ESPN.com - Tigers following similar path as the '62 Mets

ESPN.com: Baseball

Thursday, August 14, 2003
Updated: August 20, 11:36 AM ET
Tigers following similar path as the '62 Mets

By Nate Silver
Special to ESPN.com

I'm sick and tired of this New York media bias. Why is it that the 1962 Mets are always idolized as the Worst Team in Baseball History? Sure, that Mets team lost 120 games, the modern day record, stinking up the Polo Grounds like -- well, like Seabiscuit and a few of his buddies were playing polo there in between innings.

But what about all the other teams that tried their best to fail? What of the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics, who lost 117 times in just 153 tries? Shouldn't the Mets' record get an asterisk? How quickly we forget the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, who after compiling a 20-134 record in 1899, packed up their tents and left the game for good? The 1969 San Diego Padres? The 1935 Boston Braves, a team so bad that even Babe Ruth couldn't help them out? The Devil Rays?


	The Tigers have already broken new ground.

Excuse me if I'm getting a little bit testy here. I grew up in Michigan back when Alan Trammell was the league's most underrated player, not its most overtaxed manager. My boyhood team -- the Detroit Tigers -- is now at risk of joining that elite group of losers. It has been a rough decade in Motown: this will be the Tigers' 10th straight losing season. The Tigers lost 106 games last season, and 109 in 1996. The Bengals have been out of the spotlight longer than the Bangles.

But this season could be something special. The Tigers are on pace to seriously challenge the Mets' landmark total. They've scored 118 fewer runs than the next worst team in the American League, and rank last in the league in batting average, slugging percentage, on-base percentage, times caught stealing, fielding percentage, and pitcher strikeouts.

Two of their pitchers are serious threats to become 20-game losers. The Tigers have been equal opportunity losers. Pick just about any measure of indistinction, and the Tigers are right there at the bottom.

(Well, not quite. The Tigers have grounded into fewer double plays than anyone else in the AL. Then again, it's hard to ground into a DP when there's never anyone on base.)

In the meantime, the "race" between the Tigers and the 1962 Mets is likely to go right down to the wire. The wins and losses will resolve themselves, so in the meantime, let's look at some other measures of team quality. Starting with the basics:

Runs scored per game: Mets 3.86 (83 percent of park-adjusted league average), Tigers 3.35 (70 percent of park-adjusted league average).

Even though the Polo Grounds was a good hitters' park, the Mets didn't score a lot of runs. But the Tigers' offense has been truly abominable.

A simple way to account for the quality of a team's offense is to compare their runs scored per game to the league average. We'll add just a couple of wrinkles to that. First, we'll adjust each team's runs total for park effects, which helps the Tigers out a little bit. Second, we'll take the team's own runs scored figure out of the equation when calculating the league average -- it's not fair to let a bad team help itself out by dragging down the mean. What follows is a list of the worst offenses since 1901; teams are ranked by their ratio of runs scored to the adjusted league average.

Worst offenses in baseball history
Year	Team	Runs*	League*	Ratio*
1942	Phillies	2.75	4.06	67.6%
1932	Red Sox	3.79	5.44	69.7%
1981	Blue Jays	2.93	4.16	70.4%
1909	Braves	2.67	3.80	70.4%
1902	Giants	2.91	4.13	70.5%
2003	Tigers	3.50	4.96	70.5%
1920	Athletics	3.54	4.93	71.8%
1910	Braves	3.00	4.18	71.8%
1905	Braves	3.06	4.26	71.9%
1909	Senators	2.56	3.56	71.9%
1998	Devil Rays	3.68	5.11	72.0%

* Park-adjusted runs per game

The Tigers have scored around 30 percent fewer runs than an average team would in their ballpark. That places them right in the running with the worst offenses of all time. A particularly bad last six weeks, and they'll have a chance to catch the '32 Red Sox for second.

The team with the poorest offense of all -- the 1942 Phillies, deserve a mention in any discussion of the worst teams ever. You might be inclined to think the Phillies were some kind of wartime fluke, but they have no such excuse. Most of their regulars hadn't gone into the service yet, and 1942 marked the fifth season in a row they finished with at least 103 losses. The team was so bad they attempted to disguise their identity by temporarily changing their nickname to the Philadelphia Blue Jays, apparently hoping their fans would confuse them with an All American Girls Professional Baseball League club.

Runs allowed per game: Mets 5.89 (127 percent of park-adjusted league average), Tigers 5.25 (114 percent of park-adjusted league average)

The Mets take the cake in terms of poor pitching and defense. Their struggles resulted from a tragic combination of pitchers that didn't strike anybody out, resulting in a lot of balls in play, and a downright awful defense. The Mets' fielding percentage was .967, and they allowed 128 unearned runs; both figures are among the worst in the past 50 years. Even when they didn't drop the ball, the Mets weren't very likely to catch it. Their primary shortstop, Elio Chacon, was a converted second baseman. Their Opening Day center fielder was Richie Ashburn, a fine fielder in his prime, but not at age 35 in his last big-league season.

Pythagenport winning percentage: Mets .304, Tigers .293.

It's a matter of some debate whether it's better to be lucky or good. There's no such rivalry between unlucky and bad, and the Tigers and Mets have each been a lot of both.

Using a variation of the Pythagorean formula developed by my colleague Clay Davenport, we can evaluate a team's quality based on its runs scored and runs allowed. The result, which we've dubbed Pythagenport winning percentage, tells us what a team's "true" record should be in the absence of luck.

The Mets' Pythagenport winning percentage was .304. That translates into a record of 49-111, still perfectly awful, but nine games better than their actual mark. Pythagenport records are generally very good predictors of a team's actual wins and losses, and a difference of that magnitude is highly unusual.

The Tigers have been a little bit unlucky, too, with a Pythagenport record three games better than their official mark, but that's still enough to rank them among the worst teams ever:

Worst Pythagenport teams since 1901
Year	Team	RS	RA	Pyth	W-L*
1942	Phillies	394	706	.266	43-119
1916	Athletics	447	776	.270	44-118
1904	Senators	437	743	.282	46-116
1915	Athletics	545	888	.283	46-116
1932	Red Sox	566	915	.284	46-116
1909	Senators	380	656	.285	46-116
1954	Athletics	542	875	.288	47-115
1919	Athletics	457	742	.290	47-115
2003	Tigers	392	630	.292	47-115
1910	Browns	451	743	.293	47-115

* W-L records are projected over 162 games

There are our friends, the 1942 Phillies, back on the bottom again. Five of the 10 worst teams, in fact, were stationed in Philadelphia -- is it any wonder that Philly fans are notorious for holding a grudge? But since the Athletics moved to Kansas City in 1955, the Tigers have easily the worst Pythagenport record, worse even than the '62 Mets.

Average team age: Mets 27.9 (hitters 29.1, pitchers 26.7), Tigers 26.4 (hitters 27.3, pitchers 25.5).

Weighting based on playing time (innings pitched for pitchers, and plate appearances for position players), we can come up with an average age for each team. To their credit, while the Tigers are struggling, they're also putting one of the youngest teams in the league out on the field. Better yet, they've managed to reduce their team's age substantially in just a single season -- last year, when overpaid veterans like Damion Easley and Craig Paquette were getting a lot of playing time, the Tigers' average team age was over 28. The Tigers have realized there's no benefit to playing someone like Easley or Dean Palmer, regardless of how much they have left on their contract, when a younger player could use the experience.

The Mets, by contrast, were an expansion team, and without an established farm system to draw from, put a motley crew of washed-up veterans on the field. Here is the Mets' Opening Day lineup in 1962, along with the number of seasons that each man played after the end of that year ("seasons" are figured as games played divided by 162).

Mets inaugural lineup, April 11, 1962
1. Richie Ashburn, CF -- 0
2. Felix Mantilla, SS -- 2.7
3. Charlie Neal, 2B -- 0.7
4. Frank Thomas, LF -- 1.9
5. Gus Bell, RF -- 0
6. Gil Hodges, 1B-- 0.1
7. Don Zimmer, 3B -- 2
8. Hobie Landrith, C -- 0.3
Average -- 1.0

The eight position players in the Mets' Opening Day lineup combined to play fewer than eight more seasons in the big leagues after the year was out; Carlos Pena has a pretty good chance to reach that total all by himself. Not only were the Mets awful, but they also had virtually nothing to build around. Most of their players were out of the big leagues within another season or two. While the Tigers -- it pains me to say -- might be the lesser of the two clubs in the seasons in question, they're also a step-and-a-half ahead in the rebuilding process.

Years until next World Series title: Mets 7, Tigers ??.

Indeed, while the Mets had to start from scratch, it took them only seven years to win their first World Series. The Miracle Mets of 1969 were one of the youngest champions in history, with an average age of just 26. Virtually all of their players were homegrown, or acquired cheaply from other organizations early in their careers.

Contrary to their nickname, the Mets' rise to prominence was no miracle, but rather the result of solid organizational planning: commitment to building a farm system, a willingness to discard players that weren't helping the cause, and an uncanny ability to market the team to the New York faithful. In 1964, the Mets lost 109 games, but outdrew the Yankees -- who won the pennant that year -- by more than 400,000 fans.

Should Tigers fans start reserving suites near Comerica Park for October, 2010? Probably not, but the Tigers are already doing a lot of those same things right, discarding the stiffs they don't need, working the waiver wires actively, and keeping ticket prices at Comerica relatively sane. Rebuilding won't happen overnight, but the standard that the Mets set -- seven seasons -- is an eternity in baseball.

In the meantime, Tram, could you get the guys to eke out a couple of extra losses? We Midwesterners need some attention sometimes.