Thursday, June 02, 2011

B-News 4 The A's

Since the Athletics moved to Oakland in 1968, the Red Sox have gone 269-218 against them, with a 154-88 mark at home. We've outscored them 2,288-2,181 in that time.

We've played the Athletics 1,920 times including their time in Philly and Kansas City, beating them 1,050 times and losing 860. That .550 winning percentage is our second-best against any of the original AL teams. (We've beaten the Orioles franchise at a .55137 rate, and the A's at .54974. (Ties count in total number of games, but not when calculating winning percentage.))

We once won 18 straight games against the A's, between 1940 and 1941.

The longest game we've played against them was 24 innings (1906).

The A's dominated us between 1927 and 1932, winning 104 of 129!

By June of 1933, they led us by 58 games in the all-time series, having erased what had been a 45-game deficit in 1924 (though we had come back from down 33 games before that). But on September 11th, 1939, we caught up to them, tying the series at 416. In the teams' next game, the Red Sox won and haven't looked back, holding the edge on the A's for over 70 years, steadily increasing the lead to 190 games as of today.

In the first American League season, 1901, the two teams split the 20 games they played. (Runs: Red Sox 126, A's 125.) They have also split the 20 most recent games against each other. (Runs: Red Sox 99, A's 93.)

Except for 1998 and 2004, when the Red Sox won the season series 9-2 and 8-1, no team has lost fewer than 3 games in any season series. The most either team has beaten the other is 19, when the Sox won the 1950 season series 19-3, outscoring the A's 190-84 and averaging a 8.6-3.8 win.

The first Red Sox-A's game was played Monday, April 29th, 1901, in front of 3,421 people at Philadelphia's Columbia Park. The first pitch was thrown by Bill Bernhard to Boston left fielder Tommy Dowd. The A's won by the "interesting score of 8 to 5," as the Philadelphia Record put it. It was Philly's first-ever win. Boston was still waiting for theirs. The boxscore shows the game's only home run coming from Fred Ketcham, though the article noted that he actually "made the round of the bases" on an error by Dowd. (Retrosheet/Baseball Reference support this, showing Ketcham with no career dongs.) The Baltimore American also covered the game, and also called it interesting. But their boxscore was correct, no HR given to Ketcham. There are other differences--the number of players left on base is different for both teams in each boxscore. And the Baltimore paper gives the A's one more hit than the Philly paper. Hard to get the stats straight when you've got different papers reporting different things....

Comments:
If you include Philly and KC, the longest game the Sox and A's played was 24 innings, on September 1, 1906. Won by the A's, 4-1.

Good info on the teams histories, Jere...
 
Thanks--on much of this stuff I did the legwork, but on that stat, I got it from Baseball Reference saying it right on top of the head-to-head page for the teams. I think since they don't have boxscores from before 1918, a stat like that is assumed to mean "since 1919." Which is dumb, since they don't tell you that. So I'm gonna change that in the post, thanks.

Actually, they do have a stat in that same section showing a game from 1901. Hmmm..how could they leave out the 1906 24-inning game? Here's the page I mean:

(And I hate when people fall back on that, giving stats only since the earliest of the years with complete boxscores. For a while there it was 1954 I think, but now it's back to 1918/1919. Sometimes it's hard to get an exact stat from years prior, but other times, you can just easily get it or figure it out. Like, I saw some stat on the Red Sox stupid Twitter page like, "the Red Sox have won x amount of games on Opening Day at Fenway since 1920." It's like, hel-llooo, if that's the stat you have, it's easy enough to check the other 8 years yourself to get the all-time stat.) (In my case here, I didn't realize B-R was pulling a "since 1919" since they didn't say it specifically--I thought they were giving the all-time stat.)
 

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