The Kansas City Athletics Futility Score

Friday, January 02 2004 @ 08:46 AM EST

Every so often, I like to pull out my old Abstracts and re-read an essay or two. My very favourite is the Kansas City Royals essay in the 1986 Baseball Abstract, in which Bill James recounts the history of major league baseball in Kansas City. His life has spanned that era, and the essay concludes with the local nine climbing to the pinnacle of the baseball world, beating the Blue Jays and Cardinals in two thrilling playoff series in 1985.

Before the Royals built their championship-calibre teams, James' youth was spent rooting for a ballclub named the Kansas City Athletics, a team the city inherited from Philadelphia and bequeathed to Oakland. In between, the A's spent 13 seasons in Missouri and never came close to a .500 record. They won just over 40% of the ballgames they played in those seasons - no team since then has been worse over a 13-year stretch. As Bill James reached the age of majority, Charles O. Finley packed up the Athletics and took them to the Bay.

In honour of the great sabrmetrician, I devised a futily scale and named it after the team of his youth. I used 13 consecutive years of data of a given franchise (apart from being the number of seasons the A's spent in Kansas City, it's also a number considered unlucky by many), calculated the overall winning percentage during those years and compared it to the Kansas City A's. The formula is:

The KC A's, 1955 to 1967, score 100 on the scale; a team with a .5038 winning percentage scores zero. It is (of course) possible to score over a hundred (and less than zero) - several pre-WW II franchises scored over 100 on the KC A's Futility Scale year in and year out. But with the advent of the amateur draft, it has become difficult to approach those levels of wretchedness. Nevertheless, one modern day franchise is giving it a go.

Here is a complete list of teams that were worse that the 1955-67 A's (overlapping teams excluded) over 13 seasons:

The modern fan, unless he/she is a senior citizen, probably can't comprehend the length and depth of futility achieved by these clubs. Think of the 2001-2003 Tigers, add 23 years of the same and you end up with the Phillies, the #1 and #2 entries in the above chart. From 1919 to 1945, the Phillies posted winning percentages lower than .400 TWENTY TIMES (in 27 years), and poked their noses above .500 only once.

It's a wonder that baseball survived in Philadelphia considering the Phillies played wretched baseball for the majority of the first half of the 20th century. The nadir was 1936 to 1940, during which neither Philadelphia club posted a single season with a winning percentage above .400. The Athletics had two glorious periods under Connie Mack and a lot of heartache in between and after in Philadelphia. The Phillies won the war of attrition when the Athletics decided to move west for greener pastures.

It didn't turn out to be all that green: the Athletics continued to lose and eventually wore out their welcome in Kansas City. As I noted earlier, no team since the 1955-67 A's has reached 100 or better on the KCA Futility Scale. Here are the worst 13-year stretches since then (overlap teams excluded):

The Tigers overtook the Braves a few years ago for the highest non-expansion team futility score since the KC A's (the Cubs teams in the table were the precise contemporaries of the A's). If Detroit loses 100 games in 2004, their score will climb to 89.9, leapfrogging the expansion Mariners.

Perhaps there is hope for the Tigers. Some of these franchises emerged from hibernation to build very successful teams. The Braves and Indians built a strong foundation of youth, added useful veterans and rode solid management to success; the Phillies, and perhaps the Royals, appear to be following their lead. Then again, maybe we shouldn't be optimistic about the Tigers' future - I can't see very many quality youngsters in their organisation at the moment.

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