Double Plays
An Obscure Record
Double Plays
There are certain magical numbers that are dear to the heart of every baseball fan. You know what I’m talking about – 60 (home runs), 56 (consecutive games with a hit), 1.12 (ERA), .406 (batting average), and so on.
But do you know what 217 stands for?
Philadelphia Athletics
The 1949 Philadelphia Athletics turned more double plays than any other team in baseball history. They turned exactly 217 double plays, a record that has stood despite an increase in the number of games played, and despite improvements in the size and utility of fielding gloves.
This wasn’t a single season fluke, either. The Athletics turned 208 double plays in 1950, and followed that up with 204 in 1951.
Perspective
Let’s put this into perspective. Here is a quick and dirty list of double plays turned by team in 2022:
The Cardinals turned an impressive 181 double plays last year – still almost 40 away from the record.
Think of teams that probably had good double play combinations. The Cardinals of the 1980s come right to my mind. They were good, but none of those got close to even 200 double plays:
Second Place
Now – do you know which team is in 2nd place for most defensive double plays turned in a season?
It’s the 1966 Pirates, of Bill Mazeroski fame.
The Pirates came only 2 double plays short of tying the record.
Now, just think about that for a second. The 1966 Pirates were about as close as any team will ever get to tying what is probably an unbeatable record.
They had opportunities to do so, though they might not have realized it. For example, they turned only two double plays in their final game of 1966. That game – an 11-inning game against San Francisco – featured numerous opportunities for the Pirates to turn one. By my count, they had 3 opportunities to turn more – but were unable to.
An Unloved Record
It’s surprisingly hard to find data about double plays per team per season. As you can see, Baseball Reference does provide season-by-season data – but there is no option to search for team fielding leaders anywhere. Not even Stathead provides the option to search for double plays by team – and its list of 1949 play-by-play events provide data for only 179 of those 217 double plays.
Fangraphs is no help, either. Sorting by team double plays provides records in which individual plays are clearly double- or triple-counted:
Sadly, there is no option to sort by double plays per team in the pitcher category – which I take to be a general concession to the Defensive Independent Pitching Statistics approach. But more on that later.
I couldn’t even find many articles about the feat – though I admittedly didn’t spend much time looking through the SABR archives. I did find this article by the Philadelphia Athletics Historical Society, though it’s kind of hard to take the article seriously when it incorrectly states that teams now play 161 games per season in the very first paragraph.
With all of the statistical information available at our fingertips, and with all of our advanced statistics, it really strikes me odd that a statistic as simple as this one would be completely ignored. I suppose it’s simplistic – but a double play is something tangible, something easily observable, an event that happened and can be easily counted. Sometimes our desire for fancy things causes us to overlook the basics.
Double Plays in 1949
Take a look at the all-time American League averages for double plays per game:
These seasons look familiar, right? They look like some of the leading seasons in walks per 9 innings.
I can understand the argument that double plays were at an all-time high in the 1947-1958 period due to an increase in base runners. Still, I think this statistic is really impressive – and oddly missing from most baseball history discussions.
Similar to walks per 9 innings, 1949 didn’t set a National League record for double plays per game. It came close, however:
We don’t see outliers here the way we do with the American League numbers. Still, we do see a lot of those late-40s and early-50s seasons listed. And 1949 comes in at 15th place – still an impressive finish.
Why?
I honestly don’t know. I can tell you that there were certainly a lot of baserunners in 1930 – but 1930 isn’t anywhere near the top of the American League charts. We could blame it on walks – but walks in both leagues decreased after 1952. And modern seasons are conspicuously absent, which prevents me from believing that some sort of glove innovation caused this phenomenon.
The glut of double plays in this era is a mystery to me – a largely ignored mystery, covered in cobwebs and frightening to all but the most determined of statistical geeks.
Fielding statistics have been generally ignored throughout baseball history, and remain so today. We’ll gradually address that issue as this blog progresses. In my mind, however, the neglect is nowhere more apparent than in the utter disregard baseball analysts seem to have for turning the double play.
The biggest question, of course, is whether our simulations can actually recreate these numbers. We’ll see.
Forum Roundup
The Mathias 1934 replay has reached September 20. The Yankees will win the American League – but Brooklyn dropped 4 in a row, opening the door for the Cardinals.
Mark Ruckhaus shows us that Damn Yankees were still relevant in 1959.