Wednesday, April 9, 2008

#338 Brian Holton



Why this card is awesome: Because of Ishpeming MI. Sounds like pig Latin.

Cool stat: Holton was a bad pitcher who had an incredibly fluky 1988. For one thing, he allowed way fewer hits than IP, the only year of his career that he had a ratio under 1.0. For another, in the last 30 years, he had the 15th most IP for a guy allowing 0 or 1 HR. It's been well established that pitchers have a tough time controlling percentage of balls put in play that turn into hits, or percentage of fly balls that turn into homers. That year, Holton happened to end up very lucky, but it caught up with him again in 1989.

2 comments:

MMayes said...

Dang, but he spent a lot of time in Albuquerque. It looks like he lost some time to injury, but his 1981-82 numbers, especially ERA, look really good, realizing that guys like Greg Brock and Mike Marshall were hitting .380 with 40 homers there. I guess that shows how good the Dodgers rotation was then.

Andy said...

Check out that 1987 ERA. A nice uncorrected error.