That would put them even with the 1890 Buffalo Bisons and 1894 Louisville Corners for number of wins, and they’d just barely be in the top 10 for the lowest number of wins in MLB history.
(Or bottom 10 for number of wins, just depends on perspective. I’m trying to put a positive spin on it, like they have a chance to accomplish something special this year.)
Thanks for the updates but the number of games per season has changed a lot in MLB history. Less then 100 games the first 7 years. Ranged from 112 to 154 from 1884 to 1960. Then the current 162 game season since 1961.
Instead of total losses, seems better to look how low their winning percentage is. In those terms, I bet they are still on pace to accomplish one of the worst seasons ever, or at least in the modern game since 1961.
The worst team in the modern era is the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics. They only had 36 wins, and had a .235 winning percentage. If the Rockies only have 36 wins as well this year, they’d have a worse percentage at .222.
Not only would that percentage make them the worst in the modern era, they’d be the 5th worst all-time; just slightly better than the 1897 St. Louis Browns, but worse than the 1886 Washington Nationals.
If you wanted to reall get technical, you’d have to determine how many standard deviations the team was from 81-81. Modern baseball is more competitively balanced than it was in the 19th century. Having a .250 winning percentage is very rare now, and a team determined to avoid it should be able to.
The Rockies only got one hit today, during a 5-0 loss to Milwaukee.
Shohei Ohtani pitched two shutout innings yesterday and at one point threw a pitch 102 MPH. Well, I guess he’s fully back.
He also went 0-for-4. You know, it just occurred to me I have never seen a breakdown of how he hits on days he pitches vs. how he hits and days he doesn’t.
That said, he now has 82 runs scored in 82 games. Still on track to be the first guy to score a run a game since Rickey in 1985.
Wrong thread, mayhap?
Maybe he is trying to say Ohtani could beat the Rockies single handledly.
If you’re going to be in the Denver area today, don’t miss a fantastic price on a ticket for today’s Rockies-White Sox game. Only $6.74 on Seat Geek!
True, it’s in the far reaches of the left-field stands where the game will only be a distant rumor, but you can’t put a price on being a part of history.
Is it true that 6.74 is also the combined WAR scores for both rosters? If not, it should be!
The Rockies should play the Yankees every day. They would be in the playoffs in no time.
It’s a tiny bit higher, but WAR actually EXAGGERATES how good those teams are. Yes, really.
I had to look up WAR score. Says Wins Above Replacement is a player score. I guess team score is sum of all their player’s WAR scores
Yeah, I was (jokingly) suggesting that if you added up all of each team’s individual WAR scores, they wouldn’t add up to much.
Part of the concept of WAR is that it purports to measure how valuable a player is, compared to a guy that his team would bring up from the minors to replace him (hence, “wins above replacement”). A WAR of 0.0 suggests that a player is no better than the guys in AAA at his position, and it’s not uncommon for players who play poorly to have negative WAR scores.
Generally speaking, a WAR score (for an entire season) of 2.0 is a solid starter, a 5 is playing at an All-Star level, and an 8+ is having an MVP-caliber year. As we’re only halfway through the year, cut those in half for a sense of how players are doing so far.
For the Rockies, for example:
In other words, that’s a bad team (clearly, given their record) with a bad roster. The White Sox’s batters are similarly bad, but their pitching staff isn’t awful.
I don’t think most WAR systems actually try to tie them explicitly to actual wins, which is a flaw in them. Bill James’ Win Shares did attempt to do that, note. The baseline I’ve seen bandied about is that of a 48 win team. For Baseball Reference (which says it uses that baseline), I just tallied the WAR totals for position players and pitchers, and, for the 98 win 2004 Boston Red Sox I got 101.7, not 98.
Yup, because they scored and allowed runs at a rate that you’d expect would result in abut 102 wins, not 98. It’s a flaw in the system. They don’t adjust for actual wins.
It’s not a flaw, because WAR is meant as a measure of individual talent and contribution regardless of team context. 6.1 WAR player Hector Consuelo of the 20-92 Albany Crapholes is just as good as 6.1 WAR Johnny Bonneville of the 103-14 Metroville Cosmos.
Bill James would beg to disagree with the contention that team context doesn’t matter, and on that matter at least I would agree with him.
I didn’t say it didn’t matter. WAR doesn’t say it doesn’t matter, either. It simply says WAR is not going to measure it. It’s silly to create a metric that says Bobby is worth 7.5 Metrics on the Crapholes but is worth 83.2 Metrics on the Cosmos, at least for metrics that are attempting to create a way to compare players on different teams, let alone different eras.
But it’s interesting to link to an argument explaining why James is wrong in an attempt to say that he is right.
Because it also has a link to where he puts forth his own argument (alas BJ took down his site a couple of years back); note I am only interested in finding optimal ways of measuring talent and welcome authentic back and forth discussions (vs. dogmatic ones). The two factions in question differ philosophically on said point, tl;dr.
Yes, I am well aware of the effect of luck on player stats AND team performance, but Bill convinced me years ago that you couldn’t have such a stat be a free floating one, that it had instead to be tied down to something more fundamental, and well you can’t get any more fundamental than wins. Others are more interested in a context-free measure, meaning if the player in question swapped teams what would likely be his value (which would typically disregard the effects of chance). YMMV and all that.