THE "EXPANSIONIST EXTRAVAGANA"/1: THE SET-UP

Ariel meets Bogie in..."Another Guy's Dream."
From the "Necronexic Noir" series...

SO...what do we do around here when we're not ripping someone a new one, or scouring through the stats that even the SDCNs ignore? (And how many of you recognize that long-ago/far-away acronym?)

Of course, the answer is that we do a lot of things, and some of you know all about them, while others simply continue to avert their eyes, looking for a more congenial train wreck. (If we were half our age, we'd simply leave you guys hanging indefinitely while we took a crack at chasing down the eminently wooable Ariel Rosario, but some free spirits are simply destined to be free...)

ALL foreplay aside, we've been known to mess around with sim baseball when we're not overly distracted by what used to be called "pulchritude." And why not: it keeps us off the streets...but that public service aside, there is much to be gleaned, informative and otherwise, from some semi-systematic simulation (above and beyond some serial, simultaneous masochism, that is). The stories we could tell...

...but we'll confine ourselves to just one for now. It's a doozy, howevah. How it evolved is lost in a shroud, or trapped in an almost-empty gin bottle, or spattered on the window like a murdered moth. 

BLAME it on March madness....except it actually commenced before the dribbling maniacs took over the airwaves. For some reason the NCAA bracketing thing had attached itself to the remnants of our brain like a clothes hanger inserted into each ear lobe to take advantage of the limitless space within that temptingly adjacent skull...

So, as we wore our shirt over our head, and with a stiff mid-winter breeze blowing like Illinois Jacquet at three AM in a jacked-up juke joint, it came to us: let's get down with badness. Not the kind that conveys a sense of imperturbability amidst peril, mind you...but literal, everyday, corn-fed, bottom-of-the-barrel incompetence. 

And...thus: an NCAA-style tourney amongst some of the worst teams in baseball history--the first-year expansion clubs who took it on the chin so that the game could evolve into a mega-industry with TV deals larger than the GDPs of half the countries in the world (and, of course, "ghost runners"--the skeleton key to all post-Keynesian economic theory). 

So, to wax nostalgic (and what is baseball but a waxy form of nostalgia?), we were stoked (man!) by such a heterodox notion. And with the help of our friends Higgins and Magnum (no, not those two--ours are a couple of nom de plume collaborators who are still willing to humor us...) we started to set up a protracted battle even more epic than the current weekend series between the winsomely woeful Oakland A's and the morbidly midwest Kansas City Royals. 

BUT there was a hitch. (A hitch without a McGuffin, even.) As we got to counting on our left toe after using both hands, we realized that there are only fourteen expansion clubs (even though there are, of course, several metric tons worth of teams who've played like an expansion club). We needed sixteen teams to construct an NCAA-style "bracket" that could lead us to an ersatz champion...the best of the worst. 

And then it came to us: who better to join the 1961 Senators and Angels, the 1962 Mets and Colt .45s (later the Astros), the 1969 Royals, Pilots (now Brewers), Padres and Expos (now Nationals), the 1977 Blue Jays and Mariners, the 1993 Rockies and Marlins, and the 1998 (Devil) Rays and Diamondbacks than the two marquee franchises in baseball history? 

Yes, even the Yankees and the Dodgers have had a few seasons in which they approximated the won-loss record of a first-year expansion team. Their presence in this wacky competition was guaranteed to add an essential tension to the proceedings--namely, would they simply run through the competition like soft butter and wind up facing each other in the final 162-game showdown. (Wouldn't that be just ghastly?)

That's right, it's a 162-game showdown. Remember what we said earlier about "serial, simultaneous masochism": we set out to play full seasons' worth of competition between these teams, giving those Mets a chance to play someone bad enough for long enough that they might actually wind up with less than 100 losses (for those who've forgotten, the '62 incarnation of the Mets lost 120 games, and did so pretty much without breaking a sweat). 

To set it up, however, we had to find a way to create seedings for the teams in a manner analogous to what's done for March madness. And that's what you see in the figure (above at left), where we captured the salient details in first-year expansion clubs and the Yankee/Dodger "fall-down-go-boom" seasons. We took each team's actual WPCT and averaged it against their Pythagorean Win Percentage (PWP), using that average (in the column marked AW) to create a seeding for the tournament. 

AND it came to pass in those days that it became the "Expansionist Extravaganza", aka "The Feckless Fourteen Plus Two" (or...anything else you can come up with in the next ten seconds). As you can see, the 1992 Dodgers and 1990 Yankees are the #3 and #4 seeds in the tournament, and as we devised the tournament seeding chart (at right), it's clear that there was a clear and present danger the two "Tiffany franchise" ringers might end up meeting for all the marbles (OK, some of the marbles--no one here is playing with a full set of marbles!)

That's where we're going to leave things right now, with the eight first-round showdowns ready to roll. (Truth told, they've already rolled: yes, that's right...we're just going to drag this out for as long as we can.) But play along with us: check out the teams at the bb-ref pages linked above, and familiarize yourself with their preternaturally overmatched personnel. Try to envision which two teams will meet in that dark orange box in order to claim the title of "best of the worst." And try to figure out what player or players will emerge as the "superstars" of this beleaguered league of the woeful countenance, this round-robin of wretchedness, this...

Aw, hell--stay tuned!