WTOP - A Half-Century of Awful
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Before I put this thread to bed for good, thanks to all for your interest. Hope I didn’t bore anybody with posts about this project. In the end, it was a lot of fun. And I finished right at my original target date of mid-June. :blush:
In 131 total games, the overall tournament ERA was 4.54 (which was actually a bit better than I had anticipated). The WHIP was 1.51.
The final tournament batting average was .284, with a SLG of .372, and an OPS of .719.
The tournament fielding average was .970. (In my GTOP tournaments, it’s about .980)Some observations about playing with awful teams:
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Never underestimate the value of Fielding Two over Fielding Three. It’s significant. The two best-fielding teams in the tournament were the Braves (.982) and Senators (.981). They were almost always F2. The three worst-fielding teams - the Browns (.954), Mets (.961) and Pirates (.963) - were practically always F3.
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‘D’ pitchers with W’s are absolutely dreadful and should be avoided at all costs. They simply can’t get people out. Of the 40 pitchers who started games in this tournament, only four were D’s with a W. But those four guys were a combined W-L of 3-15 with an ERA of 9.05 (122 earned runs allowed in 121.1 innings).
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The HOF’ers in the tournament did really well. The Senators’ Walter Johnson (A-Y) was the only HOF pitcher and he went 5-2, 1.92 ERA. But the seven HOF hitters (Lajoie, Ruth, Maranville, Klein, Kiner, Ashburn, Hodges) also performed well. They batted a combined .323 (150-for-465) with 15 HR’s and 87 RBI.
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The two teams with the worst pitching had almost entirely D pitchers. The ‘champion’ Browns overall ERA was 6.52, while the Mets were slightly worse at 6.58. And with both stuck almost exclusively as F3 defensive teams, their games often got pretty ugly.
In the end, I learned that those 1939 Browns were simply terrible. They were so bad that you can’t even find a team picture online. The closest I could find was this photo of the six unlucky souls who were traded to St. Louis from the Tigers midway through that '39 season. Credit to their organization that they won the AL pennant only five years later.
I’m out, gang. Thanks again for your patience. :+1: :baseball: :game_die:
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@RandySteinman Very entertaining. Thank you!
