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6 hours ago, Seasick Sailor said:

 

now conflicting reports say he won't make his debut Tuesday. In unrelated news, the Toronto Blue Jays are the only team in the Majors who have zero RBI from their 3B spot. But yeah, let's keep him down there longer so he can keep hitting .430 against a bunch of kids and retreads.

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Here’s a long Athletic article on the K, 1-3 we discussed the other night. Has happened way more than I would have guessed. 

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When Jose Leclerc struck out Brian Goodwin to end the Rangers’ 5-4 win over the Angels Wednesday night (don’t worry, we’re not going there again), he finished one of — by night’s end — 218,438 major-league games (assuming you include the National Association). Over the course of those games, pitchers struck out a grand total of 2,177,525 batters, including one very peculiar event that took place just a few innings earlier.

In the bottom of the seventh inning, with no one on and two outs, Elvis Andrus came to the plate. The count was 2-2, and Angels pitcher Luis García had just spiked two consecutive curveballs. The third was irresistible. Andrus thought he had checked his swing, but the umpire disagreed. It was strike three, but the inning wasn’t over yet; the ball had passed cleanly through catcher Jonathan Lucroy’s legs for a “dropped” third strike. In fact, since it didn’t make contact with Lucroy at all, the ball was unfettered as it careened to the backstop, struck the brick wall and bounced back in the direction it came.

So hard was the bounce that it went over Lucroy’s shoulder and rolled a few feet back toward the mound, where García picked it up and threw to first to complete the out.

“The play is scored a strikeout, 1-3,” came the announcement from the official scorer over the press box microphone. As I wrote it in my scorebook, it occurred to me: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a K(1-3) in a scorebook before. I asked a few people who had watched more games than I. No one could remember one, though to be fair, it’s not the sort of thing that feels significant at the time. It wasn’t a game-winning home run or a weird triple play. It didn’t play any important role in the outcome of the game. In fact, it was deemed to be so unimportant that it wasn’t even a highlight you can find online (though if you’re an MLB.tv subscriber, you can go here and skip to 2:46:38 to see it for yourself). So perhaps the denizens of the press box had seen it happen before, and the memory was just blown under layers and layers of more meaningful baseball memories.

Still, I was curious. Has there ever been a K 1-3 in the scorebook?

I hopped on baseball-reference‘s Play Index. I was excited at first: going back three years, while there were plenty of instances of “strikeout (C-1B)”, I was unable to find even a single instance of “strikeout (P-1B). Alas, my excitement faded quickly when I realized that there should have been at least … one. I looked again, and to my dismay, Andrus’ seventh-inning plate appearance was simply listed as a strikeout. If that one wasn’t notated, then no wonder I wasn’t able to find any others.

I e-mailed the Rangers’ PR department if they would ask around. They got a message back from Elias Sports that simply read: “It happened one other time this season.  In 4/9 TOR-BOS Hanson struck out and was out 1 unassisted.”

I looked that one up as well (3:45:18 here). In the top of the eighth inning, Blue Jays first baseman Alen Hanson was unable to check his swing on a Marcus Walden breaking ball in the dirt. That ball deflected off catcher Christian Vazquez’ glove and dribbled back out toward the mound. But in this instance, Walden simply picked up the ball and tagged Hanson. It was scored a strikeout, 1 unassisted. Still not a K(1-3)

After a long afternoon of fruitless searching and e-mails, I finally got in touch with Sean Forman at baseball-reference.com. While the Play Index didn’t keep track of Andrus’ anomaly, their internal database still had the information I needed.

“Not that rare,” Forman replied, including a complete list. All told, including Andrus’ strikeout on Wednesday night, there have been 58 instances of a K (1-3) since at least August 8 1932, when Hal Lee ended the third inning of the second game of a doubleheader by striking out against Paul Derringer.

Forman is right: it’s not as rare as hitting four home runs in a game (18 times in MLB history) or throwing a perfect game (23). In fact, Carlos Beltrán had it happen to him twice in one year as member of the Cardinals in 2012 — once in April and again in August (both both times in the seventh inning!)

Still, it’s far more rare than a triple play (717), hitting for the cycle (325), or even throwing a no-hitter (299).

Of course, the logical next question was “Has it ever happened in a Rangers game before?” The answer is yes.

The first occurrence also came in a game against the Angels. It was June 25, 1986, and it might not surprise you to learn that the pitcher on the mound was Bobby Witt, who battled control issues for most of his career. The flamethrower struck out California’s leadoff hitter Ruppert Jones, and catcher Mike Stanley was unable to secure the ball. Witt retrieved the ball, made the throw to first, and for the first time in Rangers’ history, there was a K(1-3).

It would be nearly five more years before Texas made their debut on the other side of the equation. Denny Walling, five days short of his 37th birthday and in his 17th and penultimate season, only came to the plate 49 times as a member of the Rangers. The eighth of those 49 came when he led off the bottom of the ninth inning on April 12, 1991, against Gregg Olson and the Baltimore Orioles. K(1-3) went the scoring of that strikeout, and the Rangers eventually lost 3-0.

Even the pitcher involved didn’t recall anything about it.

“Wish I could help,” Olson replied via Twitter DM “Something as bizarre as that, I should. Let me know how many you find, very odd play. It had to be a curveball in the dirt that came out front,”

That does seem to be the trend.

After that Walling K(1-3), there would be a 16-year gap before another Ranger was involved. Joaquin Benoit logged one against Mariners second baseman Jose Lopez in the eighth inning of a 2-1 Rangers win on July 24, 2007. After that, the K(1-3) went dormant again, this time for nearly twelve years, returning on April 17, 2019 when neither Andrus nor Lucroy could make contact on García’s curveball. For the fourth and as-of-yet final time in Rangers history, a K(1-3) went into the scorebook.

Four times in franchise history is still pretty rare! But thanks to Sean Forman and the folks at baseball-reference.com, we know that it was not completely original, allowing baseball to once again play the part of Natalie Portman’s character in Garden State, delivering the classic line: “Oh, I’ve done that one before.”

*record scratch*

I thought the story ended there. But there’s more.

Before I got in touch with Forman, I sent a request through the site’s contact form. Late Thursday, someone got back in touch with me and said they had 59.

What was the discrepancy? I cross-checked the spreadsheets and found that this game had been added: the visiting Kansas City Royals beat the Minnesota Twins 7-4 on May 26, 1979. In the fourth inning of that game, Ron Jackson struck out looking. Catcher Darrell Porter was unable to handle the called third strike, and pitcher Ron Gale threw Jackson out at first.

It’s unlikely anyone in attendance knew that they were seeing history at the time, but — while there have been 58 K(1-3)s in baseball — Jackson was the only ꓘ(1-3) in history.

 

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“Obviously being the guy who was going to catch the ball, I had no idea he was going to do that,” Healy said. “So Dee yelled at me, ‘Let it drop. Let it drop.’ From there, I picked up the ball and looked at first and looked at Dee and said, ‘What do I do now?’ He said, ‘Throw it to second,’ so all of the sudden we had the double play. I jogged off the field not really knowing what happened. I felt like he was just playing ‘MLB The Show’ and just controlled me on a little controller.

 

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22 hours ago, Helobious said:

Don’t know who works in the strength & conditioning department for the Yankees, but they should probably replace all of them. Tulo & Bird always live on the DL no matter what, but everyone else is just ridiculous. 

Matt Krause is in charge. He's been there for six years from what I read. Whatever the hell he is doing is horrific to be nice. It stops being just random bad luck when everyone is injured. Today's batting lineup has one guy you would've expected to play in LeMahieu. You could count Frazier as well if you believed he was ready to take the next step to being an everyday player. 

Edited by UpperWestside
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Mike Trout is starting to get the Bonds treatment. OBP is up to .524 and he already has 20 walks, putting him on pace for somewhere in the neighborhood of 160 walks on the year (which still pales in comparison to Bonds’s 2004 season...232 walks and OBP of .609). Could be interesting trend to follow, especially with the garbage they Angels are putting behind him

 

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1 minute ago, Sbbruin said:

I just may have been caught up in the moment.  But he is incredibly versatile and a clutch hitter.

The last 3 years he has hit .190/.215/.256 thought he has been trending correctly and including in the power numbers but his splits. He's an average defender at best too . 

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12 minutes ago, shnsajax said:

The last 3 years he has hit .190/.215/.256 thought he has been trending correctly and including in the power numbers but his splits. He's an average defender at best too . 

But he’s an average defender at many positions!

reminds me of when Scott Sheldon was the most underrated player in mlb. 

Edited by Pato del Muerto
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