Looking for the Ancestor of Hank Aaron XXIV

The future of terrible baseball can teach us about the history of terrible baseball.

The future of terrible baseball can teach us about the history of terrible baseball.

Turanga Leela will have a mean fastball. In the right place, it will crack a rib or dent a skull. Turanga Leela will be an exceptional athlete. An accomplished martial artist before turning pro, she will have an arm that rivals even the hardest throwers of her era. She will play a future brand of baseball that will be in parts unrecognizable and in parts unchanged.

And she will be a sideshow.

She’ll be hired to be the girl who hurts guys. Not even an enforcer, she will enter the game only when wins and losses have been effectively decided and the fans are drifting towards the exits.

In episode 48 of the comedic science-fiction show Futurama, the one-eyed mutant Turanga Leela joins the New New York Mets as a relief pitcher. She promptly becomes the most famous beanball pitcher in Pro Blernsball. Though distinct in many ways from modern baseball, blernsball is indeed the descendant sport of America’s pastime. It evolved from baseball as our descendants “jazzed it up” to make the sport less boring. The ball (called the “blernsball”) is tethered to the pitching mound with an elastic string. There’s a special target in deep center field that can engage “multiball” — a chaotic explosion of activity that is part life-sized pinball game, part Tron race sequence — as well as a target that can end the game abruptly.

After discovering she is on pace to be the worst player in the confusing sport’s illustrious history, Leela seeks the guidance of Hank Aaron XXIV — the reigning worst player in baseball history (and voiced by Hank Aaron I). Under his befuddling tutelage, Leela manages to hone her game to the point of throwing strikes.

Shot1

As good art often does, this controversial episode — by many considered one of the worst in the series — pushes us to reconsider our past, tantalizes us with thoughts of the future, and questions the assembly of our present. Who is the player that Hank Aaron XXIV replaces in the Hall of Fame as the game’s worst ever? What would it mean if the first female ballplayer indeed was little more than a publicity stunt? And how is our game evolving right now — what steps are we taking to edge ever closer to Pro Blernsball?

But let us focus on this thought: Who was the worst pro baseball player ever?

Hank Aaron XXIV will be a special player. Not only will he be a truly awful blight on baseball’s statistics, but he will also manage to keep playing at the highest levels of this future sport for long enough to be considered more than just unlucky. Normally survivor bias kills off truly terrible players.

“The Worst Player” can hardly stay entrenched given the bountiful minor league rosters and always simmering free agent market. In modern baseball, Hank Aaron XXIV cannot exist. In future blernsball, a sport widely influenced by on-field antics and sideshows, H.A. XXIV apparently has room to survive.

So how can we unearth a player both terrible but still somehow good enough to keep playing? The answer lies in baseball’s past — in the eras before deep farm systems and free agency. This is a universe that is effectively pre-replacement-level player because there may not have been an actual replacement player available. The mechanisms of replacing players had yet to fully evolve. It is an era that brings us…

Bill Bergen, The Worst Catcher There Ever Was

Let’s start by agreeing this subhead is wrong. We have no way of knowing Bill Bergen was actually the worst catcher there ever was. Catching statistics, even as much as they have improved over the last three years, are still short of capturing a catcher’s full value.

A catcher is not only a hitter and a meatbag to throw fastballs toward, he is also a pitch framer, a game caller, and an on-field pitching coach. No one talks to the pitcher more than the catcher. And a catcher can maybe save a pitcher’s evening — or ruin it.

So naturally the answer to our question is not clear. It would have been easy if it turned out a first baseman had more negative WAR than anyone in history. He would be an obvious worst player. Even if Terrible First Baseman Guy was a player-manager, we could still rationalize it as, “Oh, he may not be the worst manager ever, but he’s definitely the worst player.”

Instead we have Bill Bergen.

A Hardball Times Update
Goodbye for now.

According to Joe Dittmar’s SABR bio, Bergen wasn’t just a no-bat catcher. He was a laser-rocket arm no-bat catcher:

Despite playing part-time, Bergen earned a reputation for the strongest throwing arm in the National League, so strong that his mere presence behind the plate was enough to intimidate base runners. Notes in newspapers of the day often remarked on his lightning release and ability to throw to second base on a line while standing flatfooted.

On Aug. 23, 1909, Bergen gunned down six St. Louis Cardinals attempting to steal…

He also relates a story of Bergen playing for Fort Wayne and getting his team out of a bases-loaded jam by picking off all three runners.

Bill Bergen does not fit the profile of our worst player ever search. He is almost certainly not the worst catcher in history, despite his career -16.2 WAR. But still, his hitting ability is legendary among Hank Aaron XXIV types:

Among bad hitters, no position player will be badder than Bergen.

Among bad hitters, no position player will be badder than Bergen.

Bill Bergen, across 947 games and 3,328 plate appearances, cost his teams 16 wins (according to FanGraphs WAR). In his 3,000+ PA, he hit .170/.194/.201 with two home runs. Yes, just two home runs.

Few players over the last half century have hit for less power than Dal Maxvill (.042 ISO). But even Maxvill, in his 3,898 PA, had six homers. Bergen could not hit. Bergen couldn’t hurt a fly because swinging a flyswatter was too akin to swatting at fastballs. Harry McIntire, Bergen’s teammate and the workhorse for the Superbas rotation, hit .218/.258/.285. In just 665 PA, McIntire matched Bergen’s career total of two home runs.

In other words: Bergen inadvertently helped the Superbas pioneer the wrap-around leadoff hitter lineup. He hit so absurdly badly that pitchers gave the team a better chance to put runners on for the top of the order.

But despite all this…

There Will Never Be a Worse Hitter than Bob Friend

Bob Friend was a stalwart innings eater. The man could pitch and did pitch. He threw more than 3,000 innings and finished with a career 3.58 ERA (94 ERA-) and about 60 WAR. That’s borderline Hall of Fame worthy.

But in 1,297 plate appearances, Bob Friend got only 138 hits. Let’s compare that to 2014’s worst qualified hitter, Zack Cozart. The Reds shortstop hit a pitcher-like .221/.268/.300, good for a 56 wRC+. But in just 543 plate appearances, Cozart had 112 hits. Imagine, then, the eye-popping awfulness of 2014 Zack Cozart’s hit total stretched across another full season and a half. Not just continued awfulness, but awfulness diluted with measures of additional awfulness.

Averaging only 53 hits per 500 plate appearances, Bob Friend — as a pitcher — was getting a hit only about once every three games (about one in every 10 plate appearances). In other words, one or two hits per month. In Friend’s worst hitting season, 1965, he collected only three hits in his 78 trips to the plate. He hit two doubles in 1962, and over the remaining 308 PA in his career, he hit only singles. In seven of his 16 seasons, he walked just once or not at all. And that’s despite never getting fewer than 47 PA in any one year.

Bob Friend could not hit. I am inclined to think no one will ever not hit like him again. He owns a career -25 wRC+. That’s 125 percent worse than league average. That’s more bad than greatest hitter ever, Babe Ruth, was good (97 percent better than his league).

His career slash, .121/.150/.144, glares at the remainder of baseball history from across the street like a mad transient. Like a wild-eyed, scraggly haired outsider to human society, a fellow who watches others — a thousand thousand other players’ careers — with the focus of a hunted animal and the quiet awe of an alien visitor.

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His slash beckons to the inquisitive, “What is a baseball hit?” and “What do the strike numbers mean?”

Yet, as a fan, it might have been hard to notice how bad Friend’s hitting was. If you attended a random Bob Friend start, he would bat about twice. Since his OBP is exactly .150, we would expect him to reach base once every 6.6 PA. In other words, about every third Bob Friend game you attend, he will reach base. In the grand scheme of things, that doesn’t feel so terrible. In fact, according to some spurious research, a lot of other things are more likely to happen to you!

When you look at this way, a Bob Friend hit feels more inevitable than taxes!

When you look at this way, a Bob Friend hit feels more inevitable than taxes!

Also, and this is a complete aside, but “Bob Friend” is the obvious first choice for an extra-terrestrial trying and failing to choose an inconspicuous name such that he can establish trust with the Earth-Americans.

There will truly never been a worse hitter than Bob Friend. At least until Hank Aaron XXIV. But that’s kind of the problem with Bob Friend. He wasn’t a hitter. He was a pitcher. And an excellent one at that.

But maybe there’s a terrible pitcher out there. Someone who can be awful in all facets of his game, not just a few. Maybe someone like…

Alan Mills, the Pitcher with the Lowest WAR Ever

Alan Mills has -3.3 WAR in his career. What an enormous disappointment. A resounding, echoing shrug at the end of our search for awfulness.

We were moments ago measuring the passage of time with Bill Bergen’s hitting, but here we have a reliever who managed to just stick around long enough to end on an especially bad note. Mills had a 5.25 FIP across 636 innings. That’s bad, but he played in the offense-crazy Steroid Era. A 5.25 FIP in the 1990s translates into a 116 FIP-. Not really even terrible.

Add to that: He had a 93 ERA- and 6.2 RA9 (WAR based on his ERA instead of his FIP). Mills was a serviceable pitcher.

To call Mills a bad pitcher is unfair. To call him the worst pitcher in history is to ignore facts. We need a bad pitcher. A real bad pitcher. We need…

Bill Stearns, Human-Shaped Batting Practice Machine

Bill Stearns played during the first five years of major league history, from 1871 through 1875. In those five years, he changed uniforms five times. We know little else about Stearns. He debuted at age 18 with the Washington Olympics. The Olympics folded in 1872, but by then he was the starting pitcher (as in: the only starting pitcher) for the 1872 Washington Nationals — a franchise that existed for only 11 games before folding. (Stearns started each of those games.)

Then, in 1873, Stearns played for the Washington Blue Legs. It’s unclear if the Blue Legs evolved out of the 1872 Nationals or the 1872 Olympics, but either way, Stearns once again proved the staff workhorse. He started 32 of the franchise’s 39 games, and he managed a 4.55 ERA in a league averaging a 3.25 ERA.

As a 21 year-old, Stearns left his hometown Washington for his first and only season outside the District. He played swingman (that is: he was the second of two pitchers on the staff) for the Hartford Dark Blues, but eventually got suspended for skipping out on the team. He finished his career back in Washington, pitching 141 innings of 5.36 ERA ball for yet another doomed Washington Nationals franchise.

Or was it 141 innings of 4.02 ERA ball? Different sources offer different numbers, apparently:

Year FanGraphs ERA B-Ref ERA Difference
1871 2.50 2.50 0.00
1872 6.91 6.18 0.73
1873 4.55 4.61 -0.06
1874 4.50 2.95 1.55
1875 5.36 4.02 1.34

Why are these numbers different? Who knows. It was the 1870s.

But these differences matter. A lot. It’s basically the difference between Stearns being a bad pitcher and the worst pitcher in history. So let’s just run with the FanGraphs numbers because why not. Glory is at stake here.

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Stearns pitched in an era where the league average K/9 rate was about 0.60 and the BB/9 was around 0.75. In other words: The hitters put everything in play. Pitchers weren’t meant to be especially deceptive. Stearns probably played pitcher because he threw hard and accurately (perhaps evidenced too from his occasional starts in the outfield). This era of the sport is almost as foreign as tethered-ball oddness of blernsball — a world without curveballs or sliders, strikeouts or walks.

Despite that environment, though, Stearns gave up even more contact than his peers. He averaged a 0.45 K/9 and a 0.55 BB/9. In an era where something like 90 percent of plate appearances ended with balls in play, Stearns was giving up 95 percent contact. And while the leagues were averaging around a .330 batting average on balls in play, Stearns gave up a .375 BABIP.

Did he have chronically bad defense? Or did he give up exceptionally hard contact? No one knows. It may have been a little of both. His career 98 FIP- and 8.0 WAR suggests he was hardly to blame for his struggles. But having sustained such a high BABIP across five franchises and 705 innings, we have to suspect his 156 ERA- and -12.4 RA9-WAR have some embedded information about his talent.

It’s maybe a little hard to understand a 156 ERA-. In a 2014 run environment, that would be around a 5.83 ERA in a league-neutral park. Extrapolate that terrible ERA across three-plus seasons, and we begin to understand Stearns’ struggles. That’s like the worst years of Bruce Chen stuck on repeat.

Here’s a glimpse at the misery that was the 1873 Washington Blue Legs season:

  1. Sept. 1, Lost 14-7
  2. Sept. 2, Lost 9-0
  3. Sept. 3, Lost 4-2
  4. Sept. 4, Lost 17-6
  5. Sept. 5, Lost 25-8
  6. Sept. 6, Lost 14-2

The Blue Legs hardly played games on back-to-back days. That’s a selection of six back-to-back games in which the opponents outscored them 25-83.

Add to that: Pitchers in this era hit about league average (80 wRC+) — at least compared to their present despair (-19 wRC+ in 2014). But not ol’ Stearnsy. Despite playing outfield for the occasional franchise in need, Stearns owned a career .194/.221/.199 slash (55 wRC+). He hit and fielded just horribly enough to amass -1.5 WAR in only 411 PA.

Add it all together, and we have a legitimate candidate for the Worst Player Ever.

Here he is, some young Washington guy, dead for 120 years. We don’t have his picture. We don’t know what made him quit playing at just 22 years old — though his ineffectiveness may have been a factor. It appears he at some point either entered or returned to military service.

We know is that he is buried at Arlington, that his wife drew Civil War benefits on his behalf, and that he died of malaria while deployed in Puerto Rico. Did he serve during the Civil War, perhaps with a drum or fife, as just a 10- or 11-year-old? Did he serve with Teddy Roosevelt after his playing days, charging up San Juan Hill? We don’t know for sure.

But the misery of Stearns’ pro career brings us back to the beginning: The end, Turanga Leela — the future queen of the baseball/blernsball basement. This story of a one-eyed female pitcher breaking the gender barrier in the year 3000 speaks to us now in the year 2015.

What if the prevailing wisdom throughout baseball history is true? What if this surprisingly efficient machine, this professional industry that has made finding the worst player so difficult, what if this system that has specifically and deliberately excluded female players acted efficiently? What if the first female pitcher turns out to be the worst player in history, a pitcher so foul she can somehow pitch 77 innings without getting a single out?

But, like Leela, we can take a lesson from the worst player in history: Whether you’re Hank Aaron XXIV or William E. Stearns, there’s no harm in trying.

References & Resources


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Rally
8 years ago

There are worse hitting pitchers than Bob Friend of the 121/150/144 career line. Go to a National league park in 2015, pick a pitcher at random, and he’s about a 50/50 shot at being a worse hitter than Friend. The average pitcher this year is hitting 127/152/154.

james wilson
8 years ago

I was around ten years old watching a Senators game in old Griffith park with my dad. When Detroit’s pitcher came to the plate dad mentioned that Aquirre was famous for being the worst hitting pitcher ever. When he sliced a foul ball into the first base stands he got the biggest hand of the night.
I looked up his career line. 447 PA, 33 hits, 7 doubles, 1 triple, .085 BA.

Pirates Hurdles
8 years ago

Tiny Iota, that guy was great – Hank Aaron XXIV

BobDD
8 years ago

Worst hitter and most woeful swing I ever saw in person was from pitcher Hank Aguirre.

Well-Beered Englishman
8 years ago

Maybe I especially enjoyed this because I just recently started watching Futurama, but I really did especially enjoy this.

wdr1946
8 years ago

There are many worse players than these. Where, for instance, is John Gochnauer? (Look him up if you don’t believe me.

Paul L
8 years ago

Bob Buhl- pitcher with the Braves, Cubs and Phillies from 1953-1967. He had 853 at bats with 76 hits for a .089 batting average and a .129 on base percentage. In 1962 he went 0 for 70 for the season. I’d say he was even worse than Friend.

Jake
8 years ago

Koufax was a terrible hitter too. run depressed environment, batting average not being all that useful and all – 095 is 095.

I wonder if he is the hall of famer with the lowest batting average. would be a good trivia question.

EDogg1438
8 years ago

Sandy Koufax was another horrible hitting pitcher with a career line of .097/.145/.116 good for a -22 wRC+. His walk rate of 5% is pretty high though for someone who couldn’t hit at all.

Even more remarkable was that he was originally signed as a first baseman. Fair to say that Koufax’s hitting ability at first base would probably be the worst player ever.

Jason S.
8 years ago
Reply to  EDogg1438

I don’t think that’s really true that Koufax was originally signed as a first baseman. That may be an urban legend or a mangling of the facts. Apparently he played first base in high school but a coach thought he might be able to pitch and had him do that for another team in a Coney Island league. He pitched for a year in college and when the Dodger’s signed him it seems to be only as a pitcher. I can’t find any evidence at all to support the idea that his play at first base lasted beyond high school or anybody was interested in him as a hitter.

Tyler
8 years ago

You picked Bob Friend because he had the worst batting runs on fangraphs, but that’s compared to the average hitter, not average hitting pitcher. Mike Hampton was certainly an above average hitting pitcher and he’s -36.9 batting runs using what you used. As someone pointed out, half of pitchers are worse hitters than Bob Friend. You had 3,000 worse hitters to choose from.

Miles
8 years ago

Jeff Suppan

Cliff Blau
8 years ago

The worst professional baseball player likely never got higher than a Class D league; none of the players cited in the article come close.