Baseball heads love the beginning of a new major league season for various reasons – obviously, because of the chance to watch the best baseball players on the planet exhibit their skills, but also, for maybe a month, for the strangeness of MLB stats at the end of play every day.
This strangeness is, of course, related to small samples. Limited opportunities produce perfect or at least eye-opening numbers, and the modern general human reliance on computers allows us to find a seemingly endless parade of momentary heroes.
MLB stats are a particular delight of the early season, however fleeting.
Philadelphia Phillies fans, for example, are fairly excited at the moment, not only by their team’s 5-1 start (through Apr. 8), but also because first baseman Rhys Hoskins is hitting .417 with a home run and six doubles. That doubles figure makes Hoskins an MLB stats leader. One fan’s tweet referred to the slugger as “Babe Hoskins,” but that was surely a bit tongue-in-cheek.
Cincinnati Reds fans are likely thrilled with Nick Castellanos and his seven extra-base hits and 1.610 OPS (as of Apr. 7), also an MLB-leading number. Oddity abounds as well: Three pitchers in Detroit, Boston, and Toronto have all pitched over 12 innings with WHIP figures between 0.892 and 1.105, but are an aggregate 2-3.
Early on, nearly every team has a couple players lighting up the MLB stats scoreboard, some of them establishing what can be called the Disappearing Records. These are records established in a limited number of contests, most home runs in 20 games, lowest ERA through five contests, and the like.
And computers allow us to see not only the records for a sensibly chosen number of games – say, 20 or 30 – but have brought us to the edge of finding the record number of foul balls hit outside the right field line in 17 games.
One such record, but one a bit more interesting, was pointed out by writer Matt Gelb, who tweeted the fact that Phillies pitcher Connor Brogdon was one of only 13 MLB pitchers to establish a 3-0 won-loss record in a team’s first six games.
A little digging established that – Holy Cow! – Gelb buried the lede. Under the ground. (A Twitter thing more than anywhere else, surely.)
What he might have written about the lanky Phillies reliever was that he had tied Cy Young for the wins lead after six games. Young was the first modern player to win three of his team’s first six in 1902.
One day Brogdon will be able to tell his grandchildren about the time he was listed among the MLB stats leaders with the famous right-hander.
What’s more, if Brogdon is the winner of any of the next three Phillies games, he can tell them how he rocketed past the immortal Young. This is because the Boston hurler lost his next game, the Americans’ ninth in 1902.
He would then be part of a very likely shorter list of disappearing MLB stats leaders. To get to a meaningful win-streak record – let’s say, just for relief pitchers – he has a distance to go. From June 7, 1958 through August 30, 1959, Roy Face won 22 in a row.