Ellison's Streak
Five years ago, former MLB player Bill Buckner passed away at the age of 69. Although he had 2,715 hits and won a batting title during his career, he is more famous for an error committed during the 1986 World Series as a member of the Boston Red Sox.
At the time of the error, Buckner was 36 years old and was battling a leg injury. His manager John McNamara was widely criticized for leaving him in the game defensively instead of replacing him with Dave Stapleton, a better and healthier defensive first baseman who had replaced Buckner defensively in previous World Series games. A few years ago, Baseball Prospectus ranked this decision as the worst postseason managerial decision of all-time .
Several years ago, I followed the San Francisco Giants religiously. (With my current teaching schedule (six to seven classes!), I don't have time to follow sports
so closely.) During the beginning of the 2006 regular season, I was listening to Giants games on KNBR and I noticed that Jason Ellison frequently pinch ran for Barry Bonds and/or replaced him in the outfield in the late innings. (Barry Bonds was 41 years old at the time and Jason Ellison was 28.) Ellison was a late-inning defensive replacement for Bonds
in the same way that Stapleton was a late-inning defensive replacement for Buckner. Like
Bill Buckner, Barry Bonds committed a key error in a World
Series game (8th inning of 2002 World Series Game 6) that led to an unearned run.
Ellison rarely started for the Giants. I started keeping track of the times that Ellison entered the game and I noticed that he played in eighteen straight Giants games (April 30 - May 17) without starting one of them!
I emailed then ESPN baseball writer Jayson Stark about this and he included it in one of his columns. It was ranked as the
#1 Elias Useless Info nugget. It turns out that Ellison's non-starting streak was quite rare in MLB. (Non-starting streaks are much more common in the NBA then they are in MLB.)