Bobby Cox

Bobby Cox and Ted Turner, three days apart. As probabilities go, it shouldn’t be that surprising I guess. They were about the same age and both were in poor health. But even as their life histories were entangled in the 80s and 90s, it doesn’t quite seem right that the entanglement should continue right down to today. Each really deserves their own time to be thought of separately.

Bobby Cox was the last manager of a school that will never come back: the pre-Sabermetric leader of men. I know a fair amount about Sabermetrics and I know next to nothing about leading men into battle, so I stoof in awe of Bobby’s manifest skills as a leader even as I (and many others here) bemoaned the lack of in-game strategery. We wanted more than one man could possibly be, and Bobby Cox proved that managing a diverse set of prima donnas (and, to be fair, all sorts of personalities, really) into a focused, successful group is both really important and really rare, and gets results that no amount of Sabermetric legerdemain could possibly achieve on its own.

We here at Braves Journal will try and put forward a bigger and better retrospective on the off-day on Monday, I’ve already read AAR’s contribution which is, as you’d expect, excellent, and I’m hoping to get more from the usual suspects. Until then, RIP Bobby,

There Will Be Math

So last night’s anomaly, with Michael Harris II becoming the 126th person to get four hits leading off an inning (not counting Maurice Archdeacon‘s 5 leadoff hits) got me thinking about a number of things. (And apparently JamesD as well… I think I address your issue below.)

First, Harris is not the 126th person to do it, because Ben Revere, José Reyes and Steve Sax did it twice, and Ichiro Suzuki did it three times. (Also, both Sandy Alomar and Robbie Alomar, but let’s not get carried away.) But let’s probe further.

Harris achieved the feat in four at-bats. Obviously, that is rarer. How rare? Now it’s down to 27 times, counting last night. Of those, 12 were hitting leadoff, which obviously gives them a leg up since the leadoff batter is the only one guaranteed to have at least one leadoff inning. So that leaves us with these:

DateBatterGameSinglesDoublesTriplesHomersBatting Spot
19250523Dave HarrisBSN19250523040004.0
19320917Red KressCHA19320917030017.0
19450919Buddy KerrBRO19450919040007.0
19470816Allie ClarkNYA19470816040004.0
19480721Bobby DoerrBOS19480721121105.0
19490919Del EnnisSLN19490919030104.0
19510523Mel ParnellBOS19510523031009.0
19540920Wally PostMLN19540920130015.0
19620617Bob SkinnerPIT19620617021105.0
19890815Félix FermínOAK19890815031009.0
19920808Larry WalkerPHI19920808031004.0
19990619Todd HeltonCOL19990619011116.0
20120628Jeff MathisTOR20120628021019.0
20200921Alejandro KirkTOR20200921021018.0
20260508Michael Harris IILAN20260508040004.0

So far, no math. Now I want to focus on the 5 guys who did this hitting cleanup, There are 221,471 games in the Retrosheet database where we know the lineups. This gives us 442,942 opportunties for a guy hitting 4th to go 4-4 in the leadoff spot of an inning. And 5 guys did it, for a rate of 1 in 88,576. My math question: is this more or less than you would expect?

I’m only going to give a back-of-the-envelope calculation here, but I have a pretty big envelope. First question: what is the probability that the fourth hitter in the lineup gets exactly four at-bats? As you might think, this happens a lot, about 51% of all games. Call it 50% (my envelope isn’t that big.) Leadoff batters are pretty good. What’s their overall batting average? 0.280. Now, what’s the probability that those with four at-bats get them all in leadoff positions? This, as you might expect, is the part of this that is really rare. There are only 1777 times a cleanup hitter hit leadoff four times in a game, even rarer than a 0.280 hitter going 4 for four. So the probability is roughly… [scribbles on envelope]…. .5 x .2804 x .004 = .5 x .006 x .004 = 1 in 81,106. So the feat is very slightly rarer than you might think, if you were reduced to making back-of-the-envelope calculations.

The Game

The Dodgers made the somewhat odd decision to cut Blake Snell‘s rehab short and start him tonight. Maybe they just wanted to see how he looked in their City Connect jerseys, which are nondescript in the front and weird in the back — they’re sort of the mullets of uniforms. After loading the bases in the first with no outs, Snell rallied to yield only one run. He loaded the bases again with two outs in the second inning but the can’t-hit-with-men-on juju reached its expiration date, and singles from Ozzie Albies and Matt Olson plated four more runs and it was 5-0. He had used up his 75 pitch limit in three innings, innings I suspect would have been better used with the Oklahoma City Comets.

The great success of Bryce Elder this year has turned the professional tonguewagging naysayers to focus on Spencer Strider. The Braves were very careful to baby Strider into the season. His first start in Colorado sucked, but it’s Colorado. That actually might have been part of AA’s seven dimensional chess — to give Strider plausible deniability if he sucked on his return, especially since his second start tonight was against the Fort Knox Monocle-Wearers — another opportunity for plausible deniability if things went wrong.

But once you hand Strider a five run lead, his job is to protect it. But he did a lot more than that. He looked great. The first time through the lineup: one single and six strikeouts. Velocity, movement, control. I believe those are the three basic requirements. Second time through the lineup: no hits, one strikeout, but two walks. On the home front, even our new insect overlords found some grudging respect. He pitched through six.

Riley scored from first on a Harris double in the 5th to make it 6-0. By the time Dylan Lee came in to pitch the bottom of the 7th, the Dodgers removed Kyle Tucker, whose contract doesn’t require him to play when leverage declines sufficiently, or to face a left-handed pitcher, or to tie his own shoes. Another run in the 7th made it 7-0.

The Braves have not had a shutout in Chavez Ravine in this century. I had feared that Carlos Carrasco might be called in to pitch the 9th with a 7 run lead, but Weiss went with Reynaldo Lopez. He might as well have gone with Carrasco. Lopez gacve up a double and a homer to push the shutout watch at least one more day out. But they hadn’t won a game in three years either. The game ended on a walkoff review.

All is not entirely rosy. Sean Murphy does not appear ready to face major league pitching, though he has correctly appealed his last five ABS calls. Surpassing Jonah Heim (his last game in a Braves uniform notwithstanding) with the twig should not be that daunting, but he isn’t there yet. Yastrzemski appears to be done offensively as well. But these are quibbles.

Rubber game tomorrow at 4:10 Eastern. The newly-revered Bryce Elder against Dodger phenom Justin Wrobleski.