Sports Staturday - Sip Some Coffee And Recap The Last Week In Sports With Some Wild And Irreverent Stats

Welcome to Sports Staturday. 

Little personal preamble here. Hence the italics. Like I'm whispering individually to you or something. I don't know. Anyway, I have this loose vision for a recurring blogcast every Saturday for readers to enjoy while sipping their morning coffee/mimosa, whatever. Something I can make my own and have be my baby every week. A little walk through the past week in sports to give my takes and pepper in fun/irreverent/stupid stats to keep you entertained along the way. An outlet to make use of the insane amount of data I've procured and continue to procure for original content. Even if it's in the slowest time slot possible for a blog.

I'm part-time here, have a real 9-5 outside of sports, and two kids 4 and under. As much as I'd love, it's tough to blog right after some wild statistical event in sports. The hope here is I can put all my content (sans NFL Sad Stats on Tuesday) in a weekly Saturday edition I can focus on. I'm continuing to build databases to work from and have NFL, NBA, WNBA, and NCAA basketball pretty well set. And in the process of scraping 135k college football games right now. Hockey and MLB are next on the docket. Safe to say this 16RAM Lenovo laptop has it's work cut out for it. 

We'll see how this goes. I'm vain, so comments showing you were entertained are encouraged. Hater comments as well, although I know you need no invitation. 

OK - let's hit it.

There's no other place we can possibly start. We have to break down the Shohei game.

MediaNews Group/Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images. Getty Images.

6 innings pitched, no runs. 3/3 at the plate for three home runs and a base on balls in his four plate appearances. That's about as close to perfect as you can get. My only complaint is that he hasn't yet figured out how to catch for himself. Maybe something to work on in March.

People are calling this the greatest single game performance in MLB history and maybe even sports history. Let's bring some stats into the fold to see if this has any merit. Looking just at MLB Playoffs history, only 12 other players ever had a three home-run game. Of those 12, only four others had a perfect 1.000 batting average. So let's call Shohei's performance at the plate as 4 / 3,742 total Playoff games in MLB history (according to Muse). That's a .11 percent. An all time elite performance as is. But wait! Let's not forget. We have to multiply that by the 18 batter spots per game too! 

So, more like 0.005938595%.

Oh, right. Still not done. Can't forget the pitching part.

Pitching 6 shutout innings is nowhere near as rare as hitting three dongs. But it's not ho hum either. 349 pitchers have made it through at least 6 innings - about 9.3% of total postseason games. But that means twice as many starting pitchers - so more like 4.65%.

Grand total odds of Shohei doing what he did? 0.00002761447%. I'm going to be honest. I don't even know how to say what this fraction of a percent is. And for those wondering, yes I did move the decimal two spots to the right. There's still a lot of zeroes that remain.

I'm not sure how to possibly counter this being the greatest baseball game every played.

Adam Hagy. Getty Images.

Coming in hot is the NBA. 

If you're an NBA hater - take if from me who writes occasional "fix the NBA" type blogs, and is disgusted with the lazy threes, lazy effort in general, foul baiting, cheap calls, and flopping. These first few days of the season have been 10 out of 10. And a little side note NBA, I didn't mean THAT kind of fix…

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I'll get to that later. It appears viewers could clearly tell the effort teams put into opening night too. 

We even had a little controversy in that OKC/Houston game.

There Chris Weber was scrolling the feed before getting bombarded with still frames of him at Michigan. Side note - I loved KD's walk off after Sengun successfully covered for him. We've all walked in that somewhat fast, but not too fast, b-line away from the crime scene back in Jr. High or High School. Can't walk too fast or it's obvious, but you also have to get out of dodge. Mission accomplished for KD.

Some stats. This was the first NBA double-overtime on opening night since 2005 when the Nowitzki Mavericks edged out the Nash era Phoenix Suns. Then there was Detroit vs Miami in 1999-00, Lakers vs Houston in 1991-92, who ran it back after also playing each other in double-OT back in 1981-82. Only other instance was way back in 1956-57 (Syracuse Nationals vs Philadelphia Warriors). So there it is. Your NBA double-OT history on opening night. Your first of many Sports Staturday stats that do not, and never at any point will, matter. 

But wait, we're not done with useless double-overtime stats yet!

OKC would go on to play Thursday night in Indiana in a second double-overtime game to start the season. This has never happened before to start a season. And this game would go on to remind everyone to despise SGA and the cupcake treatment he gets from the refs. And he wasn't even overly floppy like he often times is. Still. 26 free throws. The good news is it appears the rest of the NBA as a collective community is plotting against the Thunder with a plan to stop them. It's a long game, but so far so good…

To give you a sense of how crazy starting a season with back-to-back double OTs is, here's all ten other instances this happened at any point in a season in NBA history. 

Receipts:

Let's move on to other things that don't to matter. We had "Skinny Luka" playing on opening night weighing a reportedly 30-lbs lighter than last season. 

Wellllll… turns out he still absolutely sucks at defense. It was pretty funny though as he did have one very nice defensive stop that was celebrated by the broadcast crew desperately waiting all game for him to do a defense. And right afterwards he was too gassed to make it down the court. Again, this was opening night. Not exactly in the doldrums of the season. 43 points. -8 plus/minus. Now I'm well aware plus/minus stats are often confounding and riddled with selection bias (good players on both teams often rest together making it easier for bench guys to get better +/- for example). But this is just typical Luka. Nothing has changed. Not yet anyway. 

Want to know who does play good defense? 

Greg Fiume. Getty Images.

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My god, this league is officially on full notice for Victor Wembanyama. He only scored 40 points to Luka's 43 in his first game, but get this: he was a +31. Why? Because he's a two-way player. Dude was everywhere vs the Dallas "defense wins championships???" Mavericks and the scariest part is that it didn't even really look like he was trying. He raises his hand up for a block like he's Vanna White about to touch the bright screen. That's about the level of difficulty it is for this guy. 

What happens when he does start trying? 

Unfortunately… I think I know the answer. And that answer sucks. You simply can't be this tall AND play guard AND stay healthy. I've already researched and blogged on those that have tried. It's a bloodbath. I don't know what else to say other than enjoy Wemby while you can.

Air Gordon

Garrett Ellwood. Getty Images.

Quick stat on Aaron Gordon. 50 points on opening night. Most for any Nugget ever. This guy is one of my favorite players to watch. He has no business going 10/11 from behind the arc, but here we are. This ties three others in NBA history for most accurate three-point shooting game with a minimum of ten attempts. He joins Ty Lawson, Klay Thompson, and a random Luke Kennard. That's it. No Steph Curry on there. No Reggie. No Ray. Not even Scalabrine. But from what I can tell, Draymond appears to be gunning for it lately. 

OK that's a lot of NBA in this first edition. Am I missing anything?

Oh yeah. One more. I guess there was this little note…

Credit to this guy for seeing what appeared to be suspicious signs when they happened.

There's no longer any good standing to tell people they are conspiracy theorists when it comes to what's going on behind the scenes in sports. I've covered the details on how shady penalties in Chiefs postseason games were in favor of the preeminent league star, Patrick Mahomes well before the UTEP study did the same thing. Hard not to at least wonder if this has something to do with the all-time soft calls SGA gets. I'm sorry. It just does. Not saying I believe it for sure, but it's in the plausible range of outcomes. The fact that both #1 stars of their sport play in smaller markets doesn't really matter so long as people want to watch them from all over the country or world. 

Might be fun to dig through some data to see if any other players experienced some questionable injuries. 

OK. Let's talk some football to end your cup of coffee. 

Andy Lyons. Getty Images.

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You might have heard that Drake Maye went 21/23 passing against the Titans last Sunday which was good enough for most accurate passer in New England history. At least for the regular season. But what you probably didn't hear is that Brady did top that in the playoffs. Try 26/28 in 2008 vs the Jaguars. 92.8 percent. 

Maye looks absolutely awesome out there. He might actually be Brady with legs. And here's a stat to make my fellow Bears fans pretty sad, the last quarterback to throw 21/23 as Maye did Sunday was Jayden Daniels last year. How nice it must be to have an accurate young quarterback…

And that brings me to Caleb Williams…

I did a stand alone blog a few days ago wondering why Bears fans were so happy. Yes - Ben Johnson is that guy. A jackpot hit at head coach. And we finally shored up at offensive line. Odunze and Burden are getting open too and - oh yeah - we still have DJ Moore. All the pieces are there. Yet… Caleb isn't capitalizing on any of it. Literally all the perfectly reasonable excuses for his poor performance last year are now gone.

Maybe this week will change and he'll be able to dice up the most inept defense in the league. I certainly hope so, but there's been zero progress in accuracy after about 1.5 years. How that isn't troubling fans is beyond me. 

That's it for this week. If you notice any wild/funny/just plain stupid stat lookup leads, I love nothing more than seeing people reach out on Twitter to ask about them. 

Give me a follow below and let me know so I can look into it for a future Sports Staturday.

@Stathole