Tom Tildrum:
1985 Royals, 2015 Royals, or 1970 Chiefs? Or the soccer team, which I’m not as familiar with?
1937-38 Chicago Black Hawks went 14-25-9 in the regular season but beat the Montreal Canadiens, the New York Americans and Toronto Maple Leafs to win the Stanley Cup. They had a record 8 American players on their roster and their coach Bill Stewart was also American. Stewart was also a baseball umpire and was the home plate umpire for Johnny Vanderbilt Meer’s second no hitter in 1938 (first night game in Brooklyn) and the crew chief for the 1951 Dodgers vs Giants playoff series.
I wonder if the 1969 New York Mets were one of the flukes teams to win a World Series. They won 100 games although their Pythagorean record is 92-70 while the Cubs won 92 but should have won 93 according to Pythagorean record (a ratio of runs score vs runs allowed). They had a great starting pitching in Tom Seaver and a darn number two in Jerry Koosman. Nolan Ryan and Tug McGraw were just beginning. But their hitters such as Tommie Agee, Cleon Jones and Art Shamsky, good that year, didn’t have long careers. There has been talk that guys like Wayne Garrett and Ron Swoboda weren’t really dedicated. Basically after 1969, they won 83 games a year for five years. They had some breaks in the World Series: an umpire missed Frank Robinson getting hit by a ball saying it hit is bat first (replays showed it hit Robinson first), the Mets were able to reverse a call awarding Jones first base by showing the umpire the shoe polish when a ball hit Jones’s shoe and rolled into the Mets dugout). Swoboda, a poor outfielder, made a great diving catch in game 4 and the Mets won it when a ball hit J C Martin running out of the baseline to first (a call that sometimes is reversed and sometimes not. Earl Weaver had been ejected earlier in the game,although not sure if he could have changed the umpire’s decision. Tommie Agee hit a home run and made two great catches in game 3. Earl Weaver once said the Orioles were so anxious to prove they were a great team that they swung too early in the count. In 1970 they didn’t and they won the series.
The Twins are my pick - going back further in history, I don’t know a lot about the 1945 Tigers, but they only won 80-some games and rosters were probably still somewhat weakened by WW II. They did have Hal Newhouser and Hank Greenberg.
I’ll throw an individual in here for fun:
Thomas Johansson won the 2002 Australian Open. Kudos to him, but he was a journeyman tennis player his entire career. Competent, even excellent at times. He won through nice play and some bad playing from far more talented opponents.
Has there been a worse male tennis player to win a grand slam tournament in the Open Era?
Gaston Gaudio was pretty much the same player - maybe a hair or two better.
Disagree about the 1969 Mets. In addition to an awesome season by Seaver, they defeated the Atlanta Braves with Hank Aaron and a prime season by Phil Niekro to win the NL pennant.
They lost their best player; Kante, who is now the lynchpin of this years likely champions, Chelsea. So while they certainly overachieved, I cannot say they were the worst.
Next year they will probably be relegated losing Kasper, Vardy and probably Mahrez in the summer transfer window.
I don’t think the '69 Mets are anywhere near as weak a champion as the 1987 Twins, but it is interesting to look at their records:
1967: 61-101
1968: 73-89
1969: 100-62
1970: 83-79
1971: 83-79
I don’t think a team that wins 100 games can qualify as the weakest champion ever, but I don’t think they are a top half champ by any stretch of the imagination.
The Mets WERE a fluke champion, in a sense; basically they had the two best months in the history of the team between 1962 and 1985. I can think of way flukier ones though. In the case of any league with divisional play I think one of the features of a weak champion is they’re in a weak-ass division and so get to bypass superior teams. But the 1969 Mets won more games than anyone else in the National League and the East was not sufficiently weaker than the West (it was 17 games weaker over all six teams, which isn’t much) to fully explain that.
Seems like most of us agree with '87 Twins were the worst WS champs. Thinking back to MLB teams who won their League Championship, I believe the 2007 Rockies were a .500 ball club with about 2 weeks to go in the season and then just absolutely caught fire right up to the World Series. Where they were promptly swept by Boston.
Not the worst team, but the 2013 World Champion Red Sox finished a distant 5th in the 2012 season, and then promptly regressed to an equally distant 5th in 2014.
As a Twins fan, I feel that I have to stick up for them a bit. They were not as bad as they look on paper, but they did have a lot of things fall for them. They lost something like 7 of their last 9 games of the season, but most of those were after they clinched their (rather weak) AL West division.
Meanwhile in the AL East, the Tigers were in a very tight race for 1st. They were helped down the stretch by two or three late season call ups who made large contributions. Unfortunately, those late season call ups were not eligible for post season play, so the Tigers in the playoffs were not as good as they were in the final weeks of the season. The Twins beat the Tigers somewhat easily 4 games to 1.
And the Twins home field advantage was legendary at that time. Fun fact: the Twins have been to 3 world series (1965, 1987, 1991). All of them went 7 games, with the Twins having the home field advantage. They were 0-9 on the road, and 11-1 at home. Their only home loss was game 7 in 1965.
What about teams that have ups and downs throughout the season but peak at the right time? The 1988 49ers were 6-5 at one point with the local media already predicting that the end of the season would see Walsh fired and Montana traded. Then at the end of November they absolutely caught fire and destroyed the Vikings and Bears in the playoffs before beating Cincinnati in the Super Bowl. The NFCCG in Chicago was named by Bill Walsh as the greatest victory of his coaching career. (It was possibly the best sports moment in my life as well.)
The problem with naming the '88 Niners is that if you look at the surrounding seasons, the 6-5 was the fluke, not what came after. The won the Super Bowl the year after that too, and the year before had gone 13-2.
Were any of those champions in strike shortened seasons lucky and mediocre?
The 1981 baseball strike was weird because it came in the middle of season, and MLB decided to split the season into two halves, with the division winners of each half playing off for the overall division title.
St. Louis in the NL East and Cincinnati in the NL West actually had the best overall records in their divisions, but neither won either half-season to make the playoffs.
I wouldn’t call the LA Dodgers, the eventual NL champion (and World Series winner) “mediocre” but they sure were lucky. In a different setup they wouldn’t have made the playoffs.
One of the players for the Baltimore Colts teams of the late 1960s/early 1970s (Tom Matte, I think) once said the worst team he played for was the 1970 squad that went 11-2-1 and won the Super Bowl, despite having 7 turnovers in the game (partially negated by 4 Dallas turnovers, including an interception in their territory with a little over a minute left in regulation). They had virtually no running game and quarterbacks Unitas and Morrall were 37 and 36. But they had an easy schedule and helped by the fact there were virtually no other strong teams.
Matte's best team, in his opinion, was the 1968 squad that lost the Super Bowl.I nominate the 1975 Golden State Warriors, who swept the highly favored Washington Bullets and were then never heard from again. The Warriors rode an incredibly hot Rick Barry and good team ball among the other regulars (Jamaal Wilkes, Phil Smith, Gus Williams) to one championship but never did anything before or after that year.
Greece winning the Euro 2004 Football Championship.
That was a good team who played a ruthless defense based game. They would have gone far in any tournament.
Now compare with 2016 Portugal, whose tactics could be described as “pass the ball to Ronaldo”. They actually played better in the final without him.