Growing up I had several Wilson Alvarez baseball cards. Wilson Alvarez was a decent big league pitcher during the 90s and early 00s. I was never interested in his playing career, though. I was interested in how various baseball cards interpreted his 1989 ERA statistic. In 1989 Alvarez played one Major League game for the Texas Rangers. It was his first big league start, and in that game he allowed a single, back-to-back home runs, then back-to-back walks. He was then yanked by manager Bobby Valentine.
Zero outs, 3 earned runs, infinite earned run average.
And since this was his only big league appearance that year he will forever be stuck with an infinite ERA for the 1989 season. It's neat (at Alvarez's expense, of course), but how would a baseball card go about representing this non-number? Here's an example where Topps used a dash, which I suppose works. It's better than using 0.00 (which they've also done). Zero is absolutely incorrect. Infinity is, like, the opposite of zero. So what do you use? The 1993 Flair set got around this problem by omitting the '89 season entirely. Most cards, though, use "undef." or "inf." Upper Deck, I seem to recall, used an actual infinity symbol. This attention to detail was one of the reasons UD was better than all the other card companies.
Despite this statistical blemish, Alvarez redeemed himself in his next Major League start two years later when he threw a no-hitter. That's kind of amazing.
Anyway, I'm interested in other infinite seasons. Who allowed the most earned runs in a season without recording an out? In a mid-September game against Cleveland in 1979 Bob Kammeyer, pitcher for the Yankees, allowed eight runs on seven hits, including two homers. There was a hit batsman in there as well. Here's the boxscore. This was Kammeyer's last big league appearance. However the very next season as a member of the Columbus Clippers he was the International League's Pitcher of the Year.
Kammeyer's one-game effort (8 earned runs, no recorded outs) has only been matched twice since then, most recently by Paul Wilson in 2005. Wilson started for the Reds and the Dodgers jumped him for 8 runs on 5 hits. Interestingly Wilson Alvarez was the game's closing pitcher (he only had to face one batter, Sean Casey, who grounded out on the second pitch).
The other game involved Oakland pitcher Blake Stein in 1998, and it was again against the Indians. Stein didn't allow any home runs and in fact only allowed 4 hits, but he did walk 3 and hit-by-pitched another. Cleveland ended up scoring 10 runs that first inning, 8 of those credited to Stein.
Naturally Wilson and Stein were able to record outs in other games they pitched those years so baseball card manufacturers didn't have to deal with the whole infinity thing. Kammeyer, as far as I know, never had a baseball card. That's probably a good thing. Topps' calculators in 1980 would probably explode if they had to calculate infinity.
Zero outs, 3 earned runs, infinite earned run average.
And since this was his only big league appearance that year he will forever be stuck with an infinite ERA for the 1989 season. It's neat (at Alvarez's expense, of course), but how would a baseball card go about representing this non-number? Here's an example where Topps used a dash, which I suppose works. It's better than using 0.00 (which they've also done). Zero is absolutely incorrect. Infinity is, like, the opposite of zero. So what do you use? The 1993 Flair set got around this problem by omitting the '89 season entirely. Most cards, though, use "undef." or "inf." Upper Deck, I seem to recall, used an actual infinity symbol. This attention to detail was one of the reasons UD was better than all the other card companies.
Despite this statistical blemish, Alvarez redeemed himself in his next Major League start two years later when he threw a no-hitter. That's kind of amazing.
Anyway, I'm interested in other infinite seasons. Who allowed the most earned runs in a season without recording an out? In a mid-September game against Cleveland in 1979 Bob Kammeyer, pitcher for the Yankees, allowed eight runs on seven hits, including two homers. There was a hit batsman in there as well. Here's the boxscore. This was Kammeyer's last big league appearance. However the very next season as a member of the Columbus Clippers he was the International League's Pitcher of the Year.
Kammeyer's one-game effort (8 earned runs, no recorded outs) has only been matched twice since then, most recently by Paul Wilson in 2005. Wilson started for the Reds and the Dodgers jumped him for 8 runs on 5 hits. Interestingly Wilson Alvarez was the game's closing pitcher (he only had to face one batter, Sean Casey, who grounded out on the second pitch).
The other game involved Oakland pitcher Blake Stein in 1998, and it was again against the Indians. Stein didn't allow any home runs and in fact only allowed 4 hits, but he did walk 3 and hit-by-pitched another. Cleveland ended up scoring 10 runs that first inning, 8 of those credited to Stein.
Naturally Wilson and Stein were able to record outs in other games they pitched those years so baseball card manufacturers didn't have to deal with the whole infinity thing. Kammeyer, as far as I know, never had a baseball card. That's probably a good thing. Topps' calculators in 1980 would probably explode if they had to calculate infinity.
