Well, in Blue Jays history anyway. And for those of you who expect the name "Josh Towers" to appear in this article.... I promise Satisfaction. And we will meet All-Stars and Cy Young winners as well as the Lost and Forgotten.
It was, obviously, a very difficult year to be a Josh Towers fan. Where does his dismal 2006 season stand in the list of Worst Seasons by a Blue Jay starting pitcher? Near the top (which in the case, of course, means near the very bottom of the barrel) - but there have been worse.
I actually decided to employ some sort of Method in assessing these dreadful performances. I chose for eligibility anyone who made 10 starts in a season. We need a minimum, and the bar has to be set pretty low because when you pitch as poorly as these guys did you're not allowed to make 30 starts. I then went over to baseball-reference.com and took note of all the eligible starters who posted an ERA+ below 80 (The league average for that season will always be 100.) I then subtracted the pitcher's ERA+ from 80 and multiplied that figure by innings pitched.
After all, while no eligible starter posted a worse ERA+ than Roy Halladay in 2000, there were other fellas who achieved a comparable level of Awfulness and inflicted it on their teammates for twice as many innings. Which is how the following list was generated.
Using 80 as the base factor means you have to pitch quite poorly to
rack up a lot of points. If we used the league average (100), by far
the most important factor would not be the degree of awfulness so much as the
quantity of innings. For example, if we use 100 as the base, Jim
Clancy's 1984 season scores as the third worst season ever by a Blue
Jay starter, worse than Towers last year or Halladay in 2000. Clancy
did have a pretty lousy year, but he was nowhere near that bad. Hence we use 80 - a kind of replacement level - as the base factor.
So in 2000, Roy Halladay posted an ERA+ of 47 in 67.2 IP. Multiple those IP by 33 (80-47) and you get 2234. I have decided to call the result of this computation the Suckage Index.
So let's get to the Grim Details, and begin the Countdown From Hell...
10. Jeff Byrd (1977) - 2-13, 6.18. Suckage Index: 1048
Jeff Byrd was a 20 year old right-hander who was thrown into the Toronto rotation midway through the inaugural season. Really, what were the chances that was going to work? Byrd stayed right there, bravely taking his turn every five days for the rest of the year, and getting his hat handed to him on a regular basis. He managed to win twice in 17 starts. Byrd's main problem was not unheard of in young pitchers - he couldn't throw strikes. In 87.3 innings, he managed to walk 68 batters. He never pitched again in the major leagues.
9. Bill Singer (1977) - 2-8, 6.79. Suckage Index: 1075
One of the reasons young Byrd was in the rotation was because Opening Day starter Bill Singer had gone down with an injury in early June. Singer had been a fine pitcher in his day, twice winning 20 games and three times striking out 200 batters. Twice, in fact, his managers had seen fit to let him throw more than 300 innings. Of course, both times Singer responded to that workload the next year by either: a) getting hurt; b) pitching poorly; or c) both. Singer in 1977 was coming off a 13-10, 3.69 season in which he had worked 236 innings. He had nothing left in 1977, and never pitched again in the majors.
8. Todd Stottlemyre (1988) 4-8, 5.69. Suckage Index: 1078
Unlike Byrd and Singer, Stottlemyre did have a future. But in 1988 he was a rookie. He began the season as the fifth starter. By late May, he had started eight times, and sported a 1-6, 5.54 log. That put him onto the Jimy Williams shuffle - he switched back and forth from the bullpen to the rotation for the next two months before being dispatched back to Syracuse in late July. He came back up in September, and got in five relief appearances as a call-up. While his numbers don't look as bad as Byrd's or Singer's, two things to note: a) he had a far, far better team behind him; b) in 1988, AL teams apart from Toronto scored 4.33 runs per game; in 1977, AL teams apart from Toronto scored 4.59 runs per game.
7. Jack Kucek (1980) 3-8, 6.75. Suckage Index: 1088
Here's someone I had completely forgotten. He was a 27 year old right-hander who'd had a few cups of coffee with the White Sox and Phillies. The Jays signed him after the Phillies released him, and in June 1980 they called him up and stuck him in the rotation. He started out just fine, going 2-1, 2.89 in his first five starts. He then got roughed up a couple of times and was sent to the bullpen. He pitched very badly in three relief appearances, and was returned to the rotation. He made another five starts, and was truly horrible - 0-3, 12.86, giving up 29 hits in 15.2 innings - which got him banished to the bullpen for the rest of the season. He never pitched again in the majors.
6. Danny Darwin (1995) 1-8, 7.62. Suckage Index: 1170
Danny Darwin actually seemed like a reasonable idea at the time. Granted, he was 39 years old. Granted, he was coming off a dismal (7-5, 6.30) 1994 season. But he'd won 15 games for Boston the year before that, and had been a decent major league pitcher for a long time. I always regarded him as a lesser version of Dennis Eckersley (same build, same delivery, same problems with LH batters); like the Eck, Darwin had also had his best results pitching out of the pen. But in Toronto, he was only expected to be a decent, low-cost fifth starter (behind Cone, Guzman, Hentgen, and Leiter), and in fact his first two starts were just fine (1-0, 1.80). Then the wheels fell off - he lost each of his next eight starts. He pitched well just once, a complete game loss to the Indians, before being yanked from the rotation at the end of June. After two poor outings in relief, the Jays released him in mid-July.
5. Jerry Garvin (1978) 4-12, 5.54. Suckage Index: 1302
Garvin was a 21 year old left-hander who was taken from Minnesota in the original expansion draft. The Jays put him in the rotation to begin that inaugural season, and Garvin won his first five decisions. He is probably best remembed for his pick-off move - he picked off an astonishing 28 base-runners in his rookie season (and committed just two balks in the process.) The team was truly, truly terrible, and Garvin would lose 10 straight decisions later in the year. Nevertheless, it was a truly impressive season - he gave up almost exactly a hit an inning, despte the awful defenders behind him, and he didn't walk a lot of people. He had some trouble keeping the ball in the park, and it would have been nice if he could have struck out more people (4.67 K per 9 IP) - but for a 21 year old rookie on an expansion team, it was a remarkable season. However, in the process he had worked 244 IP at age 21; the year before, as a 20 year old in the Twins system, he had pitched 233 IP, and the year before that, still a teenager, he worked 205 IP. The butcher's bill came due in 1978. By mid July, he was 2-11 when Roy Hartsfield first pulled him from the rotation. After a couple of relief outings, he went back into the rotation before being shut down for most of September. He missed most of 1979 with his arm problems and while did manage to put together a couple of decent years as a lefty reliever I can't help but wonder if his career might have turned out very differently if he'd come along ten years later, in an organization that had some idea of how to develop young pitchers.
4. Jack Morris (1993) 7-12, 6.19. Suckage Index: 1374
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition and there was no reason on earth to expect what happened to Jack Morris in 1993. You will recall that in 1991 he won 18 games and took Minnesota to the World Series; in 1992, he came to Toronto and did the same thing (the two seasons are ridiculously similar.) But then... his first three starts of 1993 completely redefined the concept of Awfulness: 0-3, with an ERA of 17.18. Don't see that too often. His next three starts were merely bad (1-1, 7.02), and the Jays stuck him on the DL for three weeks while everyone speculated as to what had gone wrong. (one school of thought was that he was tipping his pitches, but other long-time Morris watchers maintained that he had always tipped his pitches.) Upon his return, Morris finally pitched a good ball game, but he then offered up stinkers in three of his next four outings. By mid-June, after his first 11 starts, his record stood at 3-7, 9.91. He actually recovered somewhat at this point, beginning with a five-hit shutout of the Twins, and went 4-5 4.23 over his next 16 starts. But he was having some physical problems - he came out of one start after two scoreless innings and was shut down for good in early September.
Morris was not the most popular player in Blue Jays history. He did not come up through the system - on the contrary, he had been a troublesome opponent for a very long time, he did not have a warm and cuddly personality, and he seemed in many ways the embodiment of the athlete as mercenary - after going to Minnesota and herocially pitching his hometown team to a championship, he lit out for where the money was. As I recall, Mike Hogan in particular seemed to take it personally that Morris had stuck it to the people of Minnesota. Morris, of course, was one of the players caught up in the owner's Collusion Conspiracy - the older readers may remember Morris flying up to Minneosta to offer his services in the off-season of 1987. But for some reason, the Twins just couldn't find room for a 20 game winner. Neither could the Yankees or the Angels. None of them even made an offer.
3. Josh Towers (2006) 2-10, 8.42. Suckage Index: 1488
You were there.
2. Roy Halladay (2000) 4-7, 10.64. Suckage Index: 2234
The final two entries, the bottom of the barrel, are in a class all by themselves. The arrival of Roy Halladay had been anticipated long before he actually showed up in Toronto, and he arrived with a splash at the end of 1998, coming within one out of pitching a no-hitter in his second major league start. As a 22 year old rookie in 1999, he had gone 8-7, 3.92 in a season split evenly between the rotation and the bullpen. HIs K-W ratio (82-79 in 149.1 IP) was a little worrisome, but his future was assumed to be very bright.
And so it would be, but the future had to wait a while. Doc beat the Royals 6-3 in his first start of the season - from there it all went downhill. He ran off six straight terrible starts, allowing more than a run per inning each time - he went 1-4, 13.50 and you're probably wondering how he managed to win one of those games. Easy - the team staked him to an 11-1 lead, before Doc gave up six runs to let the Angels back into it. The team finally sent him to the bullpen - he emerged once to allow four hits and three runs in one inning and finally they sent him to Syracuse. He didn't pitch particularly well there, but came back a month later. He made three starts and one was pretty decent. The other two were terrible, and he went back to the bullpen, and then back again to Syracuse. He was back in September to make one nondescript relief appearance, another terrible start, and finally closed his season by allowing 7 runs, all unearned, in two-thirds of an inning against Baltimore.
1. Dave Lemanczyk (1978) 4-14, 6.26. Suckage Index: 2324
The surprise winner, just barely nosing Halladay's historically awful season. Lemanczyk was the Jays top winner in 1977, and he would pitch well again in 1979 (he even got to go to the All-Star Game as a result.) But the year in between was pretty ugly. He made five April starts and went 0-5, 7.67. He was worse in May, but managed a 1-3, 8.00 log - he got the win despite allowing 12 hits and 7 runs. In June, he took his 1-9, 8.52 log to the bullpen. He pitched poorly there for a few weeks, and returned to the rotation, for no apparent reason. Yet at this juncture, he suddenly seemed to recover his form. He put together three strong starts in a row, winning twice and throwing a complete game in a 2-0 loss. After a few more rough outings, he closed the month strong and actually posted a 2.85 ERA for the month. Alas, 'twas a mirage. He made two poor starts in August, went on the DL, and came back to pitch poorly out of the pen in September.
Lemanczyk was nowhere near as bad as Halladay in 2000 - he was probably not even as bad as Towers last year. But he was indeed pretty bad, and he pitched about as much as Doc and Josh put together. And to him goes the No-Prize.
Special dishonourable mentions? Pat Hentgen (2004), Luke Prokopec and Brandon Lyon (2004), Mark Lemongello and Phil Huffman (1979), Juan Guzman (1995)
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