Best Hitters Versus The Pirates

I watched the Pittsburgh Pirates-St. Louis Cardinals baseball game on Sunday thanks to a free weekend preview of MLB Extra Innings. The Pirates broadcasters spoke extremely highly of likely future Hall of Fame St. Louis catcher Yadier Molina just before he picked off Adam Frazier in the first inning and threw out another Pirates runner trying to steal second in the second inning. You would think that the Pirates would have something like "Yadier Molina is a really good at throwing out runners" in their scouting report.

Anyway, the Root Sports broadcast also showed Molina's career batting statistics against the Pirates including his 97 runs batted in. This got me thinking. Who has the most RBIs against the Pirates in baseball history? I mentioned this on Twitter, and Sean Forman (great name) of Baseball-Reference replied that the all-time leader (who I won't identify yet) has 306 career RBIs against the Pirates. Yadier Molina has a long way to go to reach this number!

Based on the link that Sean sent me from Stathead (I'll share this later), I thought I would do a little baseball trivia today. If you want to play, try to name the top 10 players with the most home runs against the Pirates in baseball history, the top 10 players by on-base percentage, and the top 10 by slugging percentage. I included the last two categories only because most other all-time stats (like RBIs, hits, games, etc) consists mostly of players from long ago.

Feel free to list your guesses in the comments section below. I'll share the answers here soon.

Update: Here are the results.

Most Home Runs Against the Pirates
1. Mel Ott - 83
2. Hank Aaron - 78
3. Willie Mays - 76
4. Eddie Mathews - 73
5. Mike Schmidt - 62
6. Stan Musial & Duke Snider - 58
8. Ernie Banks - 57
9. Willie McCovey - 56
10. Rogers Hornsby - 55

Now that is an impressive list!

Highest On-Base Percentage
1. Barry Bonds
2. Bob Elliott
3. Albert Pujols
4. Lance Berkman
5. Jackie Robinson
6. Todd Helton
7. Mel Ott
8. Jim Edmonds
9. Rogers Hornsby
10. Stan Musial & Joey Votto

Highest Slugging Percentage
1. Albert Pujols
2. Barry Bonds
3. Jack Clark
4. Jim Edmonds
5. Alfonso Soriano
6. Mike Piazza
7. Rogers Hornsby
8. Chuck Klein
9. Larry Walker
10. Willie Mays

If you want to check out all of these stats and more, please check out this link from Stathead. Please note that there must be a minimum number of plate appearances to make this list. For example, my friend Dan mentioned that Billy Hamilton has 56 stolen bases against the Pirates, but he's not on this list.

You can check out Sean's work on Baseball Reference and Stathead

Photo by Billy Hurst/AP Photo

Friday Video: Barenaked Ladies and Hootie and the Blowfish

During the 2019 Sean summer concert series, I saw the Hootie and the Blowfish and Barenaked Ladies twin-bill at Jiffy Lube Live in Bristow, Virginia. Since I am always write about recent events, I thought now would be a good time to share some videos, pictures, and thoughts from the, um, July show.

Barenaked Ladies are awesome. They look like they are having so much fun on stage. Lead singer Ed Robertson enjoyed saying the word “Lube” when talking about the concert venue name and also shared a story about smoking a certain substance with Willie Nelson at the same location 20 years ago. There was also a funny moment when they announced that their friend Sarah McLachlan was there only to have the big screen show a bald guy. They ended the show with an awesome medley that included "Shallow," "Old Town Road," and this:



I thought it was a nice touch that drummer Tyler Stewart and Ed Robertson changed places.

Hootie and the Blowfish came next, and I don’t know if there’s a better voice in music than Darius Rucker. He just has the coolest voice. There was also a heated (well, maybe not so heated) exchange where he saw a few people wearing Clemson gear in the audience. With Darius and his band mates being graduates (or at least students) at rival University of South Carolina, Rucker said something like, “Let me know if anyone from the school up north ever wrote a song like this” and went into "Let Her Cry."

Here are a few videos from their performance:



To close the set (but before the encore), Barenaked Ladies joined them on stage.



I could probably include 30 seconds of my own poor video of Hootie and the Blowfish covering R.E.M.'s Losing My Religion, but I'll close with a few pictures that I took of the show instead. My streak of taking awful pictures at concerts continues.

Oh, it was nice seeing St. Louis Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina at the show!