I have been a baseball fan for a long time, since I was about 5 years old. I have never seen a catcher pitch before. Miguel Montero is now pitching for the Cubs.
True, he did raise his average from .158 to .163 during the series. :dubious:
By the same token, I regret ever having thought Jesse Gonder was a bad defensive catcher.
I recall seeing Yankees catcher Rick Cerone pitch two innings in a blow-out in 1987, which the Rangers won by 20-3. The hilarious thing was that he kept shaking off the catcher’s signals. He was laughing his ass off. The Rangers, to their credit, sent pitcher Bobby Witt in to hit as a pinch-hitter. Cerone didn’t give up a hit but he balked in the 20th run while pitching to Witt.
Rico Carty was hitting .365 in 1970 with an OPS of 1.120 at the All Star Break and was voted in through write on ballots. He was awful defensively though.
Well, it hadn’t happened since yesterday (Bryan Holoday of the Rangers). And both Betancourt and Phegley have done it this year.
After winning 7 in a row, the Orioles are about to get swept in a 4-game set by the fucking Mariners, ferchissakes.
I heard on one of the Cubs broadcasts that this year current Buc Eric Kratz has become the first player to pitch and catch for two teams in the same season.
Isn’t Chris Gimenez of Cleveland mostly a catcher?
He pitched today, too…two innings.
Gimenez and Montero today, on the heels of Holoday and Boston’s utility OF LaMarre yesterday, and of course the deadly Goins/Barney duo on Friday–that’s six that I know of in three days. And of course it was just a little while ago that the Cubs used three Ps in left field in a single game.
Pretty remarkable.
Same thing happened in today’s Mets-Cubs game. It seems (from the si.com recap) that Cubs manager Joe Maddon is not a student of baseball history:
“With the game well in hand, Mets pitcher Jacob deGrom was sent up as a pinch hitter in the eighth and flied out against Montero. “I thought it was equal at that point,” Maddon said. “I have to believe that is somewhat of a first.””
Also catcher Drew Butera of the Royals has pitched in 4 ML games, most recently on June 25.
A long weekend for the Rockies at Dodger Stadium – on Friday they lost 0-5 with 12 K’s. Saturday, 1-6 with 14 K’s. Sunday, today, 1-4 with 15 K’s. To add insult, in the top of the 9th with Nolan Arenado at bat, a clown corps of young adults(?) swarmed onto the field. When order was restored a couple of minutes later, Arenado struck out. Now it’s on to San Francisco for the Rockies, facing a team tied with Texas for the most wins, 52.
This has been a pretty amazing weekend for offense - wow.
A fascinating bit of trivia for you mentioned by the Jays announcing team today:
Rajai Davis of the Indians has, during his career, hit at least one walk off single, walk off double, walk off triple, and a walk off homer. In all major league history he’s the only player who has done those four things.
Personally, my favorite position-player-pitching moment comes from Mark Grace, who pitched when he was with Arizona. His Mike Fetters impression was outstanding. But what I love most about it is that he allowed the first career home run to current Cub David Ross. I can only imagine the ribbing he took for that.
RickJay, it’s incredible that Davis is the only one to have ever done that.
The Giants had only two position players from their opening day lineup in the starting lineup today, and only one of them playing their normal position. The entire starting outfield, their fourth outfielder, the second and third basemen and two of their utility infielders are hurt. So of course they won 5-4 in 11 innings, and are tied with the Rangers for the most wins in MLB.
I don’t actually believe in all the ‘even year’ stuff…but I’ll be darned if I can come up with a better explanation for how this team is continuing to win games this season.
That was my first thought too, but then I realized that Walkoff triples are really rare. Triples are rare to begin with. Add to that the winning run has to be on first when the play begins. Add to THAT the reality that it’s often possible to score a run from first on a double. I would guess that you’d just about always have a fast batter and a slow base runner. Anyway, I doubt very much that I’ve ever seen one in person and wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there aren’t more than a handful a year.
According to FanGraphs, there were 141 between 1945 and 2013, which works out to an average of about 2 per year.
The article notes that there doesn’t necessarily have to be a man on first. Two walk-off triples have occurred with bases empty - a triple plus an error leading to the hitter coming all the way home.
Thanks for doing the research. So, about in line with what I expected.
I thought about that second possibility but decided that I would count that as a walkoff error rather than walk off triplle, since after all it was the error that allowed the run to score.
Even more incredible that someone has tracked that stat throughout all of major league history.
It’s not a stat, just a factoid. No one has tracked it through history. GWRBI (of which all true walk-off hits are a subset) was an official (albeit virtually meaningless) stat for a few years. But factoids like that come from scoresheet database searches, and the play-by-play data is not complete until 1952, IIRC. There might have been an earlier occurrence that we can never know about, because the hits involved come down to us only inside game totals.
That’s nuts that someone could average .365 over 80 games and not make the all star game on the first run. Well Cory’s .302 isn’t looking like as big of a snub.
I did enjoy the Rockies in town it was a nice break from the depressing Kershaw talk. We’ve gone like 19-12 since the beginning on May and we’ve finally picked up a game and a half on the giants we’re only 5 games back.