May 3, 1962 was a Thursday; the Dodgers had an off-day to travel to Pittsburgh. The Pirates, however, were still in San Francisco, where they were valiantly trying to put a stop to the Giants' winning streak, which had reached eight games.
In the bottom of the eighth, however, Dick Groat bobbled a grounder by fellow shortstop Jose Pagan to start the inning, and it led to doom for the Pirates. Jim Davenport singled Pagan to third, and after Sanford popped out, Chuck Hiller singled, breaking the tie.
Willie Mays, now fully engaged in his hot streak, greeted Pirates' closer Roy Face with a double, scoring two to make it 7-4. Willie would score one out later, on a single by Orlando Cepeda (the sixteenth hit of the day for the Giants). Sanford had a 1-2-3 ninth, and the Giants win streak was now nine. Final score: Giants 8, Pirates 4.
SEASON RECORDS: SF 18-5, STL 14-4, PIT 13-8, LAD 14-9, PHI 9-9, CIN 9-11, MIL 8-12, HOU 7-11, NYM 3-14, CHC 5-17
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That 5-17 record for the '62 Cubs jolts us back to the present day, where a potentially historic meltdown is occurring in another Midwestern city. After 22 games in '22, the Cincinnati Reds have a record of 3-19, and there is virtually no hard luck found in that record. For purposes of comparison, dozens of teams have started out with the same 5-17 mark that the '62 Cubs posted--two other teams in that same year (the Mets and the Senators) also started out with that record. All of them lost 100+ games.
The '22 Reds were matched in their 3-19 start only by the 2003 Tigers, the 1992 Royals and the 1936 St. Louis Browns. The only team to have a worse start than these four: the 1988 Orioles, who famously lost their first 21 games that year and with game #22 finally broke that streak. Of this group, only the Royals returned to mediocrity: the Orioles lost 107 games, the Tigers 119, and the Browns finished 57-95.
So do the Reds have a chance to get underneath the worst seasonal won-loss records of all time (1916 Philadelphia A's, 1935 Boston Braves, '62 Mets)? Unfortunately, the answer seems to be: yes. As we always say at this point--stay tuned. But fasten your seat belts...kabump bump bump.
AND speaking of kabump-bump-bump, the bumptious Joe P. is at it again, belatedly whining about the low BA in baseball (we told you this was coming nearly a decade ago, Joe--it's not our fault if you've been raking in the bucks with your increasingly overwrought prose instead of paying attention when it mattered). Joe was looking for a silver lining in one of his recent thought puddles, grabbing onto a single day's offensive summary that actually had an aggregate BA over .250 as a sign that "Tiepolo pink" was going to burst forth over the troubled skies and afford all of the "launch angle" heterodoxics a collective escape path.
Last year, when batting average remained in the .230s until mid-June, there was much handwringing in the mainstream press, while curmudgeons like Bill James and "roll out the barrel" authoritarians (no names, for the sake of legal considerations but we remind you that we named a "dessert" after him...) pointed to the dead-on-historical-average runs-per-game value as a way of dismissing the matter out of hand. By the end of the year, the BA had floated up to .244, a fact which muzzled most of the overly concerned onlookers.
This year, however, the problem began to look more serious--kind of like a stagnant deflation, if you will--with homers and runs/game both down. Humidors, deadened baseballs, and an insidious ablation of liquid kryptonite (!) were all pointed to as signs that the apocalypse of 1968 had returned to plague us (of course, 1968, for all its tumult, actually looks pretty good in comparison to the present day).
But rather than deal with Joe's speculative, pulled-from-his-rear-end blather, or from the bleatings of his bemildewed brethren, we decided to grab some historical context. Just what happens to batting average over the course of a season? How often does it wind up higher at the end of the year than it is in the first month, and by how much? Questions like this often lead to inconvenient answers, but that's never stopped us.
So we looked into it, and the data is reflected in another "time-grid chart"™(at right). Positive values indicate that the year-end MLB BA was higher than the April BA. As you might expect, positive values dominate: 106 of the 120 data points here are positive (just under 90%).
What you need to know from the outset, however is that the first 50-60 years of the data--shown in the first 5-6 rows--is essentially random. That's because April games were much more scarce in the now-distant past. It wasn't until the late 1950s that teams began to regularly play more than 15 games in April. The values we see in those early years can clearly be attributed to fluctuations due to sample size.
What the more recent years tell us is that there's still a noticeable pattern of lower BAs in April, but the range of difference has narrowed. Interestingly, however, that level of difference has increased here in the "launch angle era," as a look at the numbers for 2017-21 will demonstrate. 2021's uptick from April to the end of the season was the second highest such difference since baseball's first expansion in 1961.
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| Colorized data points--1968 (black), 2021 (red), 1962 (yellow). White data points are years where April BA is higher than season BA. |
Which was why we suggested recently that BA in '22 will probably get back to .240. That's probably the "Maginot Line" for those who wish to tacitly defend baseball's most recent "errand into the wilderness" even as they survey the damage their embrace of "launch angle" has created. (After all, let's remember that the Maginot Line ultimately failed.) If it doesn't get there, one can expect a lot more handwringing, and an increase (if that's actually possible) of CYA (and that's not the acronym for the Cy Young Award, folks...) behavior from Joe P. and his ilk.
Of course, the stat that ultimately matters is runs/game, and when we have another break in the action with respect to 1962 we'll put together a time grid for it similar to what you've seen for batting average. Hot weather clearly changes things--the questions in '22 will have to do with just how much difference deadened balls and humidors will make to HR levels and overall hit levels when temperatures begin to exceed 80 degrees.
In the meantime, sit tight and watch those stricken Reds from the corner of your eye...
