12/21/24
May 02, 2014
SportsFilter: The Friday Huddle:
A place to discuss the sports stories that aren't making news, share links that aren't quite front-page material, and diagram plays on your hand. Remember to count to five Mississippi before commenting in anger.
Would be interesting to find the Kevin Bacon of baseball, some pitcher who played for so long in the '50s-'70s that most roads go through him. Actually, given how rare a final at-bat is, there probably isn't one.
posted by yerfatma at 01:31 PM on May 02, 2014
Where are you getting play-by-play records? I thought they'd be on Baseball Reference, but no luck.
posted by rcade at 02:07 PM on May 02, 2014
rcade: The play-by-play for most of the games are on BBRef, but for the very early ones, I had to reconstruct a couple of them based on batters faced in the box score and pitching/batting order.
For example:
Babe Ruth's last game as a batter is this one.
There is no play-by-play, but since he batted once and then was pulled, it's easy to determine that he faced the first pitcher of the game (Jim Bivin) who threw 6 innings.
I think there was one game where I had to do some calculations to determine who the last batter was, and was able to solve it based on the number of plate appearances everyone had, the hits, errors, walks, and sac flies/sac bunts. In the end, I had a leeway of 2 batters on either side to be right, so I figured I got it with about 90% accuracy.
posted by grum@work at 02:35 PM on May 02, 2014
ESPN has some World Cup posters to . . . do I don't know what with.
posted by yerfatma at 03:12 PM on May 02, 2014
Would be interesting to find the Kevin Bacon of baseball, some pitcher who played for so long in the '50s-'70s that most roads go through him. Actually, given how rare a final at-bat is, there probably isn't one.
For the reverse, someone like Hank Aaron (last batter for Bob Buhl (1967) and Tommy Byrne (1957 World Series)) might have a few more because of the length of his career (more opportunities) and skills (hits a home run or a double and they pull the pitcher and...that guy never pitches again).
For pitchers, you'd probably want old guys who threw complete games (because they'd face every batter in a lineup) or long time closers (because they'd face the last batters of the game and potential cup-of-coffee pinch-hitting types). So someone like Warren Spahn* or Mariano Rivera would work.
*The extremely old pitchers like Cy Young, Pud Galvin, Tim Keefe, or Kid Nichols don't have all of their individual games available in box score format, so tracking down who played in which game would be difficult. Even Walter Johnson would be a tough one to track.
posted by grum@work at 03:37 PM on May 02, 2014
Twitter, racism, and the Boston Bruins...
posted by MeatSaber at 08:02 PM on May 02, 2014
ESPN has some World Cup posters to . . . do I don't know what with.
I see they couldn't work out what language they spoke in Belgium, so they went with English.
posted by owlhouse at 10:35 PM on May 02, 2014
I see they couldn't work out what language they spoke in Belgium
Neither can the Belgians, but it seems to work out for them anyway.
posted by Howard_T at 01:55 PM on May 03, 2014
To be fair, Belgium is a fictional country created by the British, French and Prussians so they'd have a place to fight.
posted by Mr Bismarck at 05:25 PM on May 03, 2014
Oh, crap, grum is bored!
Tracking lineage in baseball: Finding the last plate appearance of a batter, and then finding the last appearance of the pitcher who faced him, and then finding the last plate appearance of the batter who faced him, and so on...
if you start with Babe Ruth, and you follow one part of his lineage*, you end up with...Mike Trout:
From here, you have to do a small jump, as the last batter Warren Spahn faced was Sammy Ellis...a pitcher. His last matchup was as a pitcher, not a hitter, so I went with that instead:
If you follow it from Sammy Ellis (the batter), it's Curtis Granderson: