WILL THE A's ESCAPE THE "BLUE GROUP"?

WE keep meaning to get back to the Expansionist Extravaganza, where bad teams get the chance to be good thanks to contextual sleight-of-hand; but we keep getting distracted by what one might call "the morbidly bad"...

...and that brings us back once again to the staggering Oakland A's, who after 50 games are tied for the worst start in major league history (10-40), arm in arm with the 1932 Boston Red Sox, who finished 43-111. The A's will be getting outsized attention from the media so long as they stay on pace to challenge the lowest seasonal winning percentage, so we can hope for their sake that they can pick up the pace (the organization has so much baggage at this point that saving them from one more soupçon of disgrace would provide a smidgeon of mercy for them). 

10-40 is not the worst 50-game span ever, though. There are many other 50-game spans in a season, and more yet if you overlap years (though that seems akin to A.J. Weberman going through Bob Dylan's garbage). When we look at the other 50-game spans within a single season (thanks to Forman et fils for expanding these tools...) we find that the worst such span occurred to another A's team, the 1916 Philadelphia A's, who had a stretch during that season where they went 4-46. 

BUT we don't want to dwell on the absolute worst, or keep kicking the A's while they're down. (The current team is being pilloried with variants of the "worst of" quotes, but none of those glib insiders actually saw the 1932 Red Sox or the 1916 A's, so they have no valid basis for comparison. No, all we can really do is contextualize.

And to do that, we've grabbed all the teams in history who had a 10-40 span during a single season and organized them into a master list (above right). There are 31 such teams since 1901 that make the list, including nine such teams in the past 25 years--and we're betting that you couldn't have named any of them prior to having seen the list. That's because the baseball media is fixated on beginnings and endings, and not nearly so much on the slog in between. (They wouldn't really be interested to know that the team here with the best overall final season record--the 1999 Cubs--were actually flirting with .500 in late July before literally falling off a cliff.)

What we can see from this list is that there's a common thread for the morbidly bad: they have extremely bad pitching. (Yes, you'll see the 1907 Cardinals with a 2.84 ERA--remember it was the Deadball Era, and the Cards scored 2.3 runs/game during their swan dive.) The aggregate ERA for the 31 teams--5.23--tells much of the tale; but most of these teams couldn't hit a lick, either. 

We separated the 31 teams into three groups and color-coded them. The "blue group" has in common the fact that they were unable to recover sufficiently to muster a .300 WPCT for the entire season. There are nine teams in the "blue group" (at least at present). 

The "green group" cleared the .300 hurdle, but could not get back above .350. There are fourteen teams in the "green group."

The "yellow group" exceeded .350, and three of the seven teams in this group managed to lose less than 100 games. 

If Ruiz can can get on-base enough, he might
actually lead the league in two categories...

Up at the top of the chart you'll see the 2023 A's, and their current team ERA of 6.93. That doesn't bode well for their ability to escape being the next member of the "blue group." (But beleaguered fans of the team might be distracted from the carnage by focusing on the exploits of rookie centerfielder Esteury Ruiz--that name is pronounced "S-tay-ur-ey"--who not only is leading the AL in steals, but is on track to be the first player since 1918 to have more hit-by-pitches than walks in a season. That doesn't say much for Ruiz' ability to take walks, of course, but somehow this extremely peculiar ultra-rarity feels like a perfect for the '23 team.)

SO mark it down now as  you'll see it--for the A's to escape "the blue group," they'll have to have a 39-73 record for the balance of the '23 season. That's a .348 WPCT: sounds like a piece of cake, right? They'll have to find some pitching, of course: the way their luck is running this year, that's a tall order--their best pitching prospect, Mason Miller, was shut down with an injury after just four starts. 

The A's bombed-out pitchers have been spared one indignity--they do not hold the record for the most home runs surrendered in a 50-game swoon. Their total of 85 is only second: the 1996 Detroit Tigers, playing in the heart of the offensive explosion, surrendered 88. But they're close enough that if they have another 10-40 run later in the year, they still have a shot at it. Hey, it's a world filled with cold comfort...stay tuned!