2014: COMPLETE GAMES #111, #112, #113

Three more CGs on the final weekend of the 2014 regular season, bringing us to a grand total of 113 (remember, we aren't counting any CGs where the IP total is lower than eight innings...).

The Nationals had a mini-crescendo over the weekend, with Doug Fister's three-hit shutout (#111, 9/26) against the Marlins one-upped by Jordan Zimmermann, who added to the lore of "last day of the season" heroics by tossing a no-hitter at the Fish (#112, 9/28) to close things out.

Sonny Gray (#113, 9/28) could not let down either the flailing A's or his mother (whose birthday fell on the final day of the '14 campaign). His six-hit shutout, leading Oakland to a 4-0 win over the Texas Rangers, pushed the A's into the post-season (even as they set a record for the worst WPCT in the second half for a playoff-bound team: .433 WPCT).

As we noted in the last post, we're likely going to stick with the CG watch in '15, simply because there's an awfully good chance that managers will continue to "knee-jerk" with respect to pitch counts. The number of CGs could more than double if pitchers were permitted to go on into the ninth when their pitch counts are at or below 105 pitches, but the chances are slim that this will happen any time soon.

At left is the final "calendar chart" for 2014 CGs. The basic trends we noted last time were not altered over the last portion of the year...

--CGs are rarest on Mondays (just six all year).

--Wednesday was the most likely day to see a CG in '14 (23), with Thursday (21) a close second.

--The Tuesday-to-Thursday axis (62 CGs out of that total of 113) dominated in terms of "days of the week."

The numbers in orange on black have nothing to do with either the O's or the Giants (who have one more opportunity to bring us a double shot of Halloween colors for the World Series this year); they refer to the number of days in each month when there was at least one CG.

That's a total of 82 days in a season that lasted a little over 170 days (we aren't counting the late March stretch after Budzilla's premature you-know-what for the season and the formal beginning on March 30), which means that there was an average of at least one complete game every other day.