Corbin Carroll Had Something of a Streak

To this point the here at the end of August, the Diamondbacks have had quite the second half. As of July 16th, the date of the 2024 MLB All Star Game, the Diamondbacks were just one game above .500 and had a middling 39.7% chance to make the playoffs, according to Fangraphs’ playoff odds. Fast forward to the eve of September, and a strong second half has resulted in a 76-59 record, which has boosted those playoff odds to 91.7%. Of course, that type of improvement doesn’t go unnoticed. Fangraphs wrote about the Diamondbacks second half surge earlier in August, and more recently, MLB.com looked into Corbin Carroll‘s emergence from a brutal first half as well.

And quite an emergence he has had; at the time of this writing Carroll owns a .998 OPS in the second half, following a brutal .635 OPS prior to the All Star break. There are any number of ways to break down Carroll’s performance, but here I take a pretty specific approach after noticing a pretty strange streak that has only just ended.

Until yesterday, Corbin Carroll had gone the entire second half —while sporting a near-1.000 OPS, mind you— without hitting a double. That is not to say he hadn’t been displaying significant power; Carroll already has 13 home runs in the second half. This begged the question: how typical is it for a player to hit so many consecutive extra base hits without any single one being a double? How rare is this double-less XBH streak of Corbin Carroll’s second half?

To that end, data was pulled from Baseball Savant on all extra base hits this year as well as last year, for good measure. After sorting data by player and extra base hit event, one can back out how long any given double-less extra base hit streak ran, or has run, for. As is rarely the case, my initial instincts were validated: Carroll was in fact on something of a rare streak. Below are those players with a 10+ double-less XBH streak dating back to the beginning of the 2023 season.

A key note on this data before diving in: Carroll’s streak ended just last night, following a home run —his 20th consecutive non-double XBH— off Clayton Kershaw, when late in the game he finally doubled. Given that, data is in fact pull through August 29th, but Carroll’s data has been updated to incorporate the events of last night’s game. For this table, wherein no other streaks are active, this does not immediately matter.

Getting back to the leaderboard’s contents, it looks as though this was in fact a noteworthy streak; no other player in the past “one and five-sixths” seasons has come close to his streak. Those that made it just over halfway, like Shohei Ohtani and Pete Alonso, did so while hitting considerably fewer triples as well. Six consecutive triples without a doubles might, in and of itself, be a bit of a streak.

Interesting too is the timeline of these double-less XBH streaks. Jose Trevino‘s streak spanned multiple seasons and lasted, all told, over a full year. It is mildly wild to consider that Trevino was catching and hitting singles and hitting home runs —and being injured, unfortunately— but failed to record an MLB double in the time it took the earth to rotate once around the sun. He is something of an outlier though. Most other streaks appear to last a month or so, though Max Muncy‘s rapid burst home run streak at the beginning of 2023 is something of an outlier on the other end of the timeline spectrum.

How much of an outlier is Carroll’s streak during this timeline amongst the wider MLB? The histogram below offers a bit more context.

Note that only players with 30+ XBHs within the timeline provides are included so as to limit the number of short streaks occurring simply on the back of so few extra base hits. Also note that data is only live through August 29th, but I updated Carroll’s own datapoint to reflect his 20 double-less XBH from last night’s game, so this data is slightly artificially modified.

Those seven players featured in the “leaderboard” above very much make up the far right tail of the distribution of these double-less XBH streak histogram. And that makes sense; since the beginning of 2023, ~55.7% of all extra base hits have been doubles. Given that point, it makes it even more interesting that Carroll would have hit 20 straight extra base hits without a single double among them.

So, while this streak has only just come to an end, it was interesting and rather unexpected for having happened at all, particularly for a player of Carroll’s power profile (he’s no Pete Alonso). Carroll and the Diamondbacks, meanwhile will surely continue to welcome this barrage of extra base hits as the NL playoff race continues to heat up, regardless of what types of extra base hits those might be.