Anybody with a bat in his hand is dangerous!

[BDWard]

Miller Huggins is rated weak for power and has no HR chances on his card. Yet that didn't stop him from muscling one out of the park in a recent game.

http://fantasygames.sportingnews.com/stratomatic/league/boxscore.html?group_id=149829&g_id=337

Huggins rolled a 3-4 against lefty Mike Flanagan, which is a TR 1-1 fly(rf)B 2-20. Apparently, Huggins pulled the 1 to get the triple and to add insult to injury, the rare play generator made it into a HR. Huggins, a switch hitter, was batting righty. The ballpark was Yankee Stadium '56, a graveyard for right handed hitters.

Curious as to how often this has happened, I went to the Diamond Dope and did some digging. In ATG6 at all price levels, Diamond Dope shows just 1 HR in 112,000+ AB for Huggins. Oddly enough that was with County Stadium '57, a HR graveyard for all hitters, as his home field. Maybe the CFer fell down chasing a ball hit over his head.

Baseball-reference.com shows the 5'6" 140lb "Mighty Mite" hit 9 HRs over 13 seasons, about 11 of which were full seasons. Some very sexy women weigh more. Can you imagine any of them hitting a HR??!! No, I'm not talking about you hitting a HR with them. Get your minds out of the gutter!:lol:

So now Huggins has 2 HRs in 112,000+ ATG6 recorded AB. This happened on Friday, November 25. Was it a full moon that night? Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket!

One HR every 56,000 AB. Move over Babe, the Mighty Mite is comin' for you!

[rburgh]

There is a possibility of an IP HR on the X-charts. It's necessary for the fielder to be rated 4 (or 5) for this to occur.

The game will also allow triples to be stretched on occasion. I have had the opportunity to do this in Netplay and other draft league games.

Yours appears to be the 2nd case.

[BDWard]

The box score shows that the HR went to CF. Billy Hamilton was playing there. He's a 1, but has a +3 arm. Apparently he couldn't get the ball back to the infield quickly enough. I'm wondering if the result would have been different if Mays or some other strong armed OFer was in CF, and if so, where the arm rating boundary is for triple vs. HR.

I did a little more calculating. Diamond Dope shows that Huggins has 20,552 walks in addition to his 112,433 AB giving him roughly 133,000 plate appearances, (not counting sacs and HBP, which are not included in the tallies) over 211 seasons, an average of roughly 630 plate appearances per season. Assuming a one third/two thirds lefty righty pitcher ratio, the TR1-FO2-20 split on Huggins card (it's the same vs. both lefties and righties, but against lefties is on 3-4, while against righties is on 3-6) will be rolled and gotten about .65 times per season or about 2 times every three seasons, depending on usage, injuries and just plain luck. That would give Huggins roughly 137 triples off his own card over his 211 seasons. Based on the above, my guess would be that the ratio used by the computer game is that about 1 in every 100 triples gotten from the hitter's card, or 1%, gets stretched into a HR. I base that conclusion only upon the info in Diamond Dope and have not taken into consideration his HR of a few nights ago. Also, with Huggins showing more than 600 triples on Diamond Dope, I'm assuming that only triples on hitters' cards get stretched into a HR. If that assumption is incorrect, using Huggins actual number of triples, it may be only 1 in every 500 triples that gets stretched into a HR if Strat-o-matic used a rounded number in the computer game.

Maybe the true ratio is based upon the number of inside the park HRs as a percentage of actual HRs. We'll probably never know the true numbers, as that it proprietary info guarded closely by Strat-o-matic.

But using Huggins as an example, who has no other way to hit a HR aside from what the super advanced features of the game give him, certainly helps provide insight into the inner workings of the game.

[PotKettleBlack]

I'm not sure that it's a good idea to assume that only batter triples get stretched against weak arms and/or bad ranges.

[BDWard]

I agree, PKB. I'm not sure if that's a safe assumption to make, that's why I put the info both ways.

As a matter of fact, I seem to recall seeing a triple on the pitcher's card get stretched into a HR in one of my first TSN online leagues, but I'm not 100% sure and I don't have time to look through all the box scores. That would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Can anyone recall seeing a triple off a pitcher's card get stretched into a HR?

[PotKettleBlack]

I would suggest that the Mighty Mite's card is underpowered. Consider, 11+ whole seasons, 9 HR and in ATG he has 2 HR in several hundred complete seasons.

This ignores the fact that his card is for a particular season, but still... I'd think he'd have a couple dozen by now, given the very very very very very very large sample size. Hell, even Rafael Santana hit a home run about every year.