But this time, I came up with it all on my own!

I'm thinking of adding leaderboards to MinorLeagueSplits.com, and ran up against the problem of deciding who "qualifies." The usual rule for batters is 3.1 PA/team-game; for pitchers, I think it's one inning per team-game. Over the course of a Major League season, then, it's 502 ABs or 162 IP.

That's easy, but in the avalanche of data that drives the MLSD, I don't track team-games. I could fetch it easily enough, but I wanted a way to determine who qualified from information my program already had at hand.

One thing I do have at my disposal is total PAs and IPs for each league. (For instance, here's the split table for Southern League hitting.) I checked the Baseball-Reference.com page for the 2005 NL and discovered that the PA qualifying threshold (502 PA) is almost precisely half of one percent of the league-wide total.

Pretty cool, huh?

The IP threshold isn't so mathematically elegant, but again it's a reasonably round number: it's almost exactly 0.7% of the league-wide total.

And while we're on the topic of Minor League Splits, I have to point out to you that Yovani Gallardo, in his first 18 2/3 IP in Double-A, has yet to walk a right-handed hitter. That's no walks in 39 ABs, to go with just five hits, all singles. Proof at last: Gallardo is the polar opposite of Doug Davis.