Great Baseball Sayings and Curious Facts Topic

Who hit three in a game the most times?
2/13/2016 5:00 PM
Posted by contrarian23 on 2/13/2016 4:54:00 PM (view original):
Posted by italyprof on 2/13/2016 3:29:00 PM (view original):
Posted by italyprof on 2/13/2016 3:27:00 PM (view original):
Three new ones:

1. Who were the only 3 players to hit 30 home runs in 13 different seasons (one is easy)  - WE HAVE TWO: AARON AND PUJOLS. WHO IS THE THIRD?

2. Who were the only 2 players to hit 35 home runs 11 times?

3. What 7 players have hit 40 home runs in a season and struck out 40 or fewer times?
1. My original question was mistaken because my source was from more than a year ago and Pujols hit 30 for the 13th time in 2015. So Aaron, Pujols and one more...

2. Pujols has hit 35 only 10 times, so we still need 2 names. 

3. No takers so far. 
The source I have lists six players who hit 30+ HR in 13 different seasons
Yeah, I apparently was using an older source than I realized. 

1. There have been 6 players so my bad: 


In A Career
(At Least Ten Seasons)

NL

Hank Aaron

Milwaukee (8)

15

NL

Atlanta (7)

NL

Barry Bonds

Pittsburgh (2)

14

NL

San Francisco (12)

AL Alex Rodriguez Seattle (4) 14
AL Texas (3)
AL New York (7)
NL Albert Pujols St. Louis (11) 13
AL Los Angeles (2)
AL

Babe Ruth

New York (13)

13

NL Mike Schmidt Philadelphia (13) 13


2. The only two to have hit 35 11 or more times were Babe Ruth and Mike Schmidt up to a few years ago, but A-Rod is the third in that exclusive group. 

So Mike Schmidt was the key to the question - as he HAD been, up to a few years ago, the only 30 13 times and 35 11 times player, sharing the first with Aaron and the second with Ruth. But now there are 6 in that first group and 3 in the second. 

3. The answer, which no one has tried for, to the 7 players who hit 40 home runs and struck out 40 or fewer times in the same season, is: 

Mel Ott 1929
Lou Gehrig 1934
Joe DiMaggio 1937
Johnny Mize 1948
Ted Kluszewski 1953
Ted Kluszewski 1954
Ted Kluszewski 1955


2/13/2016 5:12 PM

One of the people that was in our house a lot when we were kids was a man named Ted Del Guercio. I think he and our father knew each other from the North Ward in Newark already, but they both went to Seton Hall Univ. as well. So maybe they met there.

Ted, Mr. Del Guercio to us, looked like an Italian version of Ted Williams or John Wayne. He was a professional baseball player and though he never made it up to the Major Leagues, he had a very successful minor league career as a hitter and outfielder. He indulged my baseball fanaticism and we played trivia games for many years when I was young, trying to stump the other with ever more difficult baseball facts. He once hit a wiffle ball I threw him over our house, the suburban street where we lived and the house across the street, into  their swimming pool. 

In 1953 he came in second for the batting title for the South Atlantic League, hitting .333. The batting title was won by a young man from Mobile, Alabama named...Hank Aaron who hit .362.

Here are the official stats: 
http://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.cgi…

Here are Henry Aaron's minor league stats:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.cgi…

2/14/2016 4:58 AM (edited)
Ted worked for years at State Farm with my father. The "Victoria Castle" mentioned in the obit below is an important place: it was where the mafia bosses got together once a week to meet, dressed to the nines with their wives and had dinner. At times Joe Dimaggio would be there and my uncle tells us that if you tried to talk to Joe D. or Sinatra they would beat you up. But Dimaggio would always launch some baseballs to the kids waiting outside. 
This was Ted:

Here is the obit:

Ted Del Guercio, 78, top baseball prospect 
Sunday, November 26, 2006 
BY JOHN WIHBEY 
Star-Ledger Staff 
In 1945, Newark's own Ted Del Guercio signed an eye-popping $19,000 contract with the Boston Red Sox. 

The 17-year-old pitcher and slugger from the North Ward seemed like he was on deck for the big leagues. 

Mr. Del Guercio, a handsome, strapping 6-foot-1 Central High School prodigy, would hit .300 for the better part of the next decade in the minor leagues, playing against the likes of Hank Aaron, family members said. Aaron, baseball's future home run king, even bested him one year for a minor league batting title. 

Some hard luck, though, stopped Mr. Del Guercio from making the majors. In the end, he was left with only salty stories from a decade in the scruffier rungs of professional baseball -- and a glimpse of what might have been. 

"It hurt him a little bit," said his son, Ted Del Guercio Jr., 53, of Newton. "But we talked baseball every day. He would have you laughing all night. He was a pisser." 

On Thanksgiving, Thaddeus "Ted" Del Guercio Sr. succumbed to long-term health problems at his home on Wakeman Avenue in Newark, his family said. A retired private investigator, Seton Hall University graduate and father of two, he was 78. 

"He was just an all-around talented guy -- a world-class piano player, a history buff who knew everything about World War II," said his grandson, Robert Del Guercio, 31, of Queensbury, N.Y. He said his grandfather was a "proud and loyal man" who loved Newark and enjoyed dispensing tough advice to his grandkids. 

Born on Dec. 29, 1927, Mr. Del Guercio threw Essex County's first no-hitter at the high school level and became a member of the All-State team, according to reports at the time. 

"He was one of the top players the state produced during that era," said Sid Dorfman, who selected the best players during that period for both The Star-Ledger and the Newark Evening News. 

Dorfman, who owns and operates Dorf Feature Service and still writes for The Star-Ledger, said that the $19,000 contract Mr. Del Guercio signed was an "extraordinary" amount of money at the time, the result of a bidding war among other professional teams. 

Mr. Del Guercio was inducted into the Newark Athletic Hall of Fame in 1994 and made The Star-Ledger's "All Century Teams of the Decade" in baseball for the 1940s. 

But the game's national annals list him as a footnote to one of baseball's biggest trades, a 17-player, multi-team deal in the mid-1950s that brought pitchers Don Larsen and Bob Turley to the Yankees. 

After his sports career -- during which he moonlighted as a piano player at Victoria Castle, a Newark night spot -- Mr. Del Guercio worked at State Farm Insurance and then set up a private investigation business in Fairfield, family members said. He is predeceased by his former wife, Marie DeLuca. 

Family members said he was an associate of longtime Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda's and a good buddy of Yankee catcher Johnny Blanchard's, among other big league greats. 

"Johnny Blanchard told me, 'If I could hit like your father, forget about it. He was a helluva stick man,'" Ted Del Guercio Jr. said. 

But Mr. Del Guercio Sr.'s hot temper -- he once punched his own minor league manager -- and some early bad press made it difficult for him to get a big break, his son said. 

"My mother always said if he went 4-for-4, he was great," Ted Del Guercio Jr. said. "But if he went 0-for-4, he went nuts." 

The expansion of the minor leagues also coincided with the beginning of Mr. Del Guercio Sr.'s career, making it difficult to fight through the bigger talent pool to a major league club, said baseball historian Bob Golon. 

"In 1945, a lot of younger players were being signed because of the war," said Golon, an author who is writing a book about professional baseball in New Jersey. "But in 1946, the floodgates opened with all the guys coming back from the service. ... It was very tough to advance in that era." 

In a way, Mr. Del Guercio Sr. would always stay in that lost past. 

Family members said he died with a Tommy Dorsey big band recording playing on his stereo at his Newark residence. Next to Mr. Del Guercio was a freshly scribbled list of his favorite old tunes, they said. 

Carol Del Guercio, 52, Mr. Del Guercio Sr.'s daughter-in-law, said the hard-nosed ex-ballplayer had a soft spot, and his piano brought it out. "He played beautifully," she said. "He was this big guy who'd sit at the piano and this sweet sound would come out." 

In addition to his son Ted Jr., daughter-in-law Carol and grandson Robert, he is survived by his son Richard; his grandchildren, Lauren Bellamy, Kristen, David, Thaddeus J. III and Anthony G. Del Guercio, and his great-grandchildren, Blake Bellamy and Christopher Del Guercio. 

Visiting hours will be 2 to 6 p.m. today at the S.W. Brown and Son Funeral Home, 267 Centre St., Nutley, and the funeral service will be held there Monday at 9:30 a.m.
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2/14/2016 5:08 AM
What 20th Century team had two .400 hitters at the 100 game mark?
2/16/2016 3:19 AM
Posted by italyprof on 2/16/2016 3:19:00 AM (view original):
What 20th Century team had two .400 hitters at the 100 game mark?

Really? No takers all day?

Okay, the answer is the 1930 Phillies: Chuck Klein and Lefty O'Doul - both above .400 at the 100 game mark, both ended up hitting in the .380s.

2/16/2016 4:59 PM

Sorry, I didn't see the question. It was a good one, though... not sure I would have come up with it.

My first guess would have been the '21 Tigers.

2/16/2016 5:47 PM

I would have been incredibly close, as it turns out.

Through 100 games in 1921, Cobb was batting .395. Heilmann was batting .430.

2/16/2016 5:53 PM

1.4 hits short of it...

2/16/2016 5:54 PM

Great guess dahsdebater ! and now we all know something we didn't - how would you have liked to have had to pitch to the Tigers with those two in the lineup?

Here is another one:

Name the last team to overcome a 3 games to 1 deficit to win the World Series.

2/17/2016 2:57 AM

Hmmm...that one feels like it should be obvious...the 1985 Royals famously did it (and a number of teams did so before them). Has it been done since?

2/17/2016 7:14 AM

No it has not. The last team to do it was indeed the 1985 Royals.

2/17/2016 1:09 PM

The first team to do it by the way was the 1955 Dodgers. They must have partied like it was ahem, 2004...

2/17/2016 1:10 PM

What was the first team to sweep the World Series in four games?

2/17/2016 1:10 PM
Posted by italyprof on 2/17/2016 1:10:00 PM (view original):

The first team to do it by the way was the 1955 Dodgers. They must have partied like it was ahem, 2004...

Hmm...hate to point this out, but not quite true.

The 1955 series went: NY, NY, BKN, BKN, BKN, NY, BKN.

The first team to do it (counting only the "official" World Series since 1903) was actually Boston in the very first series. However, that series was best of nine, so being down 3-1 was not quite the same as it would have been in a 7 game series.

The first team to do it in a 7 game series was the 1925 Pirates, over Washington:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/postseason/1925_WS.shtml

2/17/2016 1:38 PM
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