baseball stats

[naurae29]

this came up on my facebook newsfeed: "There's a stat running around the internet that Jamie Moyer (49 year old pitcher) has faced 8.9% of all hitters...ever. Anyone know if this is true?"

help?

[rkd]

I did a quick search on Baseball Reference to find game logs of Moyer vs specific batters, which turned up (if I counted right) 1417 different batters faced. That includes pitchers who were batting. I don't know how reliable that total is, but it's probably not too far off -- I may have included All-Star and postseason play by accident, but that shouldn't affect the total too much. So if there were something on the order of 15,500 batters in MLB history, that'd be about right.

8.9% seems plausible to me -- Moyer switched leagues a few times, he plays in the interleague era, and obviously he's been pitching for a long time. He got most late-80s batters by pitching 3 yrs with the Cubs, then 2 with Texas. And he's pitched in the NL since '06 but the AL for about 15 yrs before that. And there are more teams now than 50+ yrs ago. Probably more pinch hitting as well, and he gets to the 7th inning in the majority of his starts. Cool.

[PhygLeGuy]

Between 1876 and 2011, 15,856 different players have completed at least one plate appearance.

Using play-by-play data from Retrosheet, complete from 1974 to 2011, partial from 1948 to 1973, we find:

The ten pitchers who have faced the most different batters:
1537 Greg Maddux (9.7%)
1433 Tom Glavine
1417 Nolan Ryan
1412 Jamie Moyer (8.9%)
1369 Randy Johnson
1330 John Smoltz
1285 Roger Clemens
1285 Mike Morgan
1265 Jim Kaat
1264 Tommy John

Faced the most different batters, batting as pitchers:
378 Greg Maddux
348 Tom Glavine
305 Jim Kaat
295 Steve Carlton
284 Phil Niekro
274 John Smoltz
273 Joe Niekro
261 Livan Hernandez
259 Jim Bunning
258 Rick Reuschel
To rank high on this list, avoid leagues that use a designated hitter.

Faced the most different batters, not batting as pitchers:
1254 Jamie Moyer
1206 Roger Clemens
1191 Randy Johnson
1178 Nolan Ryan
1175 Dennis Eckersley
1163 Greg Maddux
1121 David Wells
1120 Dennis Martinez
1109 Tim Wakefield
1101 Mike Morgan
To rank high on this list, change leagues.

Without play-by-play data going back to ... ever, I have no idea how to calculate a denominator for the second and third list. So, yes, Jamie Moyer has faced 8.9% of all batters ... ever, but that is not a record. He does hold the record in a category that cannot be expressed as a ratio. I intentionally counted post-season and All-Star games, because I was too lazy not to.

Bonus fun fact: Greg Maddux made his major league debut on 9/3/86 as a pinch-runner in the 17th inning. He stayed in to pitch the 18th, and lost. The starting pitchers were Nolan Ryan and Jamie Moyer. The game had actually started the day before, but was suspended after 14 innings, because Jamie Moyer and Greg Maddux began their careers before Wrigley Field had lights.

[Paucle]

what awesome and impressive research! Thanks!

[econgator]

Neat looking at that game.

The home plate umpire was Joe West, who is still umpiring (and has probably called balls and strikes on/for about half the players who have ever played).
The PH for Moyer was Terry Francona.

[TheConfessor]

So I'm guessing that it's still somewhat rarer to have been a contestant on Jeopardy! (Trebek era) than to have been a major league baseball player. I think there have been close to 6,000 J! episodes, which typically have two new contestants per show, so that's around 12,000 past contestants. And I think J! does about 230 new episodes per year, so that's around 460 new contestants per year.

There are 30 MLB teams and during September, the can have 40 players per team. So that's at least 1,200 players per season. How many of them are new in a typical year? At the current rate, will the number of ex-J! players ever pass the number of ex-MLB players, and if so, when? I'm a little rusty on my differential equations.

If you only count living ex-players, the J! number is probably higher than the MLB number. So we got that going for us, which is nice.