The Amazing Historical Significance of the 2009 Blue Jays
Saturday, September 05 2009 @ 10:43 AM EDT
Contributed by: Magpie
They're doing it again...
Back in 2005, we gasped in astonishment as the Blue Jays managed to post a losing record (80-82) despite outscoring the opposition by 70 - count 'em, 70 - runs. There's something that probably doesn't happen very often, we all thought. We thought rightly. Subsequent investigation by your not particularly humble correspondent discovered that such a thing practically never happens. As it turned out, the 2005 Blue Jays were just the third team in the history of the game, in more than 2300 team seasons, to manage this dubious feat.
Yes, folks. The 2005 Jays truly went where no team, save the 1955 and 1958 Cincinnati Reds, had gone before. (In 2006, the Cleveland Indians became the fourth team in this very small and very weird club.)
Does Pythagoras actually hate the Blue Jays? Some of us have wondered. The 2005 squad scored and allowed runs at a rate typical of an 89-73 team. And then there was 2008 - last year's team underachieved rational expectation to almost the same degree. A team that scores 714 runs and allows only 610 normally posts a record like 93-69. That's what's supposed to happen! My memory is not what it used to be, but I simply don't recall the 2008 Jays winning 93 games.
But in truth, Pythagoras does not hate the Blue Jays. He's been dead these last two milennia anyway - we're just dealing with a formula, right? And in fact, coming into the 2009 season, in 32 years the Blue Jays had posted just four seasons which they won at least five games fewer than their Pythagorean expectation. They did this in 1987, 1990, 2005, and 2008. Consider, for example, the Atlanta Braves. The Braves have pulled off the same trick - five games below Pythagoras - in each of the last three seasons. Granted, what the Braves have done these last few years is almost without precedent in the history of the game as well. But it's not like the Blue Jays have been especially unfortunate in this regard.
That said - this year's bunch is looking to carve their own special place in the Book of Dubious Achievements. It's one thing to post an ugly 60-74 record. It's quite another thing to do this when you're outscoring the other team. How often does that happen - a team loses 10 games more than they win despite scoring more runs than they allow?
Not very often. I'm looking at 2402 team seasons, going back to 1871. As things now stand, the Blue Jays would be the 8th team in history to lose 10 games more than they won while outscoring their opponents. They would be just the second such team in the history of the American League.
Anyway - 8! Out of 2402! One team out of 300.
It's pretty cool, in an appalling kind of way.
So who are the other seven, you're wondering?
Year Team W L RS RA
1907 Cincinnati NL 66 87 526 519
1918 Chicago AL 57 67 457 446
1953 NY Giants NL 70 84 768 747
1972 San Francisco NL 69 86 662 649
1980 St Louis NL 74 88 738 710
1984 Pittsburgh NL 75 87 615 567
2001 Colorado NL 73 89 923 906
2009 Toronto AL 60 74 641 633
What do these teams have in common? Well, for one thing - nobody cares about them. None of them. By definition, these are inevitably teams that should have played slightly better than .500 ball, but instead finished much further back. If the 1907 Reds had gone a more likely 76-75 they would have still finished fifth (rather than sixth) in an eight team league. They would have finished a mere 30 games behind the mighty World Champion Cubs, rather than 40.
Having gone over this ground many, many times before I've learned a thing or two about these kinds of ballclubs. Teams that fall short of their Pythagorean expectation either: a) do poorly in one-run games (the mark of an unlucky team), or b) do very well in lopsided games (the mark of a quality team.) Teams that fall far short of expectations, like these, will probably demonstrate both characteristics.
So what's worth knowing about these teams, and what happened to them in the following season?
The 1907 Reds won the blowouts and lost the close ones - their performance in April 1907 is indicative. They went 4-10 in April 1907, despite outscoring the opposition by four runs (48-44) in those 14 games. They went 1-5 in one run games, and their other three victories were by 8 runs, 5 runs, and 10 runs. The 1908 Reds weren't as good as the 1907 squad, but they improved their record by seven games (73-81) despite scoring 38 fewer runs than in 1907 and allowing 24 more.
The 1918 White Sox are probably the least representative team here. They went into the season as the reigning world champs, but 1918 was a war year - the US entered World War I in late 1917. The 1918 season was shortened, ending at the beginning of September. Chicago played just 124 games, and probably should have gone about 63-61. Their actual record falls just six games shy of that, which isn't really all that unusual - you can generally expect at least one or two teams every year to fall that far short of their Pythagorean expectation. The Sox attempt to defend their title went off the rails when Joe Jackson left the team to work in a ship building plant. Pitchers Red Faber and Lefty Williams also missed large portions of the season. The White Sox bounced back to win the 1919 pennant, of course, but conspired with gamblers to deliberately lose the World Series.
The 1953 Giants were coming off a 92-62 season, good enough for second place in 1952. But Willie Mays would spend the entire 1953 season in the army (he had missed most of 1952 as well), veteran pitchers Sal Maglie, Jim Hearn, and Larry Jansen all had sub-par seasons, and 1952's rookie sensation (Hoyt Wilhelm, who went 15-3, 2.43) wasn't quite as brilliant (7-8, 3.04). So there was very legitimate fall-off here as well. But in 1954, both Maglie and Wilhelm bounced back smartly. The Giants also swindled the Braves out of Johnny Antonelli, and - best of all - Willie Mays returned with a vengeance. 1954 was the year he became Willie Mays. They won the pennant and swept the Indians in the World Series.
Two decades later, the Giants were in San Francisco. They went into 1972 as the defending NL West champs. But their three best hitters in 1971 included the by-now ancient Willie Mays, the ever more increasingly injury-prone Willie McCovey, as well as the a marvellous young star named Bobby Bonds. Early in 1972, the Giants traded the fading Mays back to New York. McCovey missed half the season and hit just .213. Bonds was merely good rather than outstanding. The Giants compounded these problems with the disastrous trade of Gaylord Perry (for Sam McDowell), and long-time ace Juan Marichal struggled to a 6-16 mark. They were legitimately a much weaker team - just not that much weaker. McCovey and Bonds both rebounded strongly in 1973, and the team's luck more than evened out. They went 88-74 and finished third.
In 1979, the Cardinals had gone 86-76 and had all kinds of impressive talent - Ted Simmons, MVP Keith Hernandez, the brilliant Garry Templeton. But after a 13-12 start, they went into a dreadful (5-22) slide, that included 9 one-run losses. It cost manager Ken Boyer his job. Whitey Herzog took over for Boyer as manager and as the team's GM as well. The White Rat spent a couple of months in the dugout assessing his talent, another month reviewing the organization, and then spent the winter remaking the team. He traded Simmons and his top starter Pete Vuckovich. He got rid of Bobby Bonds and Ken Reitz while he was at it. His 1981 team won the first half of the split season. He traded Garry Templeton for Ozzie Smith the following winter, and the Cardinals won the 1982 World Series.
The Pirates of the early 1980s have gone into baseball lore as Team Cocaine. It was an aging team, and in 1984 they started to clear away some of the older players - Dave Parker, Mike Easler. For no apparent reason their pitchers, quite out of the blue, had an outstanding year in 1984, giving up the fewest runs in the league. But alas! - their offense collapsed completely. If any team has fielded a worse outfield than Lee Mazzilli, Marvell Wynne, and Doug Frobel... I don't want to know about it. The Pirates played a ton of close, low-scoring games, and lost a bunch of them - they went 19-32 in one-run games. Unfortunately for them, their pitching wasn't really that good, and in 1985 the staff reverted to more typical form. Coupled with their puny offense, the 1985 Pirates lost 104 games.
The Rockies had gone 82-80 in 2000, before their bizarre 73-89 performance in 2001. Being the Rockies they scored 923 runs - being the Rockies they gave up 906. They had just two guys who could really hit - Todd Helton and Larry Walker - but those two could really hit, and Coors helped the rest of the lineup look adequate. Their pitching wasn't bad, once you take Coors into account, and their bullpen was pretty good. They were quite unlucky (12-24) in the close games, however. In 2002, they still had Helton and Walker, who were still great. But they surrounded those two with an appallingly bad supporting cast and lost 145 runs of offense. They earned their 73-89 mark in 2002.
It remains to be seen, of course, if the 2009 Blue Jays will become the 8th team in this strange club. I am quite confident they can lose enough games - anything less than 17-11 from now through the end of the season will do the job. I'm not so sure they can manage to break even on the scoreboard while they're at it.
On the one hand, it's slightly encouraging to note that three of these seven teams bounced back the following year to make it into the post-season. In a group whose defining characteristic is underachievement, that's a little surprising. It's not so encouraging that the two most recent teams - the Pirates and the Rockies - are caught at the very moment when they looked over the edge of the cliff. Before they fell right off.
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