Baseball Minutiae and Trivia Only

This was written by Eric Van who holds a chair with SABR science and baseball committee.

The base on balls … on just three balls.

I may have been the only person who noticed, but Coco Crisp of the Boston Red Sox drew a three-ball walk on August 18, 2008 in the top of the 8th inning of a game against the Baltimore Orioles. With two outs and runners on 2nd and 3rd (pinch-runner Alex Cora and Jed Lowrie, respectively), O’s reliever Rocky Cherry got a called strike on a slider, missed with a 4-seamer, got a foul ball on a changeup, missed with a two-seamer, and missed with another slider, running the count full.

I was scoring the game at home (while working as a Baseball Ops consultant for the team), recording every pitch [1], and was somewhat surprised when Crisp was awarded first base on what I had as ball three.

I was pretty sure I hadn’t missed a pitch. I rewound the DVR and replayed the entire PA several times, increasingly baffled and incredulous. I looked for any indication that the umpire had called a ball for any one of several very rare rule violations, but there wasn’t any (and it would have been a big deal had there been). Nope. It was just your everyday three-ball walk. (My scorecard note: “Where the hell is ball 4??”)

Both MLB Stats, Scores, History, & Records | Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs (Baseball Statistics and Analysis) have Cherry throwing three balls after the foul. But the pitch-by-pitch data by MLB’s PITCHf/x system (a precursor to Statcast, for pitching only) very clearly shows only five pitches for the PA (it’s the last five rows in the table). Note that if you use the front end at Brooks Baseball (Home of the PITCHf/x Tool) to find this game, it won’t bring up this PA in its list of the batters Cherry faced. You have to click on “Get expanded table data” and get the linked-to table to even know that Cherry faced a final hitter.

What I believe must have happened was that the scoreboard operator had posted a phantom ball. Now, the scoreboard getting the count wrong was not that unusual in those days; you’d see it maybe every other year, and there would be a little delay while the umpire got them to correct it. But in this case, the umpire must have failed to notice that the scoreboard count was wrong. The Sox announcers missed it, too; IIRC, they were chatting about something off-topic.

The big question, of course: how did the Orioles dugout (led by manager Dave Trembley) miss this as well?

Rogers Hornsby had 2,085 hits in the 1920’s. The most of any player in a single decade…

I would have thought Cobb in the teens might have had more but he had "only" 1,948. Cobb was injured fairly often. In four of those years in the teens, he played between 98 and 124 games.

Pete Rose in the 70s was another possibility. He had 2,045. Ironically Hornsby didn't make it to 3,000 hits, finishing with 2,930. After that 1929 season, when he was 33 years old, he never again played in more than 100 games in a year.

Giancarlo Stanton is having a weird hitting season. He is the #2 ranked DH in the AL by SLG, but the 2nd worst DH by OBP...

He was an amazing player HoJoe. I never saw anything like him. I feel like he was the modern counterpart to Wee Willie Keeler.

Grover Cleveland Alexander “Pete” or “Old Pete” was not elected to the HOF on the first ballot.

With such a Presidential name, how did he get nicknamed Pete?

Alexander’s father was a Democrat & Alexander was born during the 1st term of U.S. President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, so his parents named him for Cleveland. His nickname evolved into “Pete” Alexander, from the names of characters in a series of early silent film westerns, characters he was said to resemble...