Baseball

Yesterday was Opening Day in the Major Leagues. It should be a national holiday! In my post yesterday, I unveiled a new statistic for showing hitting performance, TOP. It combines the ability to get on base, the ability to hit for power, and the ability to steal bases.

Today, I’m going to use the same statistic for pitching. Fortunately, Baseball Reference provides a batting against stat when you look at pitching. What is this? It shows the statistics for pitchers using the normal batting stats such as hits, doubles, triples, homeruns, walks, strikeouts, stolen bases, caught stealing, etc. With this, you can see the batting average, on base percentage, slugging average each pitcher allowed. So it also works for TOP!

Opening Day is here! Well, sort of. The Dodgers and Cubs played a two game series two weeks ago in Japan. That will never make sense to me. I don’t have a problem with them playing over there. I just have a problem with them playing there two weeks before the season begins.

Speaking of the Dodgers, they are definitely the team to beat. They have something like 18 starting pitchers and 20 All-Star calibur fielders. In other words, they are loaded. They have the money. And they’re not afraid to spend it. Seems like some other owners out there should spend more money. MLB doesn’t need a salary max cap. It needs a salary min cap.

The 2024 Major League Baseball season just ended and the Chicago White Sox had a historically awful season. But was it as bad as the 1962 New York Mets? Or the 2003 Detroit Tigers? Or the 2023 Oakland A’s? Let’s find out.

I went back to the beginning of the expansion era in 1961 and looked at all the teams that were really bad. The 1962 - 1965 New York Mets have the worst four year stretch in baseball history. The most games they won in that stretch was 53 in 1964. The Houston Astros of 2011 - 2013 rivaled those Mets teams, winning 56 games in 2011 and actually got worse each of the next two seasons. The 1988 Baltimore Orioles started the season 0-18 and finished with a dismal 54-107 record. But that’s not even their worst team. The 2018 Baltimore Orioles went 47-115.

The 2024 regular season has come to a close. The playoffs have started as I’m writing this. I’ve updated my final regular season rankings for the 2024 season.

2024 MLB Rankings

Seasons