Joey Votto made a bit of news today when he walked in all five of his appearances.

That made for a 0000 “stat line” in the boxscore for the Cincinnati Reds first baseman, but if you look a little closer you can see the “5” for his quintet of walks.

(A nerd thing. The boxes on espn.com are what the Associated Press once called “expanded” boxes. If you go back in time, to the pre-USA Today era, (before 1982) baseball boxes provided four stats for each player, and the two teams shared one column in the newspaper: Visitors left, home team right. When USAT began running expanded boxes, most papers of any size eventually did the same thing. It required a commitment of space, in a newspaper, because the boxes were twice as long — visiting team above home team, but they moved walks and strikeouts up into an expanded stat line — so Votto is 000050 in the box linked above.)

Votto has done this before. He went 000050 in 2013, seeing 28 pitches. This time, he saw 43 pitches.

Which is a long prelude to “unusual boxes we have known”, including one or two that may have been done only once.

One would be the 0202 line put up by Chicago White Sox first baseman Frank Thomas in 1999.

I remember seeing that one and just doing a sort of mental “double take”. 0202 … how is that even possible?

And then you think of the only way, and it makes perfect sense — two sacrifice flies and two walks, and Thomas came around to score on the two walks.

This site in April did an item about weird line scores — such as the four times someone went 0301 and the one and only time someone went 0401 — Bryce Harper, in 2015.

Of course, we have to leave it to baseball to keep track of things like this.