Category: History

How do you know the Boston Red Sox' offense really cares? They give 120 percent.

Entering Thursday's game, the Sox had a 121 OPS+. For an individual player, that's no amazing feat; 56 players have an OPS+ of 120 or better this year in baseball.

But that should give you an idea of how impressive a team OPS+ of 120 is. Only one-third of the qualifying players in the game can manage it on an individual level, and here an entire team is averaging that total. 

Follows is the list of all the teams to ever finish the season with an OPS+ of 120 or better:

• 1927 Yankees
• 1930 Yankees
• 1931 Yankees
• 1982 Brewers

And here is the list of teams to get very close (118 or better):

• 1902 Pirates
• 1932 Yankees
• 1933 Yankees
• 1994 Yankees
• 1997 Mariners
• 2003 Red Sox

That's a small group of elite offenses: The 1902 Pirates, 1927-33 Yankees, 1982 Brewers, 1994 Yankees, 1997 Mariners and 2003 Red Sox. Let's have a look at them:

Fully two-thirds of the Red Sox lineup last night hit a home run, tying the club record. The dates and players (PH means they came off the bench, not that the home run necessarily occurred in their pinch-hit at bat):

• July 4, 1977 (Lynn 2, Rice, Yastrzemski, Scott 2, Hobson, Carbo PH) 
• June 20, 1979 (Lynn, Yastrzemski, Watson, Evans, Hobson, Dwyer PH)
• June 7, 2003 (Ramirez, Ortiz, Nixon, Varitek, Millar PH, Mueller PH)
• Sept. 15, 2008 (Ortiz, Youkilis, Lowell, Bay, Varitek, Ellsbury)
• July 7, 2011 (Ellsbury, Pedroia, Gonzalez, Ortiz, Reddick, Saltalamacchia)

The all-time record is eight, set by the Cincinnati Reds against the Philadelphia Phillies on Sept. 4, 1999, though two of those came from players coming off the bench. The Yankees in 2007 (July 31) had seven players go yard, six of them in the starting lineup (Damon, Abreu, Matsui 2, Posada, Cano, Cabrera, Duncan PH).

Limiting it only to members of the starting lineup, the record is seven, set by the Athletics on June 27, 1996, and tied by the Rangers May 21, 2005.

Having now had six hitters hit homers in the same game five times, the Sox are second all-time to the Reds, who have done it six times. No team has done it more since the Sox first did it in 1977, however. Likewise, perusing the list, I don't see any teams with three such games in as short a time as the Sox in the past eight years, so I'm assuming no player has been involved in as many such uprisings as Ortiz's three unless they've done it for different teams. 

The full list below the fold.

It is extremely rare to have two hitters post a 1.000 OPS in the same season. It hasn't happened since 2006, when the Red Sox (Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz) and the White Sox (Jermaine Dye, Jim Thome) did it. 

It goes on a while longer, about 40 of them in all.

But many of those occurred during eras of major offensive explosions — the 1930s and late 1990s/early 2000s — when getting to 1.000 was much easier. So how about those who posted a 165 OPS+ or better? 

Nineteen pairs until this year and just four in the past 45. Let's look at those four and compare them to the fifth pair aspiring to join them:

One of the things I love about baseball is the tie it has to history — its "modern era," the time in which most of the rules we have today were in place and the leagues and teams took shape in ways that are recognizable to current fans is now 110 years old. That's an incredible amount of history for almost every imaginable feat to have occurred, usually multiple times. Yet every year teams and ballplayers do something that either has never been done before or hasn't been done in years.

And the best part is there are sites like Baseball-reference that allow us to find out if what we're seeing is special or not.

So the Boston Red Sox are on a huge roll, the best of any team so far this season. They've won nine straight, scoring at least five runs in each of them. A streak like that — nine games with five or more runs scored — isn't all that uncommon. It happens on average twice a season. But the Sox haven't just scored five runs a game; they have pulverized opponents for 83 runs in those nine games. That's a little more rare.

In fact, if you're a Red Sox fan, you might be thinking you can't remember a stretch like this in which the Sox have been so dominant offensively. And you'd be correct: No Red Sox team has ever had a nine-game run in which they've won every time and scored 83 runs. The closest came in 1950, when the Ted Williams-led squad scored 80 runs over the first nine games of an 11-game streak. So this is unprecedented for the Red Sox, though less so for the game as a whole.

This year, no team had scored more than 73 runs in a nine-game stretch until the Sox pulverized Toronto for 14 in yesterday's game. In all of 2010, no team scored more than 73 runs in nine games, and no team went 9-0 while scoring more than 60 runs. 2009? The Red Sox went 9-0 and led the league in runs scored over any nine-game period during the streak … and scored 76. Not since 2008 has any team scored more than 83 runs in nine games. The Phillies that year scored 85 but went 7-2.

So when was the last time a team went 9-0 and scored more than 80 runs in that span? It appears to be the 2004 Astros, who scored 84 runs over the first nine games of their 12-game winning streak that vaulted them from the basement to the playoffs in half a season. Before them, you have to go back to the 2000 Oakland Athletics, who scored an impressive 95 runs in nine games, including a 21-3 thrashing of Kansas City. 

Another great streak in recent history fell short: the 2002 A's, who won an astounding 20 straight games, scored 82 runs during a nine-game span in the middle of that streak. (Note: I ran the search for teams scoring at least five runs a game and then, just to be sure, dropped the criteria to four per game, with the same results.)

So since the turn of the 21st century, the Red Sox are the third team to score this many runs while winning nine in a row — and the first Boston team ever to do it. And that's why we love baseball. Because every day, every week, is the opportunity to see something we might not have seen before.

Adrian Gonzalez is red hot right now, and yesterday he became just the 15th Red Sox player to homer in four straight games. 

Hitting home runs in four consecutive games is a fairly rare feat — just 25 times has a Red Sox player done it since 1919. If Gonzalez goes deep tonight, he'll join a five-way tie for the Sox record, shared by Jimmie Foxx, Ted Williams, Dick Stuart, George Scott and Jose Canseco.

Foxx homered in at least four straight games three times, as did Carl Yastrzemski. Jim Rice did it twice, and so did Canseco. Otherwise, the list of players to accomplish the feat is a history of the franchise's most feared (or most notorious) sluggers: Foxx, Williams, Jackie Jensen, Stuart, Yaz, Scott, Rice, Mo Vaughn, Carl Everett, Manny Ramirez, Nomar Garciaparra, Jason Bay and now Gonzalez. Only David Ortiz (who had 11 three-game homer streaks) seems to have missed the fun.

Over the four games, Gonzalez has put up a .389/.400/1.278 line. His 1.678 OPS is on the low side among his peers. He has "just" seven hits over the four games, although six went for extra bases, and one walk. 

The king of home run streaks — both in quality and duration — was Ted Williams, who homered in four or more consecutive games five times. When he hit home runs in five straight games in 1957, Williams walked seven times, meaning he hit his five home runs in just 11 official at bats, putting up a five-game line of .727/.833/2.364. He only made three outs in the five games. 

Williams almost had another string of four straight home run games in September of 1957, but even so, it was a remarkable string:

• On Sept. 17, Williams came in as a pinch hitter in the eighth inning and hit a solo home run against Kansas City to tie the game.
• On Sept. 18, he again came in as an eighth-inning pinch hitter and walked.
• On Sept. 20, he pinch hit against the Yankees in the ninth and bashed another homer.
• The next day, he started the game and came to the plate four times, walking three times and hitting a second-inning grand slam.
• And, finally, on Sept. 22, he again came to the plate four times, walking twice, homering in the fourth and singling in the sixth.

His line for the five games: an incredible 1.000/1.000/3.400, that single in the sixth inning of the fifth game his only blemish. 

But Williams wasn't done. He walked three times, was hit by a pitch and hit a single on Sept. 23, went 1 for 3 with a home run and a walk on Sept. 24 and went 2 for 3 with two walks on Sept. 25. All told, from Sept. 17-25, Williams had 25 plate appearances and reached base in 22 of them. With only 12 official at bats, he recorded nine hits, including five home runs. His line for the week was .750/.880/2.000.

Now that's being on fire.

Teams in 2011 with the most games in which the starter qualifies for a win and allows zero runs:

• Boston Red Sox, 8 (Lester 2, Beckett 2, Matsuzaka 2, Buchholz 1, Lackey 1)
• Milwaukee Brewers, 8 (Gallardo 2, Marcum 2, Wolf 2, Narveson 2)
• Philadelphia Phillies, 7 (Hamels 2, Halladay 1, Lee 1, Oswalt 1, Worley 1, Kendrick 1)
• Atlanta Braves, 7 (Lowe 2, Hanson 2, Hudson 1, Beachy 1, Jurrjens 1)
• St. Louis Cardinals, 6 (Lohse 2, Garcia 2, Carpenter 1, Westbrook 1)
• Oakland Athletics, 6 (Gonzalez 2, Anderson 1, McCarthy 1, Ross 1, Cahill 1)

Red Sox teams with at least eight such starts in their first 35 games since 1919:

• 2002 (Pedro 2, Lowe 2, Darren Oliver 2, John Burkett 1, Frank Castillo 1).

The Padres had 11 such starts through 35 games last year, second all-time only to the 1968 Indians, who had 12. The Royals had eight such starts at this point in 2009, as did the 2003 Expos, the '02 Sox and the 2001 Braves. 

Not that it means anything. Of all those teams, only the '01 Braves went to the playoffs, losing in the NLCS to the eventual World Champion Diamondbacks (who had some good pitching of their own). And of the six teams represented on the top of the 2011 list, only the Cardinals and Phillies are in first place.

The Boston Red Sox' starters are smokin'.

With a 1.02 ERA in eight games, each a quality start (by game score), each allowing no more than two runs, each at least working into the sixth inning, the Sox are experiencing a run of starting pitching we haven't seen in decades.

In last night's game thread, Devine said:

It feels like this rotation's stretch of really good starts is starting to verge on historically good.

I would agree. The problem, as we'll see, is defining how we research these starts. While every Sox starter except one has allowed zero or one run in this stretch, Josh Beckett did allow two. Of course, Beckett went eight innings in that start, which makes it more impressive. Meanwhile, Clay Buchholz went only 5.1 innings in his — but allowed only one run and so it also felt more impressive than it otherwise might have been. That means we're reduced to looking for strings of starts with a minimum line of 5.1 innings, 2 runs allowed. That's nice, but not particularly impressive. Still, I'm not sure what else we can do. Game score isn't much of a help; Buchholz's start scored just 50, the bare minimum for a quality start.

So we have to concede the possibility that this stretch isn't as impressive as we think it is. But if it isn't, that should become clear soon enough, as we should find lots of eight-game stretches without too much trouble. And, as you'll see, it's been quite a long time since a Red Sox ballclub saw the kind of consecutive starting performances we've seen over the last eight games.