Who keeps track of successful pick offs by pitchers and players who have gotten picked off during the season and career?
Not sure what you are asking here, but I’ll take the first SWAG here. All documenting of what goes on in a baseball game is recorded by the Official Scorer working the game. This individual has sole discretion in judging and recording the outcome of every play, including pickoffs, His scoring book will indicate when a pick off happened, who was the picker and who is the pickeee, so to speak.
If there were historical stats it would be in the Baseball Almanac statmaster and I don’t see it there. There’s a stat for thrown out by catcher, and caught stealing, but not thrown out by pitcher.
A lot of pickoffs are recorded as caught stealings. If the runner tries to continue to the next base, and is thrown out there (say pitcher to first to SS) it goes down as a caught stealing and is indistinguishable (unless you look closely at who was involved) from a catcher-to-shortstop CS. The things counted specifically as pickoffs are those where the runner is tagged trying to get back to the base. Which can make it hard if you’re trying to find out how many times a pitcher catches a runner off base.
^ Another example of game totals not telling the whole story. You need play-by-play scoresheets to know what really happens in a baseball game.
Wikipedia says the record holder is Steve Carlton, by a lot, among pitchers in career pickoffs, but I’m not sure when they started counting.
Other names high on the list include other lefty starters like Buehrle and Pettitte.
Jerry Garvin of Toronto seems to hold the record for pickoffs in a single season. Again not certain when the counting began, but he was a ways back…
That is what I am wondering. I have seen comments like that before, that so and so has the most in a game or a week, but where are the records? I just saw Andrew McCutchen get picked off twice in less than a week and I think he has gotten caught once before this year. Who has gotten caught the most? He has been caught stealing five times as well, but that does not include these two I saw recently. Where are the stats?
Well, you could look in the baseball reference play index. Try Spanning Multiple Seasons or entire Careers, From 1901 to 2007, Stats only available back to 1957, sorted by greatest PickOffs | Baseball-Reference.com for a more complete list of the top 200 pickoff artists, but only 1957 through 2007.
The idea is that baseball reference has complete play by play information for many years and you can sort according to particular types of plays.
I spend half my life on that site. Unfortunately I find that lots of information there by accident. I have never seen anything related to pick off successes or failures. I did discover some info on Washington Post from last year but nothing from this year.
Thank you for that cite. Now we need to discover who got picked off.
The problem is that “pickoffs,” as we have seen, were not stat until halfway through MLB history, and many cases of a runner being picked off are counted as caught stealing. The Official Rules do not define a “pickoff” as a thing that the Official Scorer is responsible for determining.
For a sport that loves to count (ah ha ha ha haaa!) baseball actually has a surprising number of things it does not count, or doesn’t count right. An obvious thing baseball does not count, or didn’t until recently, is runners taking an extra base on a hit - for instance, going first-to-third on a single. Not did it count baserunning errors - for instance, TRYING to go first to third on a single and getting thrown out. Yet these are obviously very important events, just as important as stealing bases and caught stealing - I remember reading a study on the issue where they found the numbers were often shocking, things like “in this season Rod Carew took 73 extra bases on hits and wasn’t thrown out once,” just amazing numbers that clearly increased or decreased a player’s contribution to his team. But that’s not even a thing, officially.
That is kind of my point. There are people keeping track of stuff like this because i read things like the Carew mention and wonder where that stat comes from. Os it just one person who watched Carew all year or is someone tracking these things somewhere (Elias comes to mind) and then selling that information to announcers or whomever might want it? Thanks for the input.
Anything that’s not an official stat has to be derived from play-by-play event files, which are built from original scoresheets. A lot of this data is available for free, but the software tools to handle it for esoteric questions aren’t.
Interestingly enough when baseball was recording stolen bases back in the 1880s, stolen bases included what we now consider them to be plus these extra bases on base hits (at least for some seasons). The top ten base stealers for 1887 had:
138 129 117 111 103 102 95 94 89 88
Which would be unbelievable by the modern definition.