The Cactus Diaries, Part 2

Our annual post in which we peruse all these spring-training games that don't really count and say, yeah, but what if that had happened in the regular season? See Part 1 (Feb 21 to Mar 9) here.

We pick up with that third, middle week of spring training where kinks have been worked out, and it's about seeing how many people we can get into each game to achieve maximum "talent evaluation". Basically, the week where March games look like September games (at least for one more year).


March 10: The Indians hung 16 runs on the Mariners, which by itself isn't too unusual; they were one of just eight teams to do it twice last season. But they've only ever done it twice against Seattle-- July 16, 2004, at Safeco, and August 30, 1981, at Municipal Stadium. More notably, though, it wasn't one player blowing up the boxscore. It was all of them. Fourteen different players accounted for those 16 runs, and the 16 RBIs were split 10 different ways. Since RBI became official in 1920, the Indians have played just five games where 10 different players recorded one, though one of those was only a few seasons ago (August 8, 2015, def. Twins 17-4). Their team record for number of different players to score a run is 12, and that was last accomplished in 1966. Only three teams in the live-ball era have ever had 14 different players score a run in the same game, and the only one that wasn't a meaningless final-weekend-of-season 40-man-roster fest was when the White Sox beat Kansas City 20-6 on April 22, 1959.

Honorable mention to Francisco Liriano, who signed a one-year minor-league deal with the Pirates this season. And hopefully Indianapolis will be kind to him. Because on Sunday he faced four batters against the Yankees... and walked all of them. In succession. To start an inning. The last Pirates pitcher to pull that off was Don Robinson against the Cardinals on May 2, 1984... and one of his runners (Lonnie Smith, even) got caught stealing.


March 11: Continuing our Pirates escapades, Monday would be the day they turned the only triple play of this year's spring training portfolio. Charlie Culberson of the Braves started the inning with a double, after which Dansby Swanson drew a walk. Ender Inciarte grounded into your classic 6u-3 double play, but Culberson rounded third too far and also got nailed while trying to get back. According to the great SABR triple plays database, there have only been three ((6)-3)-5 TPs in baseball history, with the most recent one being turned by the Astros on July 16, 1971. That was the first TP in Houston history, and Ken Boswell was the Mets runner who overran third and became, well, history.


March 12: It doesn't rain a lot in Arizona, but there's always one or two days every March where it does. And now that all the teams are based in greater Phoenix, it only takes one large cloud to wipe out an entire league. Only 1½ games got played in Arizona today, so our choices were limited. Madison Bumgarner wound up with a complete-game victory out of the cloud, throwing all five innings of the Giants' rain-shortened win over Milwaukee. In the past 30 years, only one Giants pitcher has gotten a 5-inning CG in the regular season: Matt Cain against the Nationals on June 4, 2009.

And over in Bradenton, Pirates pitching blips the radar again, not because Jameson Taillon allowed five hits in his 4-IP outing against the Twins... but because all five of those hits were doubles. The last Pittsburgh hurler to pull that off (5+ hits allowed with all being doubles) was Brad Lincoln against the Reds on September 24, 2011 (5 IP, 6 doubles, and won 4-3).


March 13: The Royals, who got rained out on the 12th and rain-shortened on the 11th, finally got to unleash a bunch of runs on the Indians on the 13th. If "Kansas City 17, Cleveland 7" looks like an old AFL football score, well, it isn't. The Chiefs have only ever won one game by that exact count, and it was against Houston-- in 1974. And it's not a Royals score either; they've never won a 17-7 game, although they did lose one against Cleveland on the final day of the 1995 season.

Oakland, meanwhile, recorded a 12-11 walkoff win over the Cubs on Sean Murphy's game-winning double. The Cubs haven't scored 11 runs and lost a game that counted since Atlanta's Marcus Giles drove in an 11th-inning run at Wrigley on May 28, 2006. And Oakland's last walkoff double when trailing (so, multi-run variety) was by Miguel Tejada off Mariano Rivera on August 3, 2003.

And the Padres, who don't often play with a designated hitter, did so in their game with the Angels. That DH was Austin Hedges and they slotted him all the way at the bottom of the order. He responded by hitting a pair of home runs and driving in five as San Diego won 9-3. No Padres DH has ever had a multi-homer game, from any spot in the order, in the regular season.


March 14: You might remember the Brewers phenom that was Josh Hader at the start of last year. Where he would routinely throw two innings and strike out 5 or 6. At one point 70% of his outs were via K. And over the course of this spring it was 13 out of 19. So Freddy Peralta decided to do a little tribute. Starting against the Angels, Peralta got 10 outs before departing in the 4th. Nine of them were strikeouts. In a real game, no Brewers pitcher has ever had 9+ whiffs in an outing that lasted 4 IP or less.

Of course, part of the reason Peralta departed was that, in between all those strikeouts, he surrendered five runs and the Brewers had to score twice in the 9th to salvage a 7-7 tie. No Milwaukee pitcher has struck out 9+ while also giving up 5+ earned runs since Mike Fiers did it against the Astros on September 30, 2012.


March 15: Beware the Ides of March. You know that line from having to read Shakespeare many years ago, but did you know that in the Roman calendar, every month had an "Ides". It was a mid-month holiday between the 13th and 15th, and now we call it "payday". :) But we digress.

The Yankees unloaded a 14-1 victory on their archrival Red Sox. Maybe a small morsel of revenge for that 16-1 beatdown in last year's Division Series. But the Yankees haven't beaten Boston by 13 or more in the regular season since a famous 22-1 affair on June 19, 2000.

The Dodgers had an 8-run 8th, again not terribly unusual; they were one of seven teams to have multiple "snowmen" last season. But in the 15 seasons of inning-by-inning data we have in our collection, the Dodgers have never had an 8-run 8th, and things are further compounded by the fact that the 8th inning was the only one they scored in. Since 2004, they've only had one regular-season game where they tallied 8+ runs with all of them in one frame-- August 30, 2011, when they rocked Padres starter Tim Stauffer in the 2nd and held on to win 8-5.


March 16: The Yankees weren't done. Back in Tampa, they proceeded to drop another 17-7 score, this time against Toronto. Like Cleveland at the start of the week, 14 different players scored the runs, and 10 different players drove them in. And also like Cleveland, the Yankees have never achieved the first part of that sentence, and their last game where 10 players had an RBI was July 22, 2007, in a 21-4 thrashing of the Rays. (When Shelley Duncan hits two home runs out of the nine-hole, all bets are off.)

Speaking of the Rays, honorable mention to them for having a home game rained out. That, of course, can't really happen in the regular season because (at least for now) they play in a dome. It can, however, happen in Port Charlotte (and we have an unredeemed ticket stub from 2012 to prove it).


March 17: In the closest we got to a spring-training no-hitter (and remember, we enter the regular season sitting on 299 of them all-time), Trevor Richards of the Marlins shut down the Cardinals for six innings. Two errors by infielders allowed the only baserunners to reach. Drew Steckenrider had a 1-2-3 7th. Austin Brice committed the lone pitching transgression by hitting Drew Robinson in the 8th. But welcome Tayron Guerrero. And goodbye no-hitter. Leadoff hitter Dexter Fowler launches a solid single to right, Paul Goldschmidt follows with another one, and St Louis actually scores 2 runs. Since the Marlins were established in 1993, they've had four potential no-hitters broken up in the 9th inning; only the Tigers (7) have more. (Other teams have four.) And the last time the Cardinals scored multiple runs in a game where they had no more than 2 total bases was August 21, 1997, when they took advantage of four walks and three errors in losing a close one to Montréal, 3-2.


March 18: We didn't have room to mention it five days ago, but Trevor Bauer appears to be "in midseason form" as the saying goes. On the 13th he struck out 10 Brewers in just 4⅔ innings. Today he fanned nine more hitters against the Padres before leaving in the 6th; Bauer has never had consecutive regular-season starts where he worked fewer than 6 IP and still struck out 9+.

He lost. Because the Padres, who are the only team never to have one of those 299 no-hitters, took one into the 7th. When Kirby Yates pitched a hitless 8th, it matched a feat that San Diego's only done twice in a real game. Five different pitchers threw at least 1 IP without giving up a hit in the final game of the 2012 season against Milwaukee, and on August 4, 2007, in a 12-inning contest with the Giants.

Honorable mention to the Mets playing the "opener" game and actually starting Jeurys Familia against the Nationals. Familia worked a 1-2-3 inning before giving way to Kyle Dowdy. Familia has exactly one (1) major-league start in his career, and it was during his September callup in 2012. In his last appearance that year, in Miami, the Mets let Familia have the standard four days' rest and then asked him to throw 75 pitches. He did. Thirty-three of them were strikes. He walked six, barely made it through the 4th inning, and lost.


March 19: With any game-winning play by the home team now affectionately referred to as a walkoff, we've taken the liberty of creating some variations-- the sac-fly-off, the error-off, the balk-off, the plunk-off (HBP), and the one that happened Tuesday, the bounce-off.

In a disturbing acceptance of the new minor-league rule, quite a few games this week were played with the "international" rule of placing a runner on second base to start an inning-- in this case not an extra inning, but the 9th. Since we know we're not going to play extras either way, why not try this thing out? So it was that the White Sox took a 5-4 lead against Cincinnati in their half, Joey Votto singled, the Reds pulled a double steal, Reshard Munroe walked, and now Stuart Fairchild is up with the bases loaded. Plunk. No, not the thrilling plunk-off because the Reds are still down 1. In the past 75 years the Reds have only received one other game-tying HBP in the 9th inning, when Pittsburgh's Joel Hanrahan plunked Todd Frazier on September 23, 2011.

THEN, and only then, comes the bounce-off from Dylan Covey, scoring Leandro Santana who had run for Votto. Cincinnati has only one regular-season bounce-off in the past three decades, and that was also against Pittsburgh. On August 31, 2009, Jesse Chavez uncorked one that scored Darnell McDonald from third for a 4-3 win.


March 20: We've mentioned Arizona a lot in these last two posts, but that's the state, not the baseball team. Frankly they didn't do a lot of notable stuff, but on this day it was Alex Avila's turn. Batting against one of his former teams, the White Sox, Avila unleashed a pair of home runs to lead the Diamondbacks to an 11-2 win. Both were 3-run shots, something no Arizona 8- or 9-hitter has ever done in the regular season (not even Micah Owings). Owings and Chad Moeller in 2002 are the only D'backs to have 2 HR and 6 RBI batting 8th or 9th, but they each had other hits that drove in runs, not just the homers.

In former D'back news, A.J. Pollock hit a leadoff homer for the Dodgers against the Cubs in Mesa. Los Angeles has had such a homer against the Cubs in each of the last three regular seasons: Enrique Hernandez off Jon Lester in 2016, Andrew Toles off John Lackey in 2017, and Joc Pederson off Tyler Chatwood last June. All of those were at Wrigley; since moving to Los Angeles in 1958, the Dodgers have not had another streak of three straight seasons where they hit a leadoff homer on the road against the same opponent.


March 21: Who knew, when the Indians started this post with 14 different players scoring, that they had started a trend. The Royals took this one up a notch on Thursday, not by having 14 different players score a run, but by having each of them score exactly one run. Kansas City beat Cincinnati 14-6. We needn't rehash that such a thing has never happened in a real game that counts.

Honorable mention to the Rays, not for hitting a pair of 3-run homers in the 1st inning (which they have never done in a real game), but because one was by Brandon Lowe... and the other was by Nate Lowe. They're not related, although Nate's brother Josh is also a Rays farmhand, last year at high-A Port Charlotte where the Rays also hold spring training (and occasionally get rained out). We weren't able to check every team ever, but at least in Rays history, no two players with the same surname have ever homered in the same regular-season game, much less the same inning. (Jose and Ozzie Guillen did do it one game apart in May 2000).


March 22: It may take a little while to get used to Paul Goldschmidt being a Cardinal, but we're used to him doing stuff like this. On Friday, Goldy doubled in the 1st, led off the 3rd with a solo homer, and then legged out a leadoff triple in the 6th as St Louis cruised to a 15-5 win over the Mets. The next day the Cardinals signed him to a five-year deal for $130 million. Coincidence?

But that also means Goldy missed the cycle by the single, which you can probably guess is the rarest of the "near-cycle" feats we like to track here. There were only four in the majors last season, and the Cardinals haven't had one since May 11, 2012, when Carlos Beltran did it against Atlanta. And not surprisingly, Goldschmidt has done it once before as well-- June 23, 2012, against the Cubs. The only player this decade to do it for two different teams is Yoenis Cespedes (A's and Mets).


March 23: Kevin Plawecki, apparently trying to convince the Indians to give him $130 million (spoiler alert: they won't), repeated Goldy's feat on Saturday by hitting a leadoff double in the 4th, a two-run triple in the 5th, and then capping Cleveland's scoring with a two-run dinger in the 7th. They beat the Reds 8-5. Since we still have the list up, Cleveland hasn't had a player miss the cycle by the single since Ben Broussard did it in Detroit on May 27, 2003. Only the Orioles (Chris Richard in September 2000) have gone longer without a player joining the list.

And Cameron Rupp, now with the Tigers, recorded the team's final dramatic moment in Lakeland with a walkoff double. Not just any walkoff double, but it happened with two outs and Detroit trailing the Rays 7-6 (i.e., down to their final out). The Tigers haven't hit one of those in a real game since Lou Whitaker's bases-loaded shot in the 10th off Gregg Olson gave them a 5-4 win against the Orioles on September 28, 1991.


March 24: We appreciate the efforts of several teams to promote our new Every Score Ever page which was added to the menu bar back in January. The Tigers made sure there was no drama on Sunday, dropping an 18-6 on Toronto. That score hasn't happened in the regular season since September 13, 2011, by the Red Sox, and the Jays were also the "6" on that particular occasion. The Tigers haven't won an 18-6 affair since June 20, 2000, and guess who that was against too. Since 1977 that score has hit only 10 times, and the Jays have been on the wrong end of three of them (also vs Yankees in 2004).

And they didn't even win the day. Back in Arizona, the Cubs collected 10 doubles, while Cristhian Adames and Phillip Evans each had 5 RBI en route to a final score of 24-6 against the Padres. That's been rolled only eight times in MLB history, twice by the Cubs. Then known as the Colts, they actually did it in back-to-back years, 1894 against the Pirates and 1895 against the Phillies. The most recent 24-6 in MLB involved that other Philadelphia team, the Athletics, who rode Al Simmons's 5 hits and 6 RBI to a win at Fenway Park on May 1, 1929.


March 25: The snow has melted (mostly), real baseball starts for every team in just a couple days, and that means all those dead leaves from the fall just got uncovered again. Time to bring in #PitchersWhoRake. That would be Cubs starter Cole Hamels, with what we believe is the only pitcher home run of spring training, hit on Monday against the Red Sox in an interesting cross-league contest. (Boston is on its way to Oakland for their opening series, so why not stop in Mesa.)

Hamels still owns the most recent pitcher home run for the Cubs; it happened on the next-to-last weekend of last season against Pittsburgh. He also hit one with the Phillies in 2012. Then, thanks to a double-switch, David Bote got swapped into the nine-hole after Hamels' departure. Guess what he did. Now, Joe Maddon was among the early adopters of batting the pitcher 8th, so it makes sense that the last time the Cubs got two homers from the nine-hole was during The Addison Russell Experiment at the end of 2015. He hit two by himself in a September 4 game against Arizona. But two different number-nine hitters? And/or, a pitcher and a non-pitcher? That takes us back to August 25, 2009, against the Nationals, by starter Carlos Zambrano (of course) and, after a double-switch, Jeff Baker in the 9th.

Honorable mention to the Royals for going 0-for-10 with runners in scoring position, stranding 13 baserunners, and losing on a walkoff... to their own triple-A team, the Omaha Storm Chasers. The last time Kansas City stranded 13+ and lost on a walkoff was a 1-0 extra-inning affair with the Twins on April 26, 2007... and they've never done it while also having an 0-for in the RISP department.


March 26: One last ridiculous score on our way out to the places we will be from. And here's our third consecutive Cubs note; after hanging a 24-6 on Toronto two days ago, they ended spring training with a 16-7 defeat of the Red Sox. This is a more-common score, happening about once every other year (25 since 1968 and 51 since 1912). But still, the Cubs' last 16-7 win (exact score) was in the 2006 season opener at Cincinnati, and Boston's last loss was way back on April 18, 1959, to the Yankees at Fenway Park.

With most of the regulars removed during or after an 8-run 5th inning, Wynton Bernard collected 3 hits and 3 RBI, including a home run, in a game he didn't start. Since 1920, the only Cub to pull that off in a real game was Corey Patterson, who on May 15, 2003, pinch-hit in the 8th inning in Milwaukee and remained in the game while it eventually went 17 innings. (Patterson's two-run homer in T17 would finally be the game-winner.)

Travis d'Arnaud stole three bases, and three other Rangers stole one each, as part of their 5-4 walkoff win over Cleveland. Texas hasn't had a player with a 3-SB game since Delino DeShields Jr on May 7, 2015, and the team hasn't swiped six since doing it in back-to-back games in Anaheim on August 6 and 7, 2013.

But it was Pedro Florimon who really put the final exclamation point on 2019 spring training. In the Braves' final exhibition game, this time truly home at SunTrust Park against the Reds, Florimon stepped to the plate in the 9th with the Braves trailing 5-3 and the bases loaded. Wham, walkoff grand slam. The Braves have only hit two grand slams at all in the two seasons of their new suburban home in Cobb County, by Ozzie Albies last June and by Tyler Flowers in August 2017. And their last walkoff slam in a regular-season game was hit by Brooks Conrad on May 20, 2010... also against the Reds.


Now on to the remaining 2,428 games that actually count. Stay tuned (new posts usually happen every Sunday night to wrap up the week). And follow on Twitter for oddities about every game every night. Happy new year.