60 YEARS AGO/97: DON'T GET TOO CLOSE!

 Oddly enough, the San Francisco Giants did not fare especially well in close games against bad teams (defined as those with less than a .500 WPCT) during the 1962 season. All teams (counting both the AL and the NL, and including bad teams with the good teams) had a .567 WPCT against bad teams in close games (defined as games decided by two runs or less).

But in the '62 NL, those numbers were significantly different. Why is this? Because there were only three bad teams in the league that year--the two first-year expansion clubs and the Chicago Cubs. These were all in the "very bad" category of such teams--not the 79-83 teams or even the 70-92 teams, but teams that either came close to 100 losses or exceeded it. (Remember the quiz about how many years are there where two or more teams in the same league lose 100+ games? We still haven't done the research on that, but one of those incidences can be found in the 1962 NL.)

So the NL totals have less games than the AL (fewer bad teams, few games against bad teams...) and because of that concentration of badness, the good teams tend to do better--in some cases a lot better. (And then again a team like the '62 Phillies, technically a "good team" at 81-80, is able to win a lot of games--and in this case, a lot of close games--against the bad teams and skew the numbers a bit.)

Skew or not, the NL played .623 baseball against bad teams in close games (157-95). The Giants (to get back to where we once belonged...) played only .542 ball in those games against those kind of teams (13-11, as you can see in the table at right). The Dodgers by contrast, played .783 ball in such games (18-5).

Of course, in games where the score was decided by three runs or more, the Giants did quite well (24-6). But so did the Dodgers (24-7). The league's record against bad teams in non-close games was .704--again, higher than usual because of the smaller quantity but greater concentration of bad teams in the league.

Overall against bad teams, the Dodgers were 42-12, the Giants 37-17. That doesn't look like so much of a difference--but note that it's the close games where all of the difference lies. The Dodgers beat their Pythagorean Win Percentage (PWP) by five games because they won those extra close games; the Giants hit their PWP pretty much on the mark...because they did not. 

ON this night in Houston, though, the Giants pulled out a close one against the Colts, and their starting pitcher Billy O'Dell made a subtle difference that gave them the margin of victory. After the two teams had traded runs in the first, O'Dell came to the plate in the top of the second with two out and Felipe Alou on first. Houston starter Jim Golden threw a high strike that Billy tomahawked past him up the middle and through into center field, moving Alou to second. Chuck Hiller followed with another single that scored Alou, a run that more often that not in such a situation just doesn't come to pass (because pitchers are much weaker hitters than position players...so weak, in fact...hmm, let's just leave that where it lays, shall we?). 

The extra run made it all happen because the teams would then trade single runs again later in the game (Alou tripled and scored on Tom Haller's base hit; Stu Miller, pitching in the eighth after Don Larsen had bailed out O'Dell in the previous frame, served up a homer to Bob Aspromonte). But Stu settled down from there, bringing home the often-elusive close win over the downtrodden. Final score: Giants 3, Colts 2.

IN St. Louis, Don Drysdale had a shutout going until Stan Musial (hitting .350 on the year at age 41) hit a two-run homer in the sixth, tying the game at 2-2; but LA knocked Ray Washburn out of the game with three straight hits in the top of the seventh, scoring two runs (one of them on Tommy Davis' 103rd RBI). And Maury Wills hit his 6th (and last) homer of the season in the ninth off a clearly frazzled Don Ferrarese (a lefty nicknamed "Midget" who was shorter than Dick Littlefield but traded almost as often). Drysdale's record improved to 18-4 as he went seven innings, bailed out by the law firm of Perranoski and Roebuck. Final score: Dodgers 5, Cards 2.

AT Crosley Field, the Pirates got two homers from catcher Smoky Burgess (who was, in fact, shorter than Ferrarese the midget) but their pitching meltdown continued as Cincinnati pounded out 21 hits (4-for-4 from Frank Robinson), making the Bucs walk the plank for the third straight game. Final score: Reds 13, Pirates 6.

SEASON RECORDS: LAD 68-35, SFG 67-36, PIT 60-40, CIN 57-41