OUR pun is not necessarily your pun...but it is the beginning of summer, after all, which is really a race backward from the longest day of the year.
And so...we collate, taking care neither to spindle nor to mutilate, but always retaining the option to fold (as in "fold it five ways, and...")
EXCEPT we should fold it seven ways, given what we are talking about--the "under-data" for those 699 games where some King for a Day drove in at least seven runs.
Where to begin...you probably that teams with a hitter who drives in seven runs in a game are going to have a rather fine WPCT in those contests. What do you figure that WPCT actually is--.750? Or perhaps higher still--.800? .850??
THE answer is--higher than that, Walter. In the 699 games where a team has a hitter drive in 7 or more runs, those teams have won 662 times. That's a .947 WPCT.
Of course, we have a tiny sample size here when we consider how many games have been played in MLB history. Our ~700 games, when sliced out of the ~450,000 played in the relevant sample (1898-2026), work out to be less than 0.2% of all games played.
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| Boog in his "Why me, Lord" stance... |
BUT lo--and behold!--there is one instance of this in the annals of the anomalous (a good term, come to think of it, for the life work of Jayson Stark, n'est-ce pas?). And we will be even more surprised to discover that the player who managed to twice cluster his single-game RBI performance into "nose-bleed" territory only to have his team lose each game is someone who played for a team that went to the World Series in each of the seasons involved.
And who is that player, you ask? Why, none other than
John Wesley (Boog) Powell, that's who. On July 6, 1966, Powell drove in 7 runs for the Baltimore Orioles, who managed to lose the game 9-8 (to the then-Kansas City A's) anyway. The O's shook it off and ultimately shocked the baseball world by sweeping the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series three months later.
Then, on July 1, 1969, Boog drove in 7 runs again, this time with the Orioles playing the New York Yankees in Yankee Stadium. The Bronx Bombers (who at this time were not nearly so "bomber-y") still managed to win the game 10-9. The O's shook it off and ultimately shocked the baseball world by losing the World Series in five games to the other, even less "bomber-y" team from New York (the Miracle Mets) three-and-a-half months later...
First, batting order. It's not going to be surprising that two-thirds of these performances are located in the 3-4-5 slots of the batting order, is it? And we think you can visualize a very orthodox distribution curve for it.
Enjoy the extra white space as we move on to hits. We had a theory that two-hit performances were a good bit more rare in days of yore--we count 32 of these before the first expansion in 1961, and 90 afterwords. But when we broke out the data for the 21st century occurrences, the percentage of 2-hit 7+-RBI games was steady at 17% of the overall total. So much for that idea...
Doubles and triples are not significant factors in these games (though no one will be surprised about triples being scarce). The two games in which hitters had three triples as part of a 7+-RBI game occurred in 1898 and 1900, respectively. The last time anyone hit two triples in a 7+-RBI performance was in 1952--and you will be surprised to discover who it was...
Homers are, of course, the quickest way to get runs on the board, and it won't shock anyone to discover that there have been 502 multiple-HR instances in 7+-RBI games. That's 72% of the total games...
As you'd expect, total bases has the widest distribution in the data set (which is what produces all that white space). The one that might throw you for a loop, though, is the one game where the hitter had just three total bases. That would be Pie Traynor, who collected three two-run singles and a sacrifice fly in June 1930 as his Pittsburgh Pirates defeated the Philadelphia Phillies, 19-12 (and yes, it was in the Baker Bowl).
We're leaving the questions we asked in the first installment (most 7+-RBI games, fewest lifetime HRs for a member of the "7+-RBI club") for a bit later in the series, but we will reveal the identity of the last hitter who had two triples as part of a 7+-RBI day.
It is none other than Ted Kluszewski...and we were surprised as well to discover that "Mister Muscles" was the answer. (Immaculate Grid, here we come!) But consider that the game in question occurred in Pittsburgh's Forbes Field, where the distance to the center field fence was over 450 feet. It's now seventy-four years and counting since it happened--and, given baseball's continuing direction, it's possible that it will never happen again. More soon...
