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Following today's loss to the Padres, the Giants have gone 102 innings without hitting a single home run. The last one came off Bengie Molina's bat on July 22nd.

As a Giants fan, this seems sort of impressive in a perverse sense. But I have no idea how rare it is to go so long without a home run, and my Google-fu is failing me. So I'm turning to you guys: how long has it been since a team has gone over 100 innings without any home runs? What's the longest any team has gone in recent years?

Hello,

I'm hoping someone can assist me in collecting Pitch F/X data. I'm familiar with the ability to "download" some data via http://gd2.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/, but I want to do something a little crazier, such as "all pitches, 2007 and 2008" that are stored and then dump them into an SQL database.

1 - has anyone already done such a thing?

2 - If not, what would be the simplest way to go about things?

Thanks!

Did Manny deserve to make the starting lineup? What about Jeter? And Ichiro too! These are some of the players who will be starting in the All-Star game based on reputation - we'll call them the flubs. And read about which players we thing were snubbed.

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fpiliere over at SaberScouting is doing some work trying to determine a pitcher's dominance by tracking what percentage of each pitcher's pitches lead to outs.

I've tossed in my two cents over there, but when it comes to anything more advanced than long division, my two cents aren't worth that much.  If it's the kind of thing anyone here is interested in, I'm sure Frank would love the help.

Link!

Originally Posted On Tomahawk Blog

Michael Jordan beat the Jazz with the flu. Tiger Woods won the U.S. Open with a broken leg and a bad knee. Kirk Gibson beat the A’s with two bad legs. I beat my brother one-on-one using only my left hand, and now the Dodgers beat the Angels without recording a single hit.

The Angels’ Jered Weaver and Jose Arredondo combined for a no-hitter, but still lost 1-0 to the Dodgers on Saturday night.

Or did they?

Actually, according to a rule instituted by MLB’s Committee for Statistical Accuracy in 1991......(read more)

Friends don’t let friends argue about politics, but baseball disputes are completely in-bounds. Barack Obama and John McCain ought to merge the two subjects.

By Russ Smith

From www.splicetoday.com

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The sports media’s fascination with the private lives of athletes has reached a new, and disgusting, level.

From www.splicetoday.com

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Hello to all fans of baseball. I am here specifically to find out, in the baseball fans op- inion, which franchise is the poster franchise for Major League Baseball in terms of talent, integrity, and fan treatment. You may select from all 30 MLB clubs. If the MLB was to select one club to represent who they are and what they were about, who would it be? Thank You for your cooperation, and good luck to whomever you may root for!

I've cross posted this over at Pinstripe Alley.

The Yankee radio announcers, John Sterling and Susan Waldman, are obnoxiously ignorant, and lately they've been ranting about how the Yankees just can't seem to drive any runners in.

Go here  for a clearer picture of the chart, sorry about the image quality...

I started off charting % of baserunners scored against team slugging percentage, and I found a nearly direct relationship.  This makes perfect sense, right?  It takes 3 singles to score a run, 2 doubles, or one homer- so the higher the SLG, the higher the % of runners driven in.

So then the question that matters is how good is the team at getting on base? 

By taking the average of %Scored for the last three seasons I solved for x, which is .503 in this sample.

Here's my question:  Is this even valid?  Am I just using circular logic, proving what I wanted to question?  Is there some way to test this?

If I'm right and thinking about this is worthwhile, I feel like it's another way to evaluate the weight of OBP and SLG.

I'd be really grateful to anyone who can suggest tweaks to the equation or the methodology, or who has access to a computer based Baseball Encyclopedia who can run larger samples.