Sample size, shmample size, let’s look at the DBacks all-time greatest performances by hitters on Opening Day
Opening Day. Those two words are so exciting. So hopeful. Before the first pitch of the season is thrown, every team is in the playoff race. Every player is a potential All Star. Seriously, who had Geraldo Perdomo as an All Star this time last year? A 162 game season has a way of weeding out the good from the bad, though. No single game can really make a difference when there are 161 other days to try again. No player can be crowned a legend based on a small sample size of one game in March or April.
Analytics have really taken over the game in the past two decades, and with that has come an accepted way to play and view the game. Results in a single at bat and single game aren’t important. The approach in the aggregate of 162 games provides the true measure of a player or team. I really enjoy baseball statistics and analytics, and I have learned nothing good comes from hyper-analyzing a Tuesday afternoon game at Chase in April. This worldview leads me to fall into the trap of discounting the importance of single games, but I’m trying to recage my thinking this year. The long slog of the season isn’t merely a collection of data points leading to solution in early November. It’s baseball! It’s 162 different games where any team can win and any player can be the hero.
Just last season, we saw the extremes of what we believe the true measure of team to be with our very own Diamondbacks. Through the All Star Break, a not insignificant sample size, we had a multiple game lead on the Dodgers for first place in the division. This hot start was fueled by different players at different times. Geraldo Perdomo was white-hot in April. Lourdes Gurriel was otherworldly in May. Corbin Carroll put up his best month of the season in June. Zac Gallen was untouchable for most of April and May. By themselves, those months were outliers in the marathon that is the baseball season, but those outlier performances are real outcomes that fuel wins. Whether it was a regression to the mean or just a bad string of luck, July and early August were rough. No one hit and no one pitched well over the course of those months. Eventually, as we all know, the ship was righted just enough and our beloved Diamondbacks “backed in” to the playoffs. Was our true talent level that division-leading first half? The bottom of the barrel slump through six weeks in July and August? Were we really just a barely-above-.500 team as our 84 wins in 162 chances would make it seem? Were we the best team in the National League, like the record books will say forevermore thanks to 12 games in October?
Before we begin the long march toward October, where we are hopefully rewarded once again for our fandom with more Diamondbacks baseball, I wanted to cast an eye towards exceptional performances in the smallest of sample sizes in DBacks franchise history. Performances in a single game that are mostly forgotten a few short seasons later, but were big deals the day they occurred; performances played out by real people just having a good day at the office. In honor of our proximity to the launch of the new season, I took a look at all the Diamondbacks’ past Opening Day box scores and wanted to pick out one to highlight and bring back to the forefront of our memories, if we ever remembered it at all.
In trying to pick out the greatest hitting performance, I’m going to use a relatively unknown metric called Hitter Game Scores. Hitter Game Scores were published by Bill James, the same savant who originated Pitcher Game Scores, in his Bill James Handbook 2021. It took him quite a while to come up with a system to measure hitter performance that he liked as much as his Pitcher Game Scores, and just a couple short years after publishing the initial formula, he released a revised formula on his website that made it a little more complicated and included one change I didn’t like at all (giving credit to the hitter if he reached on error).
Without going into the weeds on the exact formula, the main bones of the Game Score come from his formula for single game Runs Created which looks at the Total Bases, Steals, Caught Stealing, Walks, Strikeouts and a couple other simple criteria and spits out the number of expected runs that hitter created offensively. To go from Runs Created to Game Score just takes some simple adding in of Runs and RBI and -voila- Game Score. If you are familiar with Pitcher Game Scores, you know they are based on an average performance earning a 50 score; Hitter scores are slightly different by having a 25 as the average score. Hitter Game Scores haven’t caught on like his pitcher equivalent, but it’s a capable way of measuring one hitter’s performance against another from a single game.
With that introduction out of the way, I downloaded all the box scores from every Opening Day in franchise history and ran the numbers to find each player’s Hitter Game Score (original formula, not revised). If you had to guess, who do you think had the greatest Hitter Game Score in Diamondbacks’ Opening Day history? Was it Snake Royalty like Goldy or Gonzo? Big boppers like Mark Reynolds or Justin Upton? Maybe one of the OG’s like Matt Williams or Travis Lee?
None of those would be correct. In fact, none of those players had an Opening Day performance in the top-10 of our Hitter Game Score leaderboard.
How about if I give you the year? The season was 2009. That year kinda falls in a dead zone of my DBacks fandom. In 2009, I moved to Japan and spent the next three years bouncing around the South Pacific with the Navy. Not as much time for baseball as I would like, which resulted in me being thoroughly surprised at the hitters at the top of this Game Score leaderboard.
Oh yeah, I say hitters because 2009 actually had the two highest and three of the top four all-time Hitter Game Scores in franchise Opening Day history. Three all-time performances from the opening salvo in an underwhelming campaign that saw the DBacks finish dead last in the NL West after, by all accounts that I can find today, being a trendy pick to be a contender and win the division crown during the preseason. Goodness, it seems strange now to think we were ever a preseason pick for a division title. How times change.
So who had those epic performances against the Rockies on April 6, 2009?
Tony Clark and Felipe Lopez. Yes, the man who today is voicing the Player’s Association grievances to the commissioner about see-through pants narrowly edged out our short term second baseman for the highest Hitter Game Score in our Opening Day history. Chad Tracy also had a very good game which included the go ahead home run that day in 2009 to place fourth on this very specific leaderboard.
Before Tony Clark was negotiating CBAs and fending off rebellions as Executive Director of the MLBPA, he logged 831 at bats over 396 games in Sedona Red and Colangelo Purple (2005-09). He kicked off his age-37 season in 2009 with a bang by hitting 2 home runs, one from each side of the plate. Clark was a switch hitter in the majors for 15 seasons and more than 1500 games, and over that career he homered from both batter’s boxes in the same game 10 times (per Baseball Almanac). That’s as many times as the original switch-hitting slugger Mickey Mantle! As good as this season started for Clark, though, he would no longer be in a major league clubhouse later that July. After his 2 homer, 3 RBI Opening Day, he would hit only 2 more home runs with 8 RBI over his next 35 games played before being released on July 13th and retiring. Tony Clark’s days in a uniform were getting short and his best seasons were behind him, but he turned in the single greatest Opening Day performance in our beloved franchise’s history.
Seeing Felipe Lopez on the leaderboard truly surprised me. I had to look up who he was! Lopez had a reasonably successful career that included one All Star appearance and a Silver Slugger award (both in 2005 with the Cincinnati Reds). In his first game with the DBacks, he went 2-for-4 with a walk. It wasn’t just any 2-for-4, though, because he was a switch hitter and he also hit a homer from both sides of the plate! Lopez and Clark combined to be the first set of teammates to homer from both sides of the plate in the same game since Bernie Williams and Jorge Posada back in 2000, and that feat has not happened in the Major Leagues since! Felipe would also not finish the season with the team, but not for lack of performance. Lopez was traded from our cratering Snakes to the Brew Crew for Cole Gillespie, an “outfielder and pinch hitter” (how little regular playing time do you have to get to be classified as a pinch hitter on your Baseball Reference banner?) who accrued -0.6 bWAR in his career, and Roque Mercedes, a player who never made the Show. The Brewers didn’t exactly win this trade either as they ended up not making the playoffs. Lopez did play extremely well for both us and Milwaukee, though, finishing with over 3 bWAR for the year. One final factoid on Lopez I found interesting, from 2006 until he was out of baseball after 2011, he played on two teams every season except 2007. Ah, the romantic life of a major leaguer, where it pays to have a punch card with your favorite moving company.
Chad Tracy came into 2009 after a rough 2008 in which he battled injury. He was so excited to have a normal offseason and be able to come in and show what he can do when he didn’t have to jump “straight off the training table and into the game”. Well, 2009 didn’t go so well for him overall, but on April 6th he led off the 7th inning in a tie ball game and crushed the 0-1 offering from Jason Grilli into “Uptown”, giving his team a lead they wouldn’t relinquish. His final line that day: 3/4 with 2 runs, 2 RBI, and the go ahead home run.
A final, more somber note from this Opening Day in 2009, Brandon Webb left the game after getting tagged pretty well and complaining of shoulder tightness. In the ESPN recap of the contest, Webby said he was feeling fine after the game. Whether he was truly feeling fine at that moment or if he was just putting on a face, we don’t know, but we do know that all was not well with that shoulder. Unfortunately, he would never step foot on a major league mound again.
That 2009 season went down as a disappointment, but after Opening Day, 162-0 was still in play. In watching Clark and Lopez both hit two homers as switch hitters, fans got to witness something that had rarely happened before in Major League Baseball history and hasn’t happened since. They even got to see the rare Chad-Qualls-converted-Save-opportunity! Truly, on Opening Day, anything is possible.
Baseball is a marathon, not a sprint, as the saying goes. Baseball statistical analysis will say you can’t make snap judgments or grand proclamations based on small sample sizes. That Opening Day from 2009 is a testament to both of those maxims. However, we should also be careful not to downplay the extraordinary that we see in any given ballgame or in any sample size. Sure, Tony Clark wasn’t kicking off a revival season and Chad Tracy never did really stay healthy, but that day they provided joy and hope and a win. Similarly, whatever their true talent level was, last year’s Diamondbacks had an effect on me, and many of you, greater than that of an 84-win team. The small sample size that was 17 games in October was far more impactful on this fanbase than the prior 162. Contrary to statistical analysis axiom, that’s okay.
So let’s embrace the joy and hope. Let’s embrace the small sample sizes this season. Happy Opening Day!
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Here is the leaderboard of best Hitter Game Scores in DBacks Opening Day history. Any of these stand out to you? Any surprising omissions? Any of these trigger a memory? Will we witness a new addition to this leaderboard tonight?
Remember, an average hitter on an average day should score a 25.