Baseball-y Goodness

My wife, for my birthday, generously gave me a subscription to Baseball Reference’s Play Index. It’s a neat database that has just about all play-by-play data for baseball games from 1957 to yesterday. You can search stat totals for seasons and careers back as far as when stats started being kept; that is to say, about 120 years. It’s updated each day with the previous day’s stats so it is almost truly up-to-the-minute. What good is it? For example, I was with my friend the other day and was showing it to him and pointed out that it allowed one to quickly find such things as “From 1957 to 2007, Most IBB in a single game“. Andre Dawson was intentionally walked 5 times in 8 plate appearances to top the list, but that took 16 innings. Only Barry Bonds has had 4 IBB more than once, and he’s the only one to have 4 in a 9 inning game. No one who’s had 4 IBB in a game has only had IBB for their plate appearances. My favourite part of this query, however, is that Gary Templeton racked up 4 IBB from the 8th spot in the batting order, everybody else was batting cleanup. (He’s also the only non-outfielder or DH on the list.)