Don’t Spot Them 6 Every Night: Braves 8, Rockies 6

Peak Dylan

It started innocently enough on September 7th, 2011. With the White Sox trailing 5-3 at Minnesota, Dylan Axelrod entered in the 7th and pitched a scoreless two innings. With that, someone named Dylan had played in a major league game. He was born on 1985 and is still just 40 years old today. In 1985, when he was born, Dylan was the 188th most popular boy’s name in the US, according to the Social Security Baby Name Tracker. But the name Dylan was in the middle of a big run. Before 1966, it was not in the top 1000 names. It didn’t crack the top 300 until 1982. 1985 was the first year it made it under #200. But by 1992 it was 28th, and has fluctuated between 19th and 44th ever since. 2003 and 2004 were the two years at #19, and the name seems to be very slowly losing popularity, but has never fallen out of the top 50.

So, as you would expect, Major League Baseball Dylans have been on the rise:

	Major League Dylans
Season
2011	1
2012	2
2013	1
2014	1
2015	1
2016	2
2017	3
2018	5
2019	6
2020	6
2021	7
2022	7
2023	10
2024	10
2025	9
2026 (so far)	6

So Peak Dylan appears to have come in 2023-2024, which is 20 years after peak Dylan in the Social Security database. The Braves have Dylan Lee and Dylan Dodd, and I wrote this to talk about Dylan Dingler, but then I found out he spells his name wrong.

What made the name Dylan popular? It couldn’t be Dylan Thomas; the timing is all wrong. Bob Dylan is an obvious possibility, and probably has a lot to do with the initial popularity, but really can’t explain the surge. from 1985-1992, or the slow decline since 2004. But never forget that Dylan is a big baseball fan (the autographed baseball above can be yours for the somewhat odd price of $53,445.99) , and wrote a slow blues about Catfish Hunter:

Who Needs a Double?

Chatter in the booth earlier in the week discussed teams who had played games in which their only hits were doubles. There was some disagreement about whether losses should count. Here are the actual results:

	Losses	Wins	Percent
Hits (all Doubles)
1	284	35	11
2	141	10	7
3	47	14	23
4	16	4	20
5	3	5	63
9	0	1	100

The first lesson is that you don’t want all your hits to be doubles unless you get a lot of them. The second lesson is what an outlier that Braves game of August 18, 1998 was. 9 doubles, two by Walt Weiss (whatever happened to him?), two from Gerald Williams, two from Danny Bautista and the oxymoronic single doubles from Chipper Jones, Andrés Galarraga and Eddie Pérez. No team with 6, 7, or 8 doubles without any other hits in well over 100 years.

Questions No One Else Is Asking

Why didn’t José and Robert have their first initials on their jerseys?

Why does José even have a jersey? (OK… he doesn’t any more, so that one is answered.)

So the answer, I think is simple economy. Everyone knew José wasn’t going to last, so nobody had to sew on an “R.” and a “J.” To be honest, i’m not exactly sure what the fabric savings are, but someone made their budget this quarter.

The Game

The Braves started this game with men on 1st and 2nd and nobody out but failed to score. The Rockies’ first six batters reached, and after 10 came to the plate, five had crossed it. It appeared as though the Hawks’ record from last night (a 51 point loss) was in jeopardy. A leadoff single in the top of the 2nd was wasted as well. A Mickey Moniak homer was the only blemish on Sherlocks Sherlocks in the 2nd, though, so it was only 6-0 after two. The Hawks’ record was looking safe.

In the 3rd inning, Jorge Mateo, Ronald Acuña Jr. and Drake Baldwin all flew out to the Moniak in left field. That inspired me to create a count of innings in which three men came to the plate and all three outs were made by the same fielder. (The alternative was paying close attention to the game.) Results are below.

The schneid was broken in the fourth with another Matt Olson homer: solo, to make it 6-1.

Holmes settled down and it turned out that instead of a rout, the first inning was merely an Episode™, The bottom of the 6th saw the Braves debut of Anthony Molina, a Venezuelan righthander whose name translates to “better than José Suarez, or at least no worse, or at least we’re gonna find out.” (Spanish is such a concise language.)

he seventh inning saw the departure of José Quintana in favor of something called Zach Agnos, who I had hoped would take away the sins of the first six innings. (That is really strained wordplay, and I apologize.) He gave up one unearned run in the 7th, but earned the affection of Braves fans everywhere by giving up a hit to Austin Riley. He left with one out in the 8th and men on first and second with Olson coming up. This was pretty much the make-or-break moment. The new pitcher, Jaden Hill, walked Olson to load the bases. Dubón triples to make it 6-5. That brought up Riley. Riley. Riley hit a long sac fly to right with an 0-2 count to tie the game.

So we were now tied, but the Rockies were going to get an extra chance for the rest of the game. Didier Fuentes, who was anticipating mopup work, was now called on to pitch a really high-leverage inning. He hit the first man faced — a Freeman not named Freddie or Marvin. After a double play, he then retired a Castro named neither Starlin or Fidel.

The Rockies then went with Juan Mejia, a guy with a José Suarez-esque ERA, but in Coors I never know what to make of pitcher’s ERAs. He walked Heim to lead off the inning, then pinch hitter Michael Harris II hit a bomb. 8-6.

That brought in the Last Suarez Standing. He got Tovar, but Doyle singled to make it interesting. Julien struck out. And Moniak grounded out to end it.

One Man Fielding

As I said, I wrote this up early in the game after Mickey Moniak made three outs in left, just as Mike Yastrzemski had done earlier in the week. Here are the results:

	1-2-3 Innings where that fielder made all the outs
fielder
Pitcher	23
Catcher	20848
First	66901
Second	75
Third	19
Shortstop	66
Left	622
Center	1312
Right	525

I don’t have a lot to say about this other than I saw three outs by the left fielder twice this week. It’s not really rare, but it’s pretty rare. Fortunately, I finished this “analysis” long before the Braves comeback.