Ruane: Fun with starting pitcher line scores

From SABR member Tom Ruane at Retrosheet on May 24, 2015:

A while back I wrote an article about batting lines. And not the new-age ones containing things like walks, strikeouts, pitches seen and left-on-base. I was talking old school:1

Mantle cf 4 1 2 4

Sure, the box score had a header line identifying what each column meant, but if you didn’t know that the numbers represented at-bats, runs, hits and RBIs, why were you even looking at a box score in the first place?

This time around, I’d like to look at pitching lines. In particular, those of starting pitchers. And I would like to use the classic version from the same era as the batting lines above. Ones like:

Gibson 9 3 1 1 1 12

I probably don’t have to tell you, but this includes innings pitched, hits, run and earned runs allowed, walks and strikeouts.

So what is most common pitching line? First, I should probably describe the scope of the study. I will be looking at starting pitchers of every game played from 1914 to 2014, a total of 171,891 games or 343,782 lines.

Read the full article here: http://www.retrosheet.org/Research/RuaneT/retro_fun5.htm#A150524



Originally published: May 26, 2015. Last Updated: May 26, 2015.