Greg Minton 1979-81 - A practical application of Hondo’s Law

 

The Exception That Proves The Rule

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This is the second post on the phenomenon of 0 home run allowed pitchers in SOM Baseball.  Greg Minton, of course is a legitimate data point, he suffered an injury that changed his delivery and made him nearly impossible to homer off of, for his career he only allowed .3 home runs per nine innings (a normal number might be 0.6 or 0.7 back then.). But the apex of this run was his years between 1979 and 1981, when he went over a thousand batters faced without allowing a home run.  Even someone who is very conservative by nature regarding exceptions to rules and complicated game flow has to stand up and look at this streak. It was not a big home run era in National League but still, that’s a Major League record. 

Okay, so we follow the steps. He’s a right hander so we pull the splits for each season for right handed pitchers versus both left handed and right handed batters, so we can rate him similar to a ball park rating. 

1979: Rhp:(from batter’s splits)

.Vs LHB 318 / 22961 = 0.01391

Vs RHB 637 / 28892 = 0.022048

1980 Rhp:

Vs LHB 365 / 24594 = 0.01484

Vs RHB 554 / 29649 = 0.018685

1981 Rhp:

Vs LHB 236 / 17105 = 0.013797

Vs RHB 315 / 19598 = 0.016073

The first thing you notice is this is not a big era for left handed power in the National League, and the strike year wasn’t brilliant for right handers either, Schmidt and Dawson both not withstanding.  So while Minton’s streak is long, the underlying league stats were also favorable. Let’s use the 95 percent calculation:

Ln(1-0.95) / lb(1- frequency above) = sample size

1979: vs LHB : 213.9   vs RHB: 134.4

1980: vs LHB: 200.4  vs RHB: 158.8

1981: vs LHB: 215.6  vs RHB: 184.9

Almost there. Now we use the Favorite Toy to impose a  probability distribution on the data strand from above:

1979: 

LHB: (213.9 / 132 - 0.5) * 20 = 22

RHB: (134.4 / 182 - 0.5) * 20 = 5

1980:

LHB: (200.4 / 154 - 0.5) * 20 = 16

RHB: (158.8 / 223 - 0.5) * 20 = 4

1981: 

LHB: (215.6 / 172 - 0.5)  * 20 = 15

RHB: (184.9 / 187 - 0.5) * 20 = 10

So these results are pretty interesting, obviously the 20 sided dice adjustments are less for left handed batters than right handed batters because left handed batters had less power in this era in the National League.  It takes more batters to be significant for zero home runs when their incidence is lower. Clearly his performance is much more significant against right handed batters.  

Minton      Vs LHB         Vs RHB

1979:          Auto                1-5

1980:          1-16                 1-4

1981:          1-15                 1-10

1980 in this context was his best season for avoiding home runs. 

Fred Bobberts, copyright 2026

Original Date of Publication 3/15/2026