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Originally Published: September 24, 2004

Obscure baseball history, 2004 style

Making obscure history is better than making no history at all.

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By Jayson Stark
ESPN.com
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It's getting to be that time of the year. Time to assemble America's greatest historians. Bring 'em on -- Ken Burns, Doris Kearns Goodwin and, of course, all 9.8 trillion members of the Society for American Baseball Research.

So why is that, you ask? Because ladies and gentlemen, history is in the making.

It may not be the kind of history that will ever be the subject of a major ESPN motion picture. But hey, making obscure history is better than making no history at all. So as another sensational season roars toward the finish line, we invite you to follow these historic, if not necessarily noble, pursuits.

Second-half blues
It seems hard to believe now. But our panel of historians assures us that as recently as the All-Star break, the Brewers, Mets and Reds all had winning records.

In fact, they all had better records than the Astros. And the Brewers (45-41) and Reds (47-41) had better records than the Braves. And the Reds even had as many wins as the Cubs, Angels or Padres. You could look it up.

But as you might have noticed, those three teams' second halves haven't quite been identical to their first halves. Through Thursday, the Brewers were 18-47 (.277 winning percentage) since the break. The Mets were 23-43 (.348). And the Reds were 22-41 (.349).

That, friends, is not just lousy baseball. It has a chance to be historically lousy baseball, according to the Elias Sports Bureau and the research wizards at ESPN.

Since the invention of All-Star breaks, only two previous teams -- Boomer Scott's 1975 Brewers (22-52, .297) and Felipe Lira's 1995 Tigers (23-51, .311) -- ever had a winning record at the break and then lost more than two-thirds of their games the rest of the way. So it's pretty darned amazing that three teams could do that just this year.

But the team in the most serious historic jeopardy is that trusty Brew Crew. If the Brewers keep up that .277 second-half winning percentage, they're going to go down in history as the owners of the worst second-half record of all time by a team that had a winning first half.

The current record-holders are the '75 Brewers. But the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Drew Olson reports that the only way those '75 Brewers could hang onto their throne would be if this Brewers team managed to go 5-5 in its final 10 games.

That may sound doable on the surface. Except that seven of those last 10 were against the Cardinals and Astros. So somewhere, we have a feeling, Boomer Scott is about to be one grateful former Brewer.

Unit, meet Lefty
It was 32 years ago, back in 1972, that Steve Carlton made all kinds of history -- for a truly horrendous Phillies team that turned into the 1899 Cleveland Spiders on all those days he didn't pitch. Carlton won 27 games that year. The other 15 guys who threw a pitch combined to win exactly 32.

In the annals of pitching brilliance for hideous teams, nobody will ever beat Carlton's year. But Randy Johnson is giving it a shot.

Barring a miraculous finish, the Unit's Diamondbacks are almost certainly going to lose 110 games this year. That isn't easy under any circumstances, considering that three of the five National League teams to do it in the last half-century -- the '62 Mets, '69 Padres and '69 Expos -- didn't even exist the year before. The other two were the '63 and '65 Mets, who were just continuing a great tradition of Metsian awfulness.

But to lose 110 games when you have a pitcher on the payroll as dominating as Randy Johnson is an achievement of astounding proportions.

Johnson has won 14 games for this team, and has two starts remaining. If he wins one more, these Diamondbacks will become only the second team in history to lose 110 games despite having a 15-game winner on its staff.

The other, according to the East Valley Tribune's Ed Price, was the abominable 1916 A's (36-117), who got a 15-24 season out of their ace, Bullet Joe Bush.

But no team has ever lost 110 games despite the presence of a pitcher who led the league in strikeouts. Or led the league in opponents' batting average. And the Unit is No. 1 in both departments at the moment.

Jake Peavy's sudden appearance on the leader board means Johnson won't wind up winning the ERA title, too. But for the record, no 110-loss team ever had an ERA champ on the premises, either.

By the way, those expanded September rosters might be saving the Unit and his team from another spectacular distinction, too.

The Diamondbacks have ripped through 24 pitchers this year. And if it weren't for two they just imported -- the invaluable Chad Durbin (claimed on waivers) and Mike Gosling (called up last week) -- none of them would have a winning record. (Not even Johnson, who just fell to 14-14.)

No team has made it through a whole season without having even one pitcher nudge his record over Mount .500 since Dave Freisleben and the 1979 Blue Jays. So we advise this team to lock Gosling and Durbin in the bullpen men's room or something and not let them out till about Halloween.

This team has already guaranteed itself -- and its ace -- its place in history. It doesn't need to go needlessly risking any more of it.

It's a Dunn deal
When Adam Dunn hits a baseball, astonishing things happen. Often, those baseballs don't just leave the park. They practically leave the county.

But the one glitch in Dunn's game is that, as you may have noticed, those baseballs don't exactly leave the park every time up there, either. More likely, they don't even leave the batter's box.

In fact, Dunn is about to enter rarified territory in producing balls that never leave the batter's box.

If he keeps not hitting baseballs at his current clip, he is going to strike out 191 times this year. Which would allow him to break the one Bonds-family record nobody wants to break (i.e., Bobby Bonds' all-time whiffing mark of 189, set in 1970).

But that's not all. At this rate, Dunn would also walk 114 times this year. That isn't a record. But it would propel Dunn into one of history's most exclusive clubs -- the 300-Times Not Hitting The Ball Club.

In 129 major-league seasons, only one man has ever had 300 trips to the plate in one year that resulted in nothing but walks and strikeouts. That man was Mark McGwire, who did it in a year (1998) when people were mysteriously focusing on another column in his stat sheet.

But when he wasn't hitting 70 homers that year, McGwire was rolling up 155 punchouts and 162 walks -- for a grand total of 317 trips without the ball leaving the box. No one else has even approached that volume of whole-lotta-nothing at-bats.

However, there have been some dramatic near-misses of the 300 Club -- most notably by Jim Thome (298) in 1999 and by Dunn himself in 2002 (also 298). And now Dunn is poised to cross that threshold.

At least if anyone asks afterward how his season went, he can always say it was a year that even a prestigious Web site like ESPN.com compared to McGwire's 1998 season -- as long as he then follows up with something like: "How 'bout them Bengals?"

May day
Last September, when Mike Maroth was closing in on 20 losses, he got more attention than Britney Spears. Of course, that was more Brian Kingman's fault than Maroth's.

Maybe if it hadn't been more than two decades years since Kingman had lost 20 for the 1980 Oakland A's & and maybe if somebody had just lost 20 games once since then & and maybe if Kingman hadn't turned himself into a human quippage machine in his quest to try to hang onto his fabulous claim to fame & then maybe Maroth would have found it a whole lot quieter on the 20-loss trail.

Instead, it was pure insanity. Everyone from "Outside The Lines" to the Wall Street Journal covered his "pursuit" of 20 losses. And when he finally lost 20, SportsCenter even went out to the yard live for Kingman's reaction.

But at least, by losing 20, Maroth accomplished one thing: He cleared the way for 20-loss seasons to once again just blend into the baseball landscape. We now have clear-cut proof of that, in fact. And we can sum up that proof in two words:

Darrell May.

This month, May lost his 16th game for the Royals. And then his 17th. And then his 18th. And nobody seemed to care. Not even Brian Kingman. He barely even followed May's quest, he said, because what did it matter. He wasn't The Last of the 20-Game Losers anymore.

"It was like having two baseball careers," Kingman reported this week. "The first one, I was an active player, and the second one, I was the reigning 20-game loser. The first one was too short, and the second one didn't pay enough."

Well, the big news, if anyone still is interested, is that Darrell May is not going to lose 20 this year. He earned a no-decision in his start Wednesday against Tampa Bay. So he's stuck on 18 losses, with only one start to go.

But that doesn't mean his historic pursuits are over for the year. May has a shot at doing something only one or two other pitchers have done in the era of the five-man rotation -- give up well over 100 extra-base hits in one season.

He already has reached the highly uncoveted century mark, serving up 56 doubles, 35 homers and nine triples. So he's well on his way. If he gives up just two more extra-base hits of any size, shape or flavor in his final start, he'll rank No. 3 in the last quarter-century, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.

If he reaches 102, only Rick Helling (116 in 2001) and Jose Lima (108) will have given up more since the five-man rotation went universal.

But we're betting you won't find Helling showing up at May's next start to see if his record survives. Unlike Kingman, who can't figure out why May doesn't lobby for one extra start.

"It seems a shame to get all they way to 19 and not be able to make it to 20, which is much more distinguishing," Kingman said. "Ah, times are changing. And losing just ain't what it use to be."

Jayson Stark is a senior writer for ESPN.com.