An Interesting Side Project

Those of you who’ve read this blog for a long time know that in addition to my addiction to the Civil War, I am an ice hockey, NFL football, and baseball nut. Having grown up in the Philadelphia suburbs, I am well acquainted with the concept of losing. During my childhood, both the Eagles and the Phillies were atrocious. And then there was the 1973 Philadelphia 76’ers, who posted a 9-73 record, the worst record ever in the history of professional sports.

As a child, one of my very favorite books was the 1974 edition of The Baseball Encyclopedia. I would spend hours and hours going through that book reading statistics and learning about long-gone players that I had never heard of previously. In the process, I learned about some great teams and great players, but I also learned about some atrocious teams, too. With as bad as the Phillies were–in 1972, they were 54-108–I came to embrace the love of bad, losing teams. Consequently, I came up with an idea that I have always wanted to pursue but never had an opportunity to do anything with.

As a 13-year-old, I devised the idea of doing a study of the worst teams in the history of Major League Baseball, which I wanted to call The Losers. I picked out some teams and thought it would be fun to do the research for a project like this. The all-time worst team in the history of Major League Baseball was the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, which didn’t even make it all the way through the season. They went 20-134 and had to play their last 35 or so games on the road, because no National League team would come to their field to play due to no attendance. Or then, there were the 1930 Phillies, who had a team batting average in excess of .310 and a team ERA well over 6.00, meaning that even with that kind of offense, they finished dead last in the National League. Or the St. Louis Browns, who went to the World Series once in their history. Or the Washington Senators who went once, in 1924. It just seemed like a project that would be a blast.

I put this idea away years ago, never figuring I would get a chance to do anything about it. I just didn’t have the resources or knowledge how to do that sort of research, and I always had other projects.

Fellow blogger Michael Aubrecht has done a great deal of writing on baseball over the years for Baseball Almanac. He knows how to do this sort of research and also knows how to write about baseball. In the course of a few exchanges of e-mails some months ago, I mentioned my idea to Michael, who fell in love with the concept.

To make a long story short, once he recovers from the spinal fusion surgery he had yesterday, Michael’s going to tackle my project. I guess that I will receive some sort of writing credit for it, since it was my idea, but it’s mostly going to be Michael’s work product. Michael has the connections to get someone famous–hopefully, a Hall of Famer–to write an introduction to the book for us, which will make it even better still. Here’s the working title, which Michael came up with the other day: USTINK: Major League Baseball’s Terrible Teams and Pathetic Players. I like it.

I’m just thrilled that this idea I came up with 35 years ago is finally going to come to fruition. I mentioned it to Ted Savas yesterday, and he liked the idea a great deal, too.

So, stay tuned. We will see where this fun little side trip leads. Fear not–I don’t anticipate that this will serve as any major hindrance to my getting my various Civil War projects done.