“P”ing on the Shoulders of Giants

The San Francisco Giants have been occasionally starting five different players whose last names begin with the letter P. One such instance occurred Thursday night at Milwaukee, when their starting nine went as follows:

This of course led the VORG to wonder if that was a record for most “P” names in a starting lineup, and then what the record was for every other letter. With the Retrosheet gamelogs revved up, I parsed out last names from the lineups of the 160,000+ games that had such info available. I then pulled out the first letter of each of the last names, and summed them for each team in each game. Voila . . . here are the counts for each letter, and the date and game in which it last occurred (through 2013, with the team that did in in italics and bolded):