This probably won’t come as a suprise to a lot of people, but I have a hard time doing much more then medium level tasks on a computer.  I’m good at doing what I know (namely excel), but things like downloading the retrosheet game logs and parsing through them is a pretty difficult task for me.  Now I’m happy to know that I can cheat.  For a small fee, Baseball Reference now offers a service called the Play Index that basically allows me to do what I would normally need retrosheet data for but without all the front end work.

So I ran a report on the Tigers 20 homeruns so far this year and received a ton of feedback.  Like of the Tigers five opponents, eight of the homeruns have come against the Royals.  Sixteen have come against right handed pitchers and 14 of them were hit by right handed batters.  11 of the twelve homeruns went out to either left field or left center and the Tigers have hit as least one homerun in every inning in their games.  They’ve hit eight homeruns with the game tied and nine of the twenty came with no outs.  And the sixth spot in the lineup has produced more then any other spot with five.

Most of this means nothing, but as someone who likes looking at the stats on the back of baseball cards, this is pretty cool stuff.  And it’ll be a little more meaningful as the season rolls on so I’m hoping to incorporate more of this kind of analysis into my writing. 

And here’s a trivia question you can guess at.  Since 1957 (which encompasses the data made available by Retrosheet), which Tiger has the longest hitting streak (and for extra credit, how long was it and what year).  I’ll give you a hint by saying that this Tiger also has the second longest hitting streak as well. 

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