TODAY’S SPORTSTAT — Brewers dig the long ball
By JERRY TAPP
The home run ball has been important for the Brewers this season.
How important?
Through games starting this week, the Brew Crew was 56-24 in games when they hit at least one home run; that’s a .700 winning percentage in those games. Just think, if they could hit an HR in every game of a 162-game season that would mean 113 wins!
The Brewers, whose hitting coach is Darnell Coles, lead the National League with the most multi-HR games (games with two or more home runs) with 47. They are 36-11 in those contests, a .766 winning percentage. The Yankees lead the majors with 56 multi-HR games.
Here are the teams with the most multi-HR games through August 11.
NY Yankees, 56
Boston, 53
LA Angels, 50
Cleveland, 49
Milwaukee, 47
Toronto, 46
LA Dodgers, 45
Houston, 45
Colorado, 43
Baltimore, 43
Following is a breakdown of the Brewers record in games this season (through August 11) when they hit zero, 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 or more home runs in a game.
0 home runs: 11-29 .275
1 home run: 20-13 .606
2 home runs: 21-7 .750
3 home runs: 11-4 .733
4 home runs: 3-0 1.000
5 or more home runs: 1-0 1.000
19 hits in a game
The Brewers had 19 hits in a Sunday, August 12, 8-7 loss to the Atlanta Braves. It was the first time this season that a MLB team lost a non-extra inning game where they had 19 or more hits.
It was the second time in Brewers history that this rare loss has occurred; back on August 24, 2002, the Brew Crew had 20 hits in a 17-10, nine-inning loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates.
There have been 40 times since 1969 that teams have lost games where they had 19 or more hits in a non-extra inning contest. If we go back to 1908, there have been 93 times this has happened. The most hits by a team that lost a nine-inning game (non-extra inning contest) was 26 by the Philadelphia Phillies on August 25, 1922 in a 26-23 loss to the Chicago Cubs… yes, a nine-inning game that ended 26-23.
For the record, the Brewers have never won a game where their opponents had 19 or more hits.
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Jerry Tapp
Jerry Tapp is a freelance writer from Racine, WI with a major concentration on sports statistics and numbers that define sports teams and players. He began his foray into sports stats-focused writing as a regular contributor to the “Numbers” column in Inside Sports magazine in the mid-1980’s and then began writing a weekly “Stats on Tapp” column for the Racine Journal Times. That column was eventually nationally syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate. He later wrote sports stats items for the Washington Post under the “Stat of the Day” heading. After launching his blog, www.statsontapp.com in 2011, Jerry turned his sports stats attention to sports websites. He wrote regularly for Bleacher Report, BallHyped, football.com and Heavy.com. Today he keeps busy writing weekly columns of stats-centric articles for three sports websites, Today’s Pigskin (NFL), Today’s Knuckleball (MLB) and Today’s Fastbreak (NBA), and as a monthly contributor to the Milwaukee Brewers “GameDay” publication that is distributed to fans attending games at Miller Park.