In Tuesday night’s slump-breaking win over the Cubs, Cardinal centerfielder Colby Rasmus rose to the occasion with a Ruthian home run in the bottom of the fifth. The two-run blast was the game’s biggest play, boosting the home team’s win expectancy by a consequential 19% to 87%.

Earlier, Rasmus had executed a more dubious win-expectancy play, sacrifice bunting Brendan Ryan to second on the Cardinals’ second plate appearance of the game (subtracting 2% from their WE). But the two events — a home run and a sacrifice bunt — in the same game represent an achievement that we are oddly enamored of and that relatively few have been able to pull off. Since 1955, the Cardinals have had a player with both a sac bunt and a home run in the same game 75 times (a little more than one a year), including notables such as Ozzie Smith, Tom Herr (Rasmus’s uniform number-sake), Garry Templeton, Bake McBride and Darrell Porter. Of those, 15 players have turned the trick multiple times:

It’s a curious list, with five pitchers and three Hall of Famers. Being able to both go yard and bunt seems to indicate some level of bat control, and while the ability to do both in one game is a bit flukish, interestingly all of the position players played at least 10 seasons in the majors (including Yadier Molina, who is on his way). That bodes well for Rasmus, assuming he has another such game ahead.

This entry was posted by Pip on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 3:09 pm and is filed under by the numbers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.