1933, with the NL having a good advantage. So there’s no common trend.

Before I saw the low total for the NL in 1934 and just resigned myself to the fact that there were shortfalls, I wondered if the low total in the AL in 1933 pointed to some kind of strike or tempest. Skimming the daily schedules, I saw no evidence of that, no remarkable gaps.

I also checked the Red Sox, who played just 149 games, going 63-86 with no ties. Their longest down period from 9/14 to 9/17. I checked the Boston newspapers, and this was a matter of rain. The Red Sox did take it easy in September and the final day of the season in October, with only a total of 21 games. They had played 23-33 every month from May through August. I have them with 26 doubleheaders and 52 doubleheader games on the year. In no month did they play a majority of doubleheader games, although August saw them play six doubleheaders in ten days.

A first suspicion for the discrepancy would be that the NL was essentially forced to play every game to determine the pennant winner, while the AL was not. That doesn’t seem to hold water, with the Giants coming out 5 games ahead of the Pirates. The standings a few weeks earlier would probably be more instructive, but the Giants were up 8 games on September 11. It’s possible that the runner-up spots were more hotly contested in the NL, and that had to accommodated. Runner-up positions seemed to matter, perhaps both for bragging rights and bonus money.

The difference between leagues seems to point to the fact that they were independently run. There was no reason they had to take the same tack toward playing all 154 games, toward how much rain was too much rain not to play, toward afternoon scheduling and the threat of darkness setting in. Come to think of it, as night games began in 1935, my random period actually makes some sense to extract and study for its scheduling imperfections.

5/18 N10: I was looking at the record of the left-handed hitting “Camera Eye” Max Bishop, trying to figure out if he’d been platooned. In the process, I learned something a bit more general and more interesting, which was that other teams assiduously avoided throwing left-handers against Bishop’s A’s.

I revolved the analysis around right-handed Jimmie Foxx, but I’m sure his fellow Hall of Fame teammate, “Bucketfoot” Al Simmons, also dictated the strategy. I have “noted” about how a 19-year-old Foxx sat on the bench almost all year in 1927 before Jimmy Dykes gave him his chance when Dykes sustained an injury late in the year. In 1928, Foxx still wasn’t in the lineup every day until June, and his 32 “vs. lefty starts” from 104 total that year are strong evidence he was being platooned through the early sporadic activity. But the pattern emerges through Foxx’s final seven seasons with the team, from 1929-1935. We can assume that Foxx was pretty much playing every day, not getting the offday versus the nasty righty, and so was a sitting duck.

Over those seven years, 83.4% of his starts came against righties, the remainder (of course) against lefties. Overall in the American League in those years, righties started a lower percentage of games, 75.3%.

But we know the A’s had maybe the best lefty of all time going for them, Lefty Grove. They also had Rube Walberg. So the question was what the league percentage of righties was without the A’s own starting pitchers, which figured to be a higher number. That would give the expected percentage of righties Foxx should really have been facing.

Grove and Walberg departed after 1933, but for the whole period, the A’s still did have a low percentage of right-handed starters, 65.1%. But taking the A’s out, the league percentage only jumps to 76.7%.

The difference between Foxx and the league may or may not sound like much. But because the right-handed percentage is already approaching a ceiling, the implication is that over a quarter of the time (83.4-76.7)/(100-76.7), other teams passed their lefty up versus the A’s and threw a righty instead. Another framing is that from Foxx’s 1036 starts, he figured to face 795 righty starters; in fact he faced faced 864.

The effect panned out every year. Subtracting the league non A’s percentage of righty starts from the percentage that Foxx faced, we get

1929 +9.8%

1930 +6.0%

1931 +4.8%

1932 +4.3%

1933 +2.9%

1934 +10.2%

1935 +8.6%

I don’t know if I’d make anything of the drop four years running to start (while the numbers are still positive), tempting as it is to do that. What seems more significant to me is that Simmons repaired to the White Sox in 1933, making Foxx the lone significant right-handed threat. And teams did use more lefties. The big increase for 1934 and 1935 makes sense, because Hall of Fame left-hander Mickey Cochrane was gone. He wasn’t there to keep teams honest.

It’s a neat finding, but my experience doing the number crunching in similar cases is that it really didn’t hurt Foxx much. It’s not like he was facing all right-handers and the baseline was all left-handers. The sum effect is a small fraction of his platoon difference. It pales in comparison to the boost he got from Shibe Park. From 1929-1935, Foxx hit .363 with a .714 slugging average in Philadelphia; he hit .321 with a .603 SLG on the road.

5/19 N1: It would seem a follow-up would be to find how the Athletics did when a team did throw a left-hander against them. But without taking pains to establish context, the results would be hard to interpret. First, if we did a straight comparison between lefties and righties, we couldn’t assume that the average left-hander was of the same level as the average right-hander; second, we know that 25% of left-handed starts were getting skimmed from the top (or bottom, as it were) to begin with, because of the perceived dim prospect.

I therefore thought I would go for fun instead, and look at individual lefties’ performance against the A’s. I restricted to their peak years, 1929-1932. The team won the World Series in the first two, won the pennant in third, and scored 981 runs in the fourth behind Foxx’s 58 home runs. Stopping there makes sense, because after the season, Simmons and Dykes were jettisoned .

What I found was that the Yankees Lefty Gomez was a true A’s killer, with a 10-3 record against them in these peak seasons. Among lefty pitchers who started at least two games against the A’s, their composite record (starts and non-starts) against the A’s was 42-60 with a 5.25 E.R.A. Without Gomez, of course, that record falls, to 32-57.

The Yankee bats certainly propped Gomez up. He had a 3.83 E.R.A. in the games (the average AL E.R.A. over 1930-1932 was 4.50). Gomez’s E.R.A. was 3.69 generally over the three seasons.

On E.R.A., the Browns’ Lefty Stewart, who had a 4.00 with a 7-8 record, rates with Gomez. Stewart was indeed a good pitcher when not facing the A’s, too. He had a 7.3 bWAR in 1930, and ERA+s over 100 every year from 1929 through 1934.

Not making it through the 3rd inning, things went badly for him, but he started for Washington in game 1 of the 1933 World Series. Carl Hubbell rolled to victory for the Giants, striking out 10 and recording an 81 game score.

For unlikely strong performance, the Indians’ Jake Miller probably qualifies more than Stewart and definitely more so than Gomez. He was 2-1 with a 3.72 E.R.A. against the A’s in 7 games and 6 starts. Miller, too, however, was an above-average pitcher, although he was a finesse pitcher, and he didn’t last particular long.

I have chronicled before how Herb Pennock was a shell of his former self at this time. He made nine starts against the A’s from 1929-1932. While his E.R.A. was a respectable 4.99, he certainly took his lumps, giving up a .335 average.

5/19 N2: 5 home runs for Xavier Edwards? What is going on here? Also major props to him for leading the NL in on-base percentage, but that the number is only .406 is sobering. The really heavy-walk guys can do that on that alone, and five guys in the American League do have a better on-base percentage than Edwards.

5/19 N3: Carson Benge’s power has either been disappointing or the last thing to come, depending on how you look at it. His average exit velocity of 90.0 and max of 108.9 may not be great, but do not give the concern of his .107 Isolated Power. His four hardest hit balls have all been outs, the three hardest ground balls. His GB/FB ratio is 1.46 — above average, but not crazy towards ground balls. I’m not an expert, but I don’t think it should hold him back from hitting home runs. Soto’s is 1.38 for his career.

5/19 N4: Following up, Semien Woods Richardson still up with the Twins, but moved to the bullpen. Working an inning against the Astros yesterday, two baserunners but no runs.

5/19 N5: The faith that many teams have placed in Jake Bauers over his career is finally paying off. Has an 872 OPS playing almost every day. What do I know?

5/19 N6: Randy Arozarena has played every game this year (and very well, thank you) and has had 709, 648, 654, 645 and 604 plate appearances going back to his official rookie year in 2021. But to my great surprise, that only places him in 10th in plate appearances during that time. We do have some durable players, it turns out. From 1st through 9th, it is Olson, Guerrero Jr., Semien, Soto, Freeman, Alonso, Jose Ramirez, Ohtani and Schwarber.

5/19 N7: If you had a bet yesterday that Noah Schulz wouldn’t have a walk, you probably cashed in nicely. It was his first walk bagel of the season, and his median total in his other six starts was 4. Unfortunately, the rest of his box score line was unremarkable, with 3 earned runs allowed in 5.1.

5/19 N8: Stolen base success rates since the rule changes:

2026 76.5%

2025 77.7%

2024 79.0%

2023 80.2%

5/19 N9: When the Washington Nationals won the 1924 World Series, Bucky Harris was their fifth manager in five seasons, following Clark Griffith (1920), George McBride (1921), Clyde Milan (1922) and Donie Bush (1923). Milan and Bush were in their last year of playing and just 35. Harris was 27. I suppose Blake Butera can take heart.

5/20 N1: I stumbled upon the fact that “career splits” for a player in Baseball Reference can function as a sort of home room. For instance, if I want to get Max Bishop’s statistics versus left-handers by year, what I can do is to go to his career splits, and then click on “vs. LHP” in platoon splits. Then I have everything. I can sample both the trend in his performance and his playing time all in one view. Before, I probably would have gone year by year and taken notes on what I saw, or at best, have used Stathead to get the same information.

5/20 N2: The Brewers have overachieved greatly offensively. They are just 16th in OPS but 5th in runs-per-game.

Although, after the Marlins, they have stolen more bases than anyone, analytics do not credit baserunning as an explanation. They are +1 in Rbaser, with team totals ranging from the Giants (-6) to the Cubs (+7). With the Mariners, however, the Brewers do have the distinction of having grounded into the fewest double plays, and they are an MLB-best +5 in Rdp.

Not quite knowing its proper role, I admit I am selective about when I invoke clutch hitting as an explanation for runs and when I don’t, but the glove does fit here. The Brewers have a .399 SLG with men on base, versus .337 with no one on. They are hitting .288 with runners in scoring position, .231 otherwise (but do note that the overall discrepancy in MLB this year is 15 points better with RISP; the Brewers are just 4th in MLB in RISP average).

5/20 N3: The healthy lead the Braves had in MLB in batting average just six days ago is gone. They’ve hit just .195 since. The Dodgers, who were 2nd, have gone back 2 points, and it is now the Rays 2nd in batting average. But it is the Braves themselves, down to .263 from .272, that have produced the different picture.

5/20 N4: With his 15 holds, the Cardinals’ Jojo Romero has emerged as a setup man of the ilk of Erik Sabrowski, from that perspective. Romero has appeared in almost half of the Cardinals’ games. From a total of 23 appearances, he’s entered 14 times in the 7th inning and 6 times in the 8th.

5/20 N5: With Kumar Rocker and Tanner Gordon combining for 14 innings in the same game Tuesday that neither started, it does seem we need the “bulk game” category, as part of standard season statistics, sooner rather than later.

Make things painless for us researchers!

5/20 N6: When the worst part of Nick Kurtz’s 2026 hitting statistics is his home runs, and that’s still 27-per-575 AB, you know he’s a hell of a hitter. He’s conservatively one of the ten best hitters in baseball, and probably one of the top five….Looking at something arbitrary, Batting Runs since 2023, has the top four Judge, Ohtani, Soto, and Freeman, with Alvarez and Olson tied for 5th. Looking at OPS+, of those with at least 30+ Batting Runs in that time period, Kurtz comes in for Freeman and takes the #5 spot, Alvarez naturally wins in his tie with Olson, since Alvarez’s Batting Runs came in a lot less playing time….By Batting Runs, I mean Baseball Reference’s RBat.

5/20 N7: I’m not sure how the pitchers the Angels have used has changed, but through April 30, they were 11th in MLB in four-seam velocity. In May, they are 29th. With a 5.74 May E.R.A., results have hardly been better.

5/20 N8: Patrick Wisdom at third for the Mariners??? It cannot be. I was sure during the winter I wrote about his foreign statistics, and indeed, he was in KBO last year. Had a .236/.321/.535 slash and 35 home runs. But a Murakami-like start at Tacoma (12 HR, 14 BB, 1 2B, 90 PA) evidently got him back to MLB.

5/20 N9: Ildemaro Vargas has four multiple-hit games in his last seven, but my impression that he’s continued right on raking even through the end of his long hitting streak is incorrect. His .266/.277/.344 slash since actually looks like the worst of Ildemaro Vargas historically, frankly. Largely through his low walk total, Vargas is in the top 10 in MLB in at-bats during that period and has 17 hits.

In order of hits, those with 20+ since May 3 are Carson Benge, Otto Lopez, Elly De La Cruz, Riley Greene, Willy Adames (streakiness giveth as it taketh away), Josh Naylor, Bobby Witt, Brandon Marsh, Spencer Steer, Randy Arozarena and Daulton Varsho.

Travis Bazzana has 19. Sixteen of them have been singles, but his .453 OBP during the period will play.

5/20 N10: I’d heard of the “Old Ball Coach.” Baseball Reference has Joe Nuxhall’s nickname “Ol’ Lefthander.” I can see that maybe that was just a broadcasting, self-deprecating thing?

5/20 N11: Besides Rickey Henderson, the two Hall of Famers born on Christmas are Pud Galvin and Nellie Fox.

5/20 N12: Both Aspromonte brothers, 94 and 87, are apparently still alive. Yoounger brother Bob got much more significant traction. He was the original Colt .45 third baseman and their first-ever batter, scoring 3 runs and getting 3 hits in the first game, an 11-2 win over the Cubs. Basebll Reference WAR wasn’t a big fan (4.4 WAR), but Bob held down the Colt third-base job through 1968. The superfluous Mets mention is that BA retired after he was the closest they had to a starting third baseman in 1971 (the chronic third base hole leading to Ryan and others for Jim Fregosi that offseason).

Ken averaged 354 plate appearances a year while with the Red Sox, Senators, Indians, and Angels from 1958-1961. He was mostly a second baseman. In career bWAR, he nips his brother.

5/20 N13: Picking up from a note of last week, Nolan Ryan’s counterpart in his first start (9/18/66) was Bob Bruce. Bruce went all the way for the Astros, giving up 2 runs and striking out 10. What also stood out was that that brought his season record to a paltry 3-13 with a 5.36 E.R.A. The NL E.R.A. at the end of the year was 1.75 lower than that. I commented before how unsatisfactory I found the Mets lineup, and Bruce certainly took advantage.

This was the first game of a doubleheader, and given the miserable season he had, it is tempting to guess Bruce was just forced into action because of the doubleheader. But in fact, beyond ineffectivess and manager preference, his innings only reached 129.2 on the year because he missed all of May and the beginning of June. Afterwards, he was in the rotation.

But the Astros did essentially stop on him after this game. Believe it or not, even though it was 1966, in game 160 of the season they seem to have used him as an opener for Don Wilson’s major league debut. The relay went swimmingly, Bruce getting six of his seven hitters out, and Wilson then getting the 3-2 win, striking out 7 men over 6 innings. Wilson died under unfortunate circumstances in 1975 but would win over 100 games for the Astros and emerge as a #2 starter type. His number is retired. Opposing Bruce/Wilson for the Reds, by the way, was none other than Joe Nuxhall, making his last major league start.

Bruce’s 1966 season checks the boxes as a really bad year. The slash against him was .301/.344..470; if he’d had 162 innings and done that, it would have been the highest “OPS Against” in the National League.

Bruce was a swingman for the Tigers over three years (mostly on the 1960 team), then a regular member of Houston’s rotation from their inaugural year through 1966. Traded after 1966 in a deal that brought back an over-the-hill Eddie Mathews, Bruce finished up with 38.2 innings for the Braves in ‘67.

His game score when he faced Ryan comes out to 77. How did that rate among his other career games, I wondered?

What I uncovered was that, first, Bruce had two absolute gems to his credit, and second, these best-ever games from his career of 167 starts came consecutively! First, he two-hit the Mets on 9/20/64, walking no one and striking out 10 (game score 93). Then, taking his usual turn in the rotation on 9/27, he registed a 12-inning shutout against the Dodgers, striking out 6 while giving up 5 hits and 2 walks (game score 96).

Both games were at home. The Colts moved to the Astrodome in 1965 and became the Astros, but of Bruce’s nine 80+ game starts, eight not only came at home, but at Colt Stadium.

In the 9/20 game, Bruce was perfect until Roy McMillan singled out with 2 outs in the 6th.

Don Drysdale opposed Bruce in the 9/27 game. He threw 10 full innings before giving way to Ron Perranoski. Neither team was in the pennant race, but the game was significant to the Colts and bRuce both because it was the final game ever in Colt Stadium and because they had never had a 15-game winner, and Bruce entered it 14-9.

The biggest scare the Colts had came in the top of the 9th. With Tommy Davis on second base and two outs, 21-one-year-old Joe Morgan made an error but kept his composure and threw out Davis as he attempted to score.

The Colt walk-off came when 22-year-old Jim Wynn singled home 20-year-old Rusty Staub.

Despite all these young ‘uns, the Colts actually had the oldest Batage in the league at 28.0. They had the likes of Nellie Fox (36). Morgan wasn’t an official rookie until 1965, so didn’t really affect the average.

After the game, Bruce’s catcher, 21-year-old rookie Jerry Grote, made special note of Bruce’s slider. Perhaps surprisngly, I was not able to find an article noting that Bruce had picked up from his 9/20 masterpiece against the Mets.

So, we have two great outings against the Mets. This was the larger record. Bruce started 14 games against them, compiling an 8-3 record and a 2.27 E.R.A. (1 relief appearance included). In terns of wins, winning percentage and E.R.A., his marks against the Mets were the best he had against any National League team.

Where did Bruce’s two gems rank among all National League 1964 starts? Of course, they would have been superlative for anybody, but here we must tap on the breaks a bit. There were three National League no-hitters that year. On 6/4, Koufax had 12 strikeouts while no-hitting the Phillies (game score 98), and the Phillies own Bunning had a 10-strikeout perfect game less than three weeks later (game score 97).

The third no-hitter was tossed on 4/23 by Bruce’s teammate, Ken Johnson. Striking out 9 and walking only 2, Johnson did not get it through a backdoor, but thanks to his own 9th-inning error and then one by Fox, he lost 1-0 when the Colts couldn’t score in the bottom half of the inning. The game score method gives this one a 92 game score, actually preferring both of Bruce’s big consecutive outings.

Then, for marathon pitching, Bruce’s effort against the Dodgers was overshadowed three days later (the final Wednesday of the regular season) when the Pirates’ Bob Veale faced off against the Reds’ Jim Maloney. The game meant nothing to the Pirates, but the Reds were in a three-way fight with the Cardinals and the reeling Phillies. Neither starter gave an inch, but Veale did have to leave in the 13th, Maloney after 11. Veale struck out 16, Maloney 13. Because of his edge in baserunners allowed (5 to 13, although Veale had 3 intentional walks), Maloney got the better game score, 102 to 97. But the Pirates won the game in the 16th. The loss cost the Reds, as the Cardinals ultimately finished a game in front of them.

So, game-score wise, Bruce’s games officially ranked 5th and 6th in the 1964 NL, with the ones by Maloney, Koufax, Bunning, and Veale rated better.

Like other Colts/Astros, Bruce’s forte was throwing strikes. He was just nipped for the league BB-per-IP best by Bunning. That his strikeout rate in 1964 was solid (15th of 37 qualifiers) is denoted by his SO/BB ratio’s being 3rd in the league to Bunning, between Koufax and Marichal. Bruce had a 125 ERA+ in 202.1 innings that year.

Although better than his 1966, his other ERA+s with Houston were a far cry from what he did in 1964, and under 100. However, because Houston was always or last or second-to-last in the league in defensive support, he is liked considerably better by bWAR, with marks in the 2-2.9 range in 1962, 1963, and 1965.

5/21 N1: A big change in Andrew Abbott’s ground balls and fly balls this year.

2026: 75 grounders, 72 fly balls

2025: 153 grounders, 230 fly balls.

He used to be a major fly ball pitcher; this year, he isn’t really anything.

More material is probably a SO/BB ratio that was 3.5 in 2025 and 2.4 in 2024-2025, but is 1.5 this year. That rates him 108th among the 114 pitchers who have made at least 8 starts this year.

5/21 N2: If you are a pitcher, the initials you want are CS. See Cam Schlittler, Cristopher Sanchez, Chris Sale. Among past pitchers, CC Sabathia comes to mind.

5/21 N3: Since his slugging average was 158 points better than on-base percentage last year, and this year his on-base percentage is 38 points better than his slugging average, Taylor Ward has really been unrecognizable. He almost makes you ask why we bother with player profiles. Why even bother keeping track of who is who? The psychologists of the 1960s and 1970s who believed personality was a myth would expand their theory to baseball and find much joy in him.

5/21 N4: A pall over the Twins with the Jeffers hamate news, but 15 SO, no walks from Ryan and two relievers makes for a day of distraction, if nothing else.

5/21 N5: The Senzatela redemption story continues. Must rate as one of the best relievers of 2026, as he could hardly have been better, giving up just 5 runs over 30.1 innings while having to deal with the thin air.

Small-sample-size theatre, but on the road, his numbers have been even better.

Road: 0.56 E.R.A., 0.625 WHIP

Home: 1.88 E.R.A., 1.047 WHIP

5/21 N6: Playing every Guardians game, he hasn’t made it easy on himself, but Jose Ramirez’s 3 strikeouts yesterday do mean he is on pace for his first 100-strikeout season.

He has one 4-strikeout game in his career, on 4/18/23. Like yesterday’s game, that was in Detroit. Eduardo Rodriguez got him 3 times, Jason Foley once.

Over his career, the switch-hitting J-Ram has a 12.3 strikeout percentage against righties, 11.1 against lefties.

5/21 N7: Craig Kimbrel worked 2 2/3 innings yesterday. That was his first career outing longer than 2 innings, regular season or post. All credit to him.

5/21 N8: The longest pitching apperarance ever in an All-Star Game was Lefty Gomez’s 6-inning start in the third contest, in 1935. His AL won 4-1. I guess everyone was figuring out what the approach should be; the only other All-Star game when a starter even went 4 innings was in 1942, Spud Chandler throwing four scoreless frames.

Gomez’s manager in this game was Mickey Cochrane. Cochrane was also on the team as a player but didn’t put himself him. He went with the Browns’ Rollie Hemsley all the way at catcher.

5/21 N9: Here’s one more data point that prediction is futile. The Pirates are tied for 7th in MLB in steals, and last night they had Oneil Cruz, Konnor Griffin and Jake Mangum in the lineup. They had 18 baserunners in the game, including 12 singles. Catching for the Cardinals was Ivan Herrera, he of the career 85 stolen bases against from 91 attempts, and no caught stealing since 2024. Yet the Pirates didn’t attempt a steal….Then, on the other hand, Michael McGreevy started for the Cardinals, and although he only lasted 5 innings, he has only given up 1 career steal in his 29 career starts. Ollie Marmol isn’t stupid, hence the decision to catch Herrera in this game, with McGreevy pitching. So I suppose one has to just keep looking.

5/21 N10: Shohei Ohtani is a legend in our time. Try as I might, when my father would tell me about legends he saw that I didn’t, I didn’t really believe what he was telling me. I thought what he said was too good, too amazing to be true. But this is real, and we can believe and appreciate. Children of tomorrow, you missed out.

5/21 N11: I almost feel like the Athletics are gaslighting us with this rotation they feature, yet in Civale, Ginn, Severino and Springs, they are the only team to have four starters with bWAR of 1.0 or greater.

5/21 N12: It can be a little bit messy trying to get all pre- and post-All Star team records in Stathead for a particular league, but if you are in Baseball Reference’s schedule section, for any specific date, you can click on “After this date” (look underneath the day’s scores). The standings you want come right up. So that is not another way to do it. They even have the runs and runs allowed after that date, and the Pythagorean records those correspond to.

5/21 N13: Interesting to see that Hall of Famer Heinie Manush led the AL in HBP his first two seasons, drawing 17 and then 16, and then cooled it, not adding another 16 until more than five other seasons had gone by. He also had those HBP in an average of just 115 games. He was a rookie in 1923. In 1928 and 1929, his two full seasons with the Browns, he had only had 1 HBP over those years while he finished 2nd in the MVP both seasons.

5/22 N1: The cutter has had a prominent place in Sonny Gray’s arsenal since 2023, but if the numbers hold, this will be the first time it has ever been his most common pitch. The difference seems to be that he is throwing more cutters to left-handers. In the last three years, his season’s ratio of cutters to righties versus lefties has been between 2.8 and 3.2. But this year, he’s thrown 69 cutters to lefties, 76 to righties.

When you start breaking down one particular pitch for Gray by hand, though, you are dealing with a small slice. It is a conservative statement to say he is in the 99th percentile as far as “mixing it up.”

He has interesting strikeout statistics by pitch. His strikeout rate is very much down this year, and he hasn’t gotten any through that cutter. He has 11 of his 30 on the sweeper, but the other pitch that has finished a lot of hitters isn’t his four-seamer (3 SO), as one might expect, but his sinker (12 SO). After ranking just 27th in looking strikeouts in MLB in 2023 and 11th in 2024, Gray led MLB in looking strikeouts last year, and one can see the two-seam front-hip fastball to lefties might be instrumental in doing that. But Gray actually throws many more sinkers to right-handers than he throws to left-handers.

5/22 N2: Javy Baez’s injury has stretched Zack Short’s improbable major league career to a 6th season. In fact, Short (who largely plays the position of his name) has started five of the last 11 Tiger games. Admittedly it’s not very catchy, but my nickname for him is “Do We Have To?” Short. He has plate discipline statistics for his career that map on to the 2025 versions of Jonathan India and Mookie Bett, so that’s good, and has 74 walks in 614 plate appearances. But I think I, too, could stand at the plate and not swing. He’s a career .169 hitter.

I couldn’t field my position more or less cleanly the way Short does (he has 21 errors in about a season’s worth of innings), but Short isn’t a defensive plus in either Baseball Info Solutions or Statcast’s rendering — Statcast Fielding Runs actually has him at -14 for his career. Austin Hedges has had a lot longer career than Short and trails him 53 to 57 in OPS+. but the case for Hedges is that he’s +20 Statcast Catching Runs per 1436 innings caught over his career.

5/22 N3: As the last time, I griped about Spencer Torkelson, he went wild, hitting home runs in five straight games, I assume there will be no objections if I vent spleen again. At the time of my rant, he had a .566 OPS in 23 games played. His streak ended April 28. Now in May, he has OPS of .514.

I thought of anotehr streaky player, Willy Adames. Obviously as a shortstop Adames brings a whole other dimension, but aside for a 20-point edge in batting average, his career statistics do line up remarkably well with Torkelson’s.

Per 162 games:

Torkelson: .224, 31 2B, 1 3B, 25 HR, 67 BB, 174 SO

Adames: .244, 31 2B, 1 3B, 28 HR, 65 BB, 181 SO

5/22 N4: If you start by saying someone is an “innings eater,” that is telling, a kind of damning by faint praise. Sandy Alcantara leads the NL in innings, but his E.R.A. of exactly 4.00 also speaks volumes. There used to be the innings and the dominance with Alcantara.

5/22 N5: The Guardians are 3rd in MLB in walks, just 4 walks behind the Yankees, and this is a whole new dimension. Things had been going in the right direction, but they were 26th in 2021, 24th in 2022, 25th in 2023, 23rd in 2024 and 20th in 2025. Rookies DeLauter and Bazzana are the face of the change and the start of the narrative, if not necessarily the whole of the reason.

I think it would be hard to deny Stephen Vogt a third Manager of the year award. Yet, maybe I’m not looking in the right places, but it doesn’t seem like an aura has developed around him. It doesn’t seem like people are licking his boots. But if you do a great job managing year after year, maybe you are in fact a great manager?

5/22 N6: Not only have the Angels lost two-thirds of their games, they are trending in the wrong direction. Vibe-wise, it’s a 100-loss team, but analytically I am a bit puzzled.

They stay retain some of their decent marks from the beginning of the season, ranking 9th in home runs and 15th in walks.

They are 11th in pitcher strikeouts

Obviously, they could get more from Neto and O’Hoppe, and probably from Adell, Schanuel and Detmers as well. That’s a positive going forward.

Aside from Josh Lowe, they haven’t really been killed by individual players: there are 82 players with -5 Batting Runs in the majors, or 2.7 a team, but only two Angels (O’Hoppe the one besides Lowe).

I suppose I will have to issue some faint praise of my own. They don’t look like anything close to a winning team, but not a 100-loss team, either.

5/22 N7: Do you think Aaron Boone should tell Anthony Volpe he’s going to be doing some “watchful sitting” for the next little while? That is the way one player’s demotion was described in a 1926 article.

As in Volpe’s case, it was more a matter of what the other guy did than about what the incumbent didn’t do, so it’s not quite a euphemism for “benching” because it’s at most a synonym, not an equivalency. But the term would come in very handy today (and one can imagine the conversation) if a manager could go to a player and tell him he was going to be doing “watchful sitting,” refusing to go down that road when the player wanted a more frank acknowledgment of benching.

5/23 N1: This point where we go from a quarter of the season to a third of the season always goes fast for me. Right now, we’re one game shy of an average of 51 games per team. My sense that the Angels are better than their record may or may not be right, but what I missed yesteday was that the area of contested turf is less than entire; with their win last night, even if the Angels play .500 ball the rest of the way, they’ll still lose 89 games.

5/23 N2: Relief pitchers this year are allowing 16.4 home runs per 575 AB, starters 19.2. A 15% advantage for relief pitchers. Last year, the advantage was 13%, so similar. In strikeouts, the two appear closer, with a relievers having an edge in SO-per-PA .223 to .220 this year, .228 to .218 last year. One also wants to look at that to see if balls in play alone are driving the home run difference. Starters gain some ground on relievers in strikeout percentage when it is measured by plate appearance just because they walk fewer batters (intentionally and unintentionally), so that is something else to consider.

5/23 N3: The Dodger pitching and defense is superior. The team leads MLB in fewest runs allowed despite the high slugging averages allowed from Roki Sasaki (.494) and Emmet Sheehan (.480). And Yoshinobu Yamamoto (.382) can surely do better.

5/23 N4: Mets announcer Gary Cohen has recently been extolling the Mets defense on account of the fact that they are (or were? I see at best 12th now) 10th in Defensive Runs Saved. Yet that doesn’t seem to follow from the fact that they are 10th in E.R.A. vs. 6th in FIP. They have allowed more than FIP says they should have. And, indeed, Baseball Savant (with defense even including catcher framing, something not touched by FIP) has the Mets with -6 Fielding Run Value, which places them 23rd.

5/23 N5: While Trent Grisham’s 34 home runs last year now look like a fluke on the upper end of things, he hit his 9th double yesterday, tying what he did in 2025. Truthfully, Grisham has really only been bad in average (.188), and that wasn’t even a strong suit last year (.235).

5/23 N6: With his 11 strikeouts yesterday, maybe that’s a sign Bubba Chandler has found it. Despite their bad offensive year, the Blue Jays remain a tough team to k (have second-fewest in MLB).

5/23 N7: I suppose I would had to have seen the upset of deGrom’s getting roughed up by the Angels to have a good opinion as to whether it should be cause for alarm, particularly as his season’s E.R.A. now sits at 3.86, I don’t like the 3 walks in 3 innings, but deGrom still ranks 3rd in MLB in SO/BB ratio. He’s walked 3 or more in four of his other 48 starts with the Rangers, so it does happen to him (and most everyone else). 13 whiffs also sounds good, although is less impressive per swing (28.9%), Yes, the Angels are the top strikeout team, but their season whiff is lower than that (25.3%).

5/23 N8: With his 131 OPS+ and 1.7 bWAR, it is certainly looking like a comeback season for Arenado. He did next to nothing over his first 14 games but has a 1.015 OPS in 33 games since.

It’s a tiny thing, but he’s probably over his head with his current 8.9% walk rate. Four of the walks came against Colorado May 15 (maybe they were confused which year this was, and which team he was on?), and his OBP jumped 22 points from that game. Arenado hasn’t had a walk rate as good as 8.9% since 2019.

5/23 N9: 2 more HBP of Sam Antonacci last night. He complemented his leadoff game with a walk and steal. However, his totals in those categories trail his 10 HBP.

5/23 N10: Here’s a phrase that was in use 100 years ago but which may have had a wider meaning then. For, in 1926, Irving Vaughan of the Chicago Tribune wrote, “…[Eddie] Collins is showing unmistakable signs of going over the hill as a regular.”

Today, for some reason, we don’t talk of this as a process. Someone can’t be going over the hill; he is over the hill or he isn’t. He can’t be moving, because the expression means that he is done. I don’t know why the phrase couldn’t mean what Vaughan has it meaning in the excerpt; after all, if taken literally, being over the hill is synonynmous with being on “the down side.” That just means you’re past your peak, but is a perfectly polite thing to write about a player, while the phrase “over the hill” says something different, as it is writing him off categorically.

Then note that this is a type of over the hill, that it is conditional. What Vaughan says is that Collins is over the hill as a regular. This is actually quite pithy, if one is allowed to use the phrase that way, suggesting that Collins could perhaps play to his normal standard if just given proper rest. This is a sentiment we often express today about a player, but we take two or three sentences to convey it.

5/23 N11: It would seem to me that a probability edge challenging pitches if you are a batter might be to concentrate on those where you have a chance to win on either the in/out or the height, to give you two chances at being right. For pitchers, the idea would the opposite, and you should be more aggressive if you knew the pitch was a strike on one dimension. I think our instinct is more just to say, “I disagree, that was a ball” rather than thinking of this. There have to be cognitive biases that are relevant the problem.

On this paradigm, do note that batters would then be challenging generally better pitches than pitchers would be. Any pitch where you really know it is a strike in one dimension isn’t ideally placed, unless it’s a great Charlie Morton curve or something. You don’t want to be throwing just under the belt or in the middle of the plate.