Team Games With 3 Hits But No Singles Or Doubles

Last night

, the Braves pulled off an unusual feat in their 3-2 win over the Giants. Not only did they win while getting just 3 hits, but those 3 hits included no singles or doubles (an RBI triple and two solo homers).

That makes the Braves just the 11th team (and just the 3rd NL team) since 1918 to get exactly 3 hits in a game without getting a single or double. They are also just the fourth team in that span to get exactly 1 triple, 2 homers, and 0 singles or doubles. Here’s the list, sorted by number of HRs:

What’s fascinating to me is that despite only getting 3 hits, and despite none of these teams scoring more than 4 runs, 7 of the 11 teams won their games. There is no obvious explanation for this, but in many of the wins, the 3-hit team took an early lead and didn’t do much (or anything) afterward. I’m guessing that the offense in these cases kind of coasted behind a strong pitching performance.

That certainly seems to be what happened in last night’s game, as the Braves had a 3-1 lead after the 4th inning and got no hits after that. Tim Hudson pitched into the 8th inning before giving up a 2nd run, and the Braves’ bullpen held the lead from there.

In a few of the other instances, the winning team hit a homer late in the game. My theory is that the hitters went into a sort of all-or-nothing, swing-for-the-fences approach because they (consciously or not) felt confident in their pitcher holding the lead. In one case (Hudson’s old teammate, Mark Mulder, on the 2001 A’s), the pitcher actually blew the lead, but the team won anyway on a late HR. In another similar game (Kevin Brown on the 2000 Dodgers), the pitcher blew the lead and the team’s offense never got back in gear, leading to a loss.

Postscript: You have probably noticed that this is my first post on JunkStats (or anywhere) in a couple months. Everything is fine with me. The hiatus was caused first by a busy schedule that ate up my free time (vacations, visiting relatives, and other activities) and then by a simple lack of desire to research and write new posts.

I’ve also been off Twitter; to be honest, I just flat-out got sick of that site. While I enjoyed it for the most part, Twitter was eating up waaaayyy too much of the time and focus that I need for other things. I just can’t deal with it at the moment. I will, however, probably get back to blogging irregularly, both here and at the other sites I write for (Talking Chop and Beyond the Boxscore). It won’t be the 5-posts-a-week schedule that I was keeping before, but if I see something worth writing about, I’ll put a quick post up.

If you want to get in touch with me, my email is in the sidebar to the upper right. Thanks for reading.