29 April 09

What To Do About No Run Support

One of the things I love about baseball is the way quirky events occur with regularity. Today the Milwaukee Brewers were playing the Pittsburgh Pirates with the young pitcher Yovani Gallardo on the hill for the Brewers. Gallardo pitched extremely well, allowing only 2 hits with 11 strikeouts over seven innings. He was however getting no help from the Brewers’ offense and the score was 0-0 in the seventh. So Gallardo takes things into his own hands and hits a solo home run in the bottom of the seventh. Nobody scores any more runs, and the Brewers win 1-0.
We had dinner this evening at the taqueria and were watching ESPN Baseball Tonight there who had a story about Gallardo’s day. One of the stats they flashed was that only two other pitchers in the modern era had struck ten or more batters and had hit a home run to win the game 1-0: these would be Early Wynn for the White Sox in 1959 and Red Ruffing for the Yankees in 1932. These are the sort of figures that the various stats agencies take pride in pulling out of their databases, but I’m amazed at how much of this detail is available on the web through sites like Baseball-Reference.com. Here for instance is the complete play-by-play action for that Early Wynn game in 1959 (White Sox 1, Red Sox 0, with Wynn striking out 14).

Posted by at 10:02 PM in Baseball | Link |

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