Fun With Box Scores: Two Marathon Games!

Yesterday, the Rangers and Blue Jays played 18 innings before the Jays were able to walk off with a 4-3 win in Toronto. Not to be outdone, the Mets and Marlins needed 20 innings in Queens before the Marlins could go to bed with a 2-1 win in their pockets (kudos to any fan able to sit through that one). As always, marathon games mean crazy box scores, and this version of Fun With Box Scores is twice as nice. Lets’ take a look:

Blue Jays 4- Rangers 3:

• Jurickson Profar went 1-7 yesterday, a tough day for anyone but even tougher for Profar as he saw his average drop 18 points in one day!
• Despite having 60 team at bats, the team lead for the Rangers in hits was only 2. A feat accomplished by AJ Pierzynski and Jeff Baker.
• The aforementioned Pierzynski went 2-4, off the bench. He was a pinch hitter…in the 9th inning!
• Elvis Andrus lead the game in pitches seen with 42
• Adam Lind went an impressive 4-7 for the Jays yesterday, raising his average up to .342
• Colby Rasmus had the only triple of the game
• Shockingly, the Jays used only 2 replacement position players the whole game
• The Jays did use 9 pitchers however. If not for Casey Janssen’s blown save, Mark Buehrle would have gotten the win after 7 quality innings.
• The Blue Jays threw 268 pitches as a team and, despite getting only 1 out, Dustin McGowan threw 17 of them.
• After Janssen, the BLue Jays bullpen threw 9 scoreless innings of relief.
• On the Texas side of things, the most impressive feat was that of Ross Wolf who, despite getting the loss, threw 6.2 innings out of the ‘pen. As we’ll see in a few minutes, that wasn’t even the longest relief outing of the day.
• Thanks to Wolf, the Rangers needed only 5 pitchers to lose this one, none of whom threw less than an inning.

Marlins 2-Mets 1

• The Mets opened the scoring in the second and the Marlins then scored two unanswered runs, one in the fourth and then another in the 20th inning.
• 13 Marlins had at least one plate appearance yesterday, 14 Mets accomplished the same feat.
• 10 players had at least 8 ABs, including 9 out of Omar Quintanilla and Daniel Murphy.
• Quintanilla went 1-9, dropping his average almost 100 points
• Josh Turner came in for Ike Davis in the 8th, and had 5 ABs
• Mike Baxter was used as a pinch hitter, then pinch hit for before he stepped into the box
• Lucas Duda struck out 4 times
• The Marlins had 1 stolen base but 4 caught stealings (2 CS and 2 picked off)
• 11 Mets were penciled into the 9 spot in the order at some point during this marathon game!
• Shaun Marcum, who came in as a reliever, had 2 ABs. We’ll get to him in a second though
• Rob Brantly led the game with 4 hits
• Both Brantly and John Buck caught all 20 innings
• 561 pitches were thrown by 16 different pitchers
• Kevin Slowey threw 7 shutout innings and 94 pitches enroute to the win out of the ‘pen. Not even that was the longest relief outing of the day
• Shaun Marcum, formerly a Mets starter, fell to 0-7 on the season after hurling 8 innings of 5 hit, 1 run ball. He threw 105 pitches out of the ‘pen.
• Marcum is the first Met to throw over 100 relief pitches since 1989 but he’s the third guy to do it this season.
• The Mets and Marlins played more innings than they had combined hits: 40 to 28

Both Texas and Toronto and the Mets and Marlins have to play at 1 Eastern today. Something tells me those won’t be the most fun games to watch. Bold prediction, however, at least one of them goes into extras.

-Max Frankel