Myles Straw’s infamous home run drought came to an end at 295 games on Friday when he homered off the Rays’ Jason Adam.
Long homerless streaks were fairly common in early days of baseball, but Straw’s streak is the sixth longest in franchise history over the last 100 years:
Myles Straw has gone 250 games without a home run, the ninth longest streak by a Cleveland hitter over the last 100 years.
The longest drought in that span was Duane Kuiper‘s 423 games from 1977 through 1981.
Since Kuiper, the only other player to reach 250 games was Felix Fermin (408 games) from 1990 through 1993.
Amed Rosario enters 2023 with a .478 batting average when putting the ball in play since joining Cleveland.
Dating back to 1990, that’s the highest average among Cleveland hitters with at least 100 one-pitch at-bats:
Rosario, .478
Ellis Burks, .429
Russell Branyan, .423
Shin-Soo Choo, .423
Roberto Alomar, .419
Jim Thome, .408
And here’s the bottom five, among 64 qualified players:
Aaron Boone, .259
Mark Lewis, .263
Felix Fermin, .269
John McDonald, .270
Mike Aviles, .272
The MLB average over this span is .335.