In Kenley’s case, that’s not entirely surprising, since he was a catcher until this season. His numbers weren’t great, but he was competent. What surprised me was that 75 pitchers since 2000 have finished the season with a perfect batting average. 9 were from this year, including Clay Buchholz and his distant cousing Taylor Buchholz. Evan Meek and Bruce Chen matched Jansen’s two plate appearances without an out. None of the perfect batting average crowd had an extra-base hit except for Chacin.

Since 2000, the most plate appearances by a pitcher to keep the perfect batting average was 4 by Manny Aybar in 2000.

At the other end of the spectrum, this year only three pitchers managed a perfect 1.000 on-base percentage without getting any hits at all. George Sherrill and Matt Reynolds both walked in their only plate appearances; Jack Taschner went them one better by recording a sacrifice hit in a second plate appearance.

Finally, to round things out, this year saw Joe Blanton and Heureusement, ici, c’est le Blog‘s favorite pitcher, Yovani Gallardo, each get hit by two pitches. Gallardo had clearly angered other pitchers by being so much more awesome than they were.

There are two accepted measures of what a quality start is. Officially, a quality start is one with 6 or more innings pitched and 3 or fewer runs. Bill James’ definition used his game score statistic and used 50 as the cutoff point for a quality start. Since a pitcher gets 50 points for walking out on the mound and then adds to or subtracts from that value based on his performance, game score has the nice property of showing whether a pitcher added value to the team or not.

Using the game score definition, there were 393 losses in quality starts last year, including 109 by July 7th. Ubaldo Jimenez and Dan Haren led the league with 7, Roy Halladay had 6, and Yovani Gallardo (who’s quickly becoming my favorite player because he seems to show up in every category) was also up there with 6.

So far this year, though, it seems to be the Year of the Tough Loss. There have already been 230, and Roy Oswalt is already at the 6-tough-loss mark. Halladay is already up at 4. This is consistent with the talk of the Year of the Pitcher, with better pitching (and potentially less use of performance-enhancing drugs) leading to lower run support. That will require a bit more work to confirm, though.

Though Gary said it, that pinged my “Stuff Keith Hernandez Says” meter, and I trotted off to Baseball-Reference.com to look it up. Since 1973, six other pitchers who debuted in relief have two hit batsman. Were any of them as bad as Sborz?

We don’t have to go back too far to find someone who was. In 2002, Justin Miller of the Blue Jays made his debut against the Devil Rays and hit Chris Gomez, then Jason Tyner. Miller deserves special recognition – after that beautiful start, he held on to pitch 2 2/3 and got the win!

Honorable mention goes to Mitch Stetter of the Brewers. In a 2007 game against the Pirates, Stetter debuted in the last inning of a 12-2 blowout. He was on the winning side, though it ended up 12-3. Stetter hit Jack Wilson. He threw a wild pitch in the process of walking Nyjer Morgan, then iced the cake by plunking Nate McLouth. That was followed up with a groundout that scored Wilson and a merciful game-ending double play.

Last year, everyone’s favorite balk-off artist, Arizona’s Esmerling Vasquez, gave up two home runs in extra innings against the Texas Rangers on June 25th. Those were two of 83 free-baseball homers in 2009. Extra-innings home runs are more common in the tops of innings, because in a tied game a home run for the home team is a walk-off whereas the road team will get the chance to capitalize on their momentum, but I would have expected the proportions to be much more different than they are. In 2009, for example, of those 83, only 44 were hit by the away team with 39 hit by the home team (and 33 of those were game-enders).

So far, no batter has more than one extra-innings home run this year, but last year there were several. Andre Ethier led the pack with 3, with a bunch of batters who had 2.

I queried Baseball-Reference.com’s event finder for home runs, then narrowed it down to first inning home-runs with two outs this year. Prior to tonight, there had been 82. None of them came in three-homer games – that answers that.

Just for fun, I checked 2009 as well. In total, there were 209 2-out, first-inning home runs in 2009. Only one of those home runs happened in a three-homer game, so it didn’t happen then, either.

Poor AJ.

The most interesting fact  to me was that only one third of the games were won by left-handed pitchers (Feliciano twice, Eric O’Flaherty, Randy Flores, and John Parrish). That doesn’t quite make sense because LHPs are more likely to come in for one batter than RHPs. (So far, 189 right-handers have games with one batter faced, compared with 198 lefties). That indicates that wins aren’t distributed uniformly across appearances.

Also interesting is the efficiency shown by Jorge Sosa in the Marlins’ May 31 game against the Brewers. He threw one pitch to pitcher Chris Narveson, who was doubled up along with catcher George Kottaras. Sosa ended up credited with 2/3 of an inning pitched and the win.

Balks are fun. The rule is designed to keep the pitcher from “deceiving the baserunner,” but also serves to encourage good fundamentals in young pitchers at the lower levels of play. For example, it’s a balk to even accidentally drop the ball.

Walk-off balks (balk-offs) are fairly rare. It’s not surprising that Vasquez, a sophomore in MLB, was fooled by Casey Blake, because balks can result from inexperience, and it’s fairly rare to have an inexperienced pitcher throwing the bottom of the 9th inning in a tied game. I ran a search on Baseball-Reference.com for losing pitchers with at least one balk who finished the game for the visiting team, which are necessary conditions (but not sufficient) to find a balk-off. After wading through the game logs, I found that the most recent balk-off was almost two years ago, when Colorado visited Atlanta in September of 2008. Taylor Buchholz balked in Kelly Johnson to take the loss.

Buchholz was in his third (and so far final) major-league season and is best known for having allegedly failed a trade physical when Houston tried to trade him to the White Sox. He’s still with Colorado and currently on the 60-day DL for Tommy John surgery.

I ran a Baseball-Reference.com report on all players for an NL team who played as the designated hitter in the World Series. For whatever reason, it omitted the 2002 and 1982 World Series, so I dug them up and added them manually. There have been 108 instances of someone playing as DH, PR-DH or PH-DH for a National League team in the World Series; all told, they’ve scored 38 runs, recorded 78 hits in 315 at-bats and 353 plate appearances, had 4 sacrifices, walked 36 times, struck out 59, and hit 11 home runs. The most appearances as an NL DH in the World Series: Lonnie Smith, who DH’d in 9 games spanning 4 different series for 3 teams – the 1980 Philadelphia Phillies, the 1982 St. Louis Cardinals, and the 1991 and 1992 Atlanta Braves. Why? I’m not quite sure – he had 7 hits, 1 homer, 3 walks and 6 strikeouts in 40 plate appearances and 35 at-bats, for an average of .200 and an OBP of .250.

Chris Coste of the 2008 Phillies is upholding the tradition – he went 0-for-4 last night.

The most DHs used all-time is 14 by Saint Louis, with Atlanta following with 9 and then several teams with 6. Within one series, the NL teams with the most variability were the 82 Cardinals and the 97 Marlins, each using 5 different DHs.

Has Scotty suffered the greatest postseason indignity ever? Nope. Not even close. That honor belongs to Mike Mussina of the 1997 Orioles.

Using Baseball Reference’s Play Index, I took a look at pitchers with 6.0 innings or more and 0 earned runs, but whose team lost the game, and sorted by game score. I was surprised how many there were – 38 since 1903, when Cy Young pitched a seven-inning, one-run, 0-earned-run performance. They didn’t track game score at the time, but if my cocktail napkin is correct, he would have come in at 71 (owing mostly to the lack of strikeouts). In 15 of those, the starting pitcher lose the game when his defense gave up an unearned run on his watch. I’ll disqualify them, because I think the indignity is greater when you leave eligible for the win. (The highest game score in that case was John Smoltz, who score 79 points in the 1996 World Series for the Braves. He gave up 4 hits and one unearned run, striking out 10, in an 8-inning performance. Criminally unsupported, he lost the game 1-0.)

In 1997′s ALCS game 6, Mike Mussina pitched 8 scoreless innings, giving up 1 hit and 2 walks, striking out 10. In 8 innings, he managed to hold a lineup including Manny Ramirez, Jim Thome and David Justice scoreless. The game went to the 11th inning, at which point Todd Fernandez hit a two-out solo home run. Jose Mesa saved the game, 1-0. Mussina’s game score was 88, his highest postseason game score ever (although he had set the mark at 80 just 4 days prior, also in a 1-run loss). In the regular season, Moose has gone to 88 or better 13 times, with two one-hit shutouts topping the list at 98 each.

Kazmir, meanwhile, has made three postseason appearances, at game scores of 30, 46, and 72. His top regular season game score is 91, which is also the only time he’s beaten Moose’s 88. (His second-best game score is 84.) He’s still young. He’s got a lot of time to be as criminally unsupported as Mussina.

I originally designed this as a measure of anti-quality starts: six runs or more in three or fewer innings, with the team picking up the win nonetheless. There were fourteen of those this year alone (including one by my Favorite Pitcher of All Time, Sidney Ponson). Even Brad Penny had one. In fact, there were 485 instances of just such a thing happening in the history of baseball. Clearly I’m going to need to ratchet up the numbers on this one.

For 8 or more runs, the numbers get a little cleaner. Only 37 this time. There were still two instances in 2008, and John Garland had one last year and one this year. Hmm… looks like Garland may come out the winner of this little contest. Big ups to Sidney Ponson, though, for not having an 8-run, 3-inning game since 2005 (that was back when he was still talented). Sid gets an honorable mention, along with Nate Robertson from this year, for having all 8 runs be earned. (Garland had 8 earned runs but nine total.)

For 9 or more runs, we’ve cut it all the way down to 9 games. The eventual winner here is obvious, but I’d really like to point out how cool Andy Pettitte’s stats were for this game: a game score of 1, and an ERA of 72.00. (I can’t help but think that someone mixed up the two numbers.)

Finally, the winner: Sean Bergman of the San Diego Padres. Ending with an admirable game score of 7, Bergman pitched two innings and two thirds, allowing 10 runs, all of them earned, on seven hits and three walks (meaning that every last baserunner he allowed scored). What’s more, of the eight batters he retired, he struck out six! Once Bergman came out, a parade of relievers came to his rescue, shutting down the Colorado Rockies except for one inning later in the game, and his team rallied to 13 runs to get the win with a five-run 9th inning.

Sean also had a hit that night, wrapping up this installment of the “weirdest line” contest.