The Least Lucky Team Of All Time
Most of you are probably familiar with Bill James’ Pythagorean record.
Wikipedia has a pretty good explanation of how this works. Without getting into the math, if you’ve got a team’s runs scored and runs allowed, the ratio between the two totals should give you an idea of how much “luck” a team had.
You’d define “luck” in this sense by looking at whether their overall won-lost total matches up with what the theorem gives you. Lucky teams wind up doing well in close games, winning more than you’d expect. Unlucky teams wind up doing poorly in close games, losing more than you’d expect.
I wondered which team was the least lucky team since 1901. And, fortunately for me, I came across this Reddit thread.
The thread is a little bit dated, but it’s still pretty useful. Somebody has apparently calculated this in a spreadsheet, and came up with this list of unlucky teams:
Now, if you compare this with Baseball Refernece, you’ll notice some discrepancies. Baseball Reference uses 1.83 as the exponent for the theorem, not 2. I’m guessing this anonymous poster used 2. It doesn’t matter to me, though. The 1905 Cubs are certainly an interesting team.
This is practically the same team that set the record for most wins in a season in 1906. And yet the Cubs just weren’t with it at all in 1905. In fact, they never really climbed out of third place.
Part of Chicago’s problem was its inability to beat the Giants:
It’s not that the Cubs played particularly poorly on May 13th at the Polo Grounds. They just had some bad luck, giving up a run on an error in the first inning and only managing 3 base hits.
They had trouble against lesser competition, too:
Now, there were occasionally flashes of offensive brilliance.
But, of course, this leads you to wonder how impressive it really is if you can beat up on the Reds when they’re down. The Cubs were up 5-0 after 3 innings, after all. Does scoring an additional 13 runs in a laughter really mean that the team was unlucky in its other games?
And besides — Chicago wasn’t always unlucky in 1905. Take this game, for example:
But maybe the whole forgettable season was best summed up by this September 11th doubleheader:
By the way — the untold story behind this doubleheader must have really been interesting. The doubleheader was scheduled to start at 2 PM, which ordinarily would have been more than enough time for two games that were played so quickly:
However, there was rain in the forecast:
And it seems that the two teams were supposed to play a doubleheader the game before. The park was actually too wet for baseball, but well over 4,000 fans turned up, and so they decided to get one in before the overcast weather made it too dark to see:
Anyway, the poor weather and the fact that there was no other open date available for the doubleheader likely explains that abbreviated 12-0 second game on September 11.
By the way — Baseball Reference indicates that the second game of the doubleheader was a “makeup” game for a game scheduled on September 12th, which it claims was “rained out.” This makes no sense, of course. If it were true, it would be the first time I’m aware of that a game was rained out the day before it was supposed to start.
All in all, we should ask ourselves just how much of the 1905 Cubs futility was “bad luck” and how much of it was beating up on bad pitching.
Great read Daniel and reading the box scores and stories associated with those 1905 games was also very cool and interesting. Now I will have to write about Cy Seymour!