If a player is not named for his historical occupation, where does his surname come from? If he does not come from workers, his family line would die, would it not, unless he came from aristocracy, or a higher social strata. Oh what fun to contemplate for the politically incorrect among us.

A couple more eye-catchers from the Karma Leagues to put into your grab bag for if you ever need inspiration:

I had a pitcher come *this* close to striking out one and only one batter in all nine innings of his game. Have there been any 9-inning games in which a pitcher struck out one every inning, yet failed to reach double digits in Ks?

And one with the biggest Wowie-factor I’ve seen in I-don’t-know how long, filed under quirks I would never have thought to explore if I didn’t see this with my own eyes. Karma League Baseball produced a batter who collected three hits on a team that scored 16 runs, yet that batter didn’t join in the fun in terms of runs or RBI. What if we started with batters who played a full game yet ‘didn’t join in the fun’ in the highest scoring games of all time, meaning no hits to go with no runs or ribbies, and worked our way over to batters who collected one hit, then two, and so on, and *still* had nothing to show in terms of the pay-off numbers.

Answers to a question I posed you earlier: Eddie Milner and Cesar Tovar.

http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/printarticle/10-things-i-didnt-know-about-one-hitters/

Silver lining for “poor” Andy Hawkins; he managed to pitch a no-hitter (official at the time, I believe, and forever in my heart) without having to get through the ninth.

Question brought up by your study: what is the most runs a team has scored between hits? Or an easier way to approximate this record: most runs, inning, without a base hit.

Didn’t escape my notice that you found a new adverb for the ’62 Mets, calling them “epically bad”, rather than adjust your scale as for what constitutes “legendarily bad”. This stubbornness is unattractive, to cling to “legendarily” in describing the better of the two expansion teams of 1969. When two teams lose the same number overall, the team that loses the most 1-run games must be considered the better team. The *Padres* were bad; the Expos matched them in losses because they were more unlucky.

Montreal was a legendarily unpopular town for a ballplayer to be forced to play his home games, but there’s no way the ’69 Expos were a ‘legendarily bad’ team. Legend is the stuff of stories handed down, and when I came to baseball consciousness in ’75 or so it was *always* the Amazin’ Mets of 1962 that were talked about, and it was pretty much *still* always those Mets for my next 15 years as a fan.

Even if legend can be whipped up from dried up numbers, perhaps the case for the Cleveland Spiders of 1899, most of the supporting statements undermine the idea that those Expos were especially bad. They were par for the course in the context of ’60s expansion, no worse than the same-year Padres (and better than the Mets), and your readers had previously been treated to a reminder that it’s the blowouts and not the squeakers that better indicate whether a team is good or bad.

How about a list of most extra innings during an extra-inning winning or losing streak? That might be the best way to make our eyes bug out about the 1980 Cubs.

Do the flipside, of players who *scored* all a team’s runs. And better yet– all the team’s runs were scored by one player and knocked in by another. The tandem Henderson-Mattingly might make such a list. (I browsed a game in my developmental simulation league today in which a team scored three runs, all scored by their #3 hitter and knocked in by #6. Only trouble was that they lost 15-3; I’d rather they’d have been victorious.

Another game, way off topic, saw one team win 4-3 despite being outdone in baserunners by a 16-7 margin. I’m sure no big historically, but it would be an interesting theme to take up one of these days.