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Purebaseball or MLB - Which produces wierder events.

Posted By KenG

Found this article of strange going ons in MLB. Compare it to some of the things you have seen in games right here in PB.

Certain things go with the territory. When you’re the designer of a baseball game, one of those things is the occasional message from a customer (a) whose pitcher just tossed three wild pitches in a row and cost him a game, (b) is angry, and (c) insists that such a thing could never happen in real baseball so there must be something wrong with the design of the game.
For a long time, I’ve been curious about how often certain baseball events cluster together in a short period of time. So Tom Ruane and I (mostly Tom Ruane) wrote a program that looks through our play-by-play files and tracks how often certain things happened in one inning. In this case, when I use the term inning, I really mean a half-inning ... that is, an inning for one team, not both.
We analyzed play-by-play data from 1978 to 2001, a period that includes about 50,000 games and a little over 914,000 half-innings.
The program compiles two types of information. The first counts the number of half-innings in which the event occurred once, twice, three times and so on. The second is a list of interesting innings, where an inning is deemed worthy if an event occurred far more often than normal. A four-strikeout inning qualifies as interesting; a three-strikeout inning does not.
You could, of course, find some of this information by looking things up in the Sporting News record book. In a way, that would be better than what we’re doing here because it would cover all of baseball history. But that wouldn’t necessarily tell you how often you’d see innings that don’t quite reach the level needed to make it into the record book.
So, without further ado, let’s take a look at what we found.
From 1978 to 2001, there were ten innings in which a team banged out five doubles and one inning with six. The Mets had six doubles in the 2nd inning of their game in Montreal on July 22, 1999. Dustin Hermanson was on the mound for all of them, but was left in the game and retired fourteen in a row as soon as the doubles barrage ended.
Six of the eleven innings with 5+ doubles were on artificial turf, one in Colorado, and two more in doubles-friendly Fenway Park.
On seven occasions, a team had three triples in one inning, most recently on May 15, 1997. In the home half of the seventh, the Cubs got a triple from Brian McRae, another triple from Doug Glanville, a single from Mark Grace, and a third triple from Sammy Sosa. The Padres Tim Scott was the victim on all three.
Twenty-three four homer innings have been recorded in this stretch, four of them in 2001 and seven more in 2000. The most recent was on August 17, when the Blue Jays blasted four dingers in the 6th inning against that woeful Rangers pitching staff. Well, that’s a bit too general. It’s not fair to indict the entire group for the failures of one individual. Pat Mahomes came on in relief and promptly gave up four homers to the five batters he faced.
There have also been 431 innings featuring three homeruns in this stretch, and another 5946 frames with a pair of long balls.
If you like innings that never seem to end, we’ve got one for you. On August 3, 1989, Cincinnati recorded 19 official atbats in the bottom of the first. Here’s how it went: walk, stolen base, single, single, three-run homer (by Ken Griffey Sr.), single, single, single, pitching change (Bob Forsch relieving Jim Clancy), double, wild pitch, ground out (Bronx cheer!), double, single, single, single, single, double, single, single, single, fly out, fly out. If this was chess, not baseball, I’m sure the Astros would have resigned before this 14-run inning was over. Instead, they played it out and lost 18-2.
If you happened to be counting, you already know that the Reds had 16 hits in that inn