Include the aesthetic value of the uniforms each team wore. I believe that, if you’re gonna lose, at least look good doing it!! 
Sorry Rockies, the Giants did the best they could[sup]*[/sup] to get you the NL West crown all for your own; it just wasn’t meant to be…
- The sad truth is that they really, really did.
I can totally respect that opinion.
I hope the Dodgers lose their next two games, and you get put out of your misery early.
I actually worked on this a little today.
It’s the 2003 Tigers. It just has to be. There’s no way around it, and it became clear early on no one competed with them.
I did it by calculating Misery Points this way:
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Take total losses; if the team didn’t play 162 games, adjust the losses to the number they’d have in 162 games.
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Add more Misery Points like so:
2a. Butterfingers Points: Add 1 Misery Point for every 15 errors the team is above the league average. Watching a team that just can’t hit or pitch is one thing, but there’'s something especially enraging about bungled fielding. (Virtually all truly bad teams get Butterfingers Points.)
2b. Power Outage: Add 1 Misery Point if the team finished last or next to last in the league in homers. Add another point is no one on the team hit 20 homers.
- Subtract Misery Points like so:
3a. Expansion Credit. No one really expects a new team to be any good; fans are just happy it exists. Subtract 10 misery points for a first year team, 5 for second year. After that they should be better.
3b. Star Power. Even if a team is bad one player can bring you joy. Add 1 point for every All Star above the minimum one; two points for any Hall of Famer, or likely future Hall of Famer, who played regularly for the team; 3 points for a player who won any major award (MVP, Cy, ROY) and one point for a Gold Glove or a player leading the league in a Triple Crown category. Believe it or not this came up from time to time. The 1952 Pirates had Ralph Kiner; the 1979 Blue Jays had a Rookie of the Year, Alfredo Griffin.
3c. Power Surge; Add 1 point for any player with a 30-homer season, 2 points for 40, and come on, 50 won’t happen.
Anyway, the 2003 Tigers had 121 misery points; 119 clean for their losses, 2 for the Butterfingers category, and literally no bonuses.
If you go pre-Jackie Robinson, the 1916 A’s best the 2003 Tigers. They would have lost 124 games with their .235 winning percentage in a 162-game season, plus 6 Butterfingers points, minus one point for having Nap Lajoie on the team, for a staggering 129 Misery Points. They also deserve a special few points for this amazing number; they finished 40 games out of next to last place, while that team (Washington) was only 14.5 games out of FIRST. If Washington hadn’t missed one game they might have finished 77-77, which would have made the A’s literally the only team in the league with a losing record.
The other famous pre-war contender are of course the 1935 Braves, who would have gone 41-121 in a 162-game season. The Braves don’t get any more points though, and Wally Berger costs them three points with his huge year leading the league in homers and RBI.
So honestly, the A’s and Braves disasters were probably worse than the Tigers in a sense. On the other hand, baseball back then was not as balanced as it is now, and teams could be really miserable for an extended time, so I don’t think today’s teams can be compared.
Anyway, the 2018 Orioles are pretty far down there:
Losses: 115 points
Butterfingers: 1 point
No bonuses (it is safe to say no one on that team is getting an award.) 116 is a huge, huge total.
You should figure a way to add misery points for the size of the losses. In other words, losing 100 games sucks, but if a bunch of them are by a run or two, you just sort of blame the universe for hating your team (or get mad because they “can’t come through in the clutch”).
But if they consistently lose by a bunch, you just give up. Misery!
Maybe RA/RF or RA above league average by a certain number or RF below? Both? Obviously, I’m figuring that adding bonus misery point per game is not feasible.
It’s noteworthy to me that in looking at the 2003 Tigers transactions on Baseball Reference they did not make any mid-season trades that would have made their team worse. In fact it probably helped their record a tad by trading 2 minor leaguers for Alex Sanchez in May. In contrast Baltimore traded away Machado and Britton, and who knows how Gausman and Schoop would have done had they remained there through the season.
I actually considered this.
You can approximate this number by examining a team’s projected “Pythagorean” record. A bad team that exceeds its projection must, by definition, have lost a slightly disproportionate number of close games.
The 1962 Mets were a good example; they were 40-120, but scored and allowed runs like a bad, but not as bad, 50-110 team. Ten games is a really, really big difference.
I decided not to do this, though, because
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I am not sure how accurate it is in guessing at the “frustrating loss” factor - the '62 Mets look to me like they got blown out a lot, but happen to have won some big blowouts,
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Is losing by a close margin really more frustrating than getting blown out? It sucks to lose a heartbreaker, but if I go to the ballpark, is it really worse than watching my team get the shit kicked out of it 14-2? And…
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I am not a fan of the idea of “crediting” a team for underperformings it Pythagorean record. The Mets weren’t “really” a 50-110 team. They were a 40-120 team, no matter what the Pythagorean method says.
Anyway, of the really terrible teams, the '62 Mets are the one of most extreme examples, but almost all did underperform the projection, which is, if you think about it, totally what you’d expect:
1962 Mets: 40-120 really, 50-110 projected
2003 Tigers: 43-119 really, 49-113 projected
2018 Orioles: 47-115 really, 55-107 projected
1979 Blue Jays: 53-109 really, 57-105 projected
1952 Pirates: 42-112 really, 48-106 projected
1916 A’s: 36-117 really, 41-112 projected
1935 Braves: 38-115 really, 50-103 projected (Biggest gap)
1961 Phillies: 47-107 really, 56-98 projected
2013 Astros: 51-111 really, 56-106 projected
1988 Braves: 54-106 really, 59-101 projected
1939 Browns: 43-111 really, 53-101 projected
The infamous 1899 Spiders were 20-134 really, 26-128 projected, but I don’t consider them a real major league team.
Special credit goes to the 1932 Red Sox and White Sox, who somehow BOTH won fewer than a third of their games (Boston 43-111, Chicago 49-102) though, of course, they must have played each other a lot.
Incidentally, I am sure I am not the only person who noticed the delightful fact that Khris Davis hit .247 this year, and in fact has now hit .247 four years in a row. He is the only player in baseball history with the same batting average four years in a row.
As one who never liked the one game playoff after 162 game regular season, it’s somewhat disheartening to see how many there are on the NL side of the playoff bracket. But, at least nobody will be completely eliminated in the Chi/Mil or LA/Col games.
Next thread, already in progress:
MLB Playoffs 2018: Who Wins It All?
It’s pretty amazing. Interestingly, his power has improved each year, with SLG going up every time, and his OPS+ has also therefore improved, along with his WAR.
The Davis streak reminds of Adam Dunn. He hit exactly 40 homers 4 years in a row, and followed that up by hitting 38 two consecutive years.
MLB has better thank the weather gods that they made this an early day game for the Cubs, it looks like rain tonight and I have no idea what they would have done if today’s game got rained out. I guess they could have pushed the NL play in game to Wednesday if necessary
This is literally one of my favorite things about baseball.
Ideally, I don’t like the one game play in either. But , if they’re going to play 162 games, and want more teams in the playoff picture, then that’s the only solution. Pushing the playoffs into November is really asking for trouble, weather wise.
I know you’re all getting tgired of me babbling about this but I think the 1942 Philles are a strong contender.
Unlike the other clown shows I listed above, the Phillies’ hideous 42-109 record was actually LUCKY; their projection was actually 39-112. Their Misery Score is 120: 117 for losses adjusted to 162 games, plus two bonus points for Power Outage and two for Butterfingers, minus one point for having Lloyd Waner all year. So they just miss the 2003 Tigers.
I think the '42 Phillies might actually have been worse. They had probably the worst offense of the live ball era; they only scored 2.6 runs a game, a stupefying low total. It was a low offense year, but they were still 34% worse than average, a stunning accomplishment. They did everything badly. They were last in the league in almost every positive team statistic.
The team’s “best” pitcher was Tommy Hughes, who went 12-18 with an ERA around the league average. He actually got a few downballot MVP votes, which I assume were out of sympathy. His eprformance was at least half luck; his K/W numbers were bad even by the standards of the era. After the 1942 season, he was shipped off to the Army and spent three years in a chemical warfare battalion, which was probably more fun than playing for the Phillies.
The team’s best position player, according to WAR, was Pinky May, who - I am not making this up - batted .238 with no home runs, 18 RBI, and 25 runs. I assume he was a good fielder but that can’t be right, so I’ll say it was Danny Litwhiler, who batted .271 with 9 homers, 56 RBI, 59 runs, and led the team in all those categories. After 1942 he was shipped to St. Louis, which must have felt like being released from prison; he won a World Series there in 1944.
It is further important to note that as awful as they were, it was the end of a string of years in which they were scarcely better:
1938: 45-105
1939: 45-106
1940: 50-103
1941: 43-111
1942: 42-109
Holy smokes.
I know it’s a last minute game and it’s a work day, but there’s a lot of empty seats for the Dodgers
Yeah, I’m not a fan of it, either (except for a tie-breaker to determine a division champ, like today.). Frankly, I’m not a fan of the 5-game playoff series, either. I’d make them all 7 games myself, and reduce the regular season schedule to accomodate. But I guess it depends on what you’re looking for in terms of the playoffs.
Attendance for today was 47,816. Considering today’s game wasn’t confirmed until yesterday afternoon, and considering this is a noon game on a Monday, I would say 47K is pretty respectable.
I wonder why, once it was determined that there would be two NL tiebreaker games today, the NL Wild Card wasn’t flipped to Wednesday?