Most Times Giving Up 8 or More Runs in a Game (Since 1947)

Last night, Aaron Harang gave up 8 runs to the Braves. It was his 7th career start with 8 or more runs allowed. That’s far from a record, though. Who has the most such disastrous starts?

I used Baseball-Reference’s marvelous Play Index

to search for pitchers (since baseball was integrated in 1947) who have given up at least 8 runs in a start (earned or unearned). Here are all the pitchers with at least 13 such games:

UPDATE 2/17/2012: In honor of Tim Wakefield’s retirement, I’ve added in the results from the 2011 season, and guess what? Wakefield is now tied for the post-1947 lead. As is Livan Hernandez. Wakefield had 2 8-run starts in 2011, while Livan added 1.

I love the mix of players on this list. You’ve got lots of decent or mediocre starters (Navarro, Livan, Wright, Suppan, Fogg, etc.), but also some great pitchers (Clemens, Johnson, Ryan, Carlton, etc.). Like with Dumb Luck Wins, you have to be fairly good to amass  a lot of 8+ run games. If teams didn’t see some ability there, they wouldn’t keep running these guys out to get steamrolled.

I also checked to see which pitchers had the most 8+ run starts in a given year. Six guys have had at least 5 such starts in the same season:

Jaime Navarro’s 1997 season might be the worst full season for a starting pitcher, ever. He allowed 11 runs twice, 9 runs five times, 8 runs once, and 7 runs three times. That’s 10 starts with 7+ runs allowed (out of 33 total)! Why the White Sox let him make all his starts that year, I will never understand, though they somehow managed to go 15-18 in Navarro’s starts. They actually won 3 of those 10 games in which he allowed 7 or more runs, including a 14-12 win in a game in which Navarro gave up 11 runs.

Amazingly, three of these seasons are from 1997, and two are from the same team–Navarro and James Baldwin on the ’97 White Sox. That team could really hit (Frank Thomas had a 7.2 WAR season), but their pitching kept them from being more than average. They got 96 starts from players with an ERA over 5 (Navarro, Baldwin, and Doug Drabek) and finished 80-81, 6 games back of the Indians. If you replaced those guys with 3 mediocre pitchers, the Sox probably make the playoffs.

There were 37 other seasons with at least four 8+ run starts. Rodrigo Lopez (2003 and 2005) and Murry Dickson (1951 and 1953) both did it twice.