The virtual 1965-68 Washington Senators
We’ve had fun exploring some what-if scenarios involving good teams, or even great teams, that might plausibly have been better. The rule we follow in this game is that we can’t invoke any transactions that didn’t actually occur, but we can negate some that did, and examine the likely consequences.
This time we’ll play the same game, only instead of examining how a good team might have been better, let’s think about a bad team that might have been worse.
The new Senators
One of the odder episodes in baseball history took place in the autumn of 1960. Washington Senators owner Calvin Griffith persuaded his fellow American League owners that continuing to operate his franchise in that city was untenable, and thus he needed to relocate to Minneapolis-St. Paul. The odd part was that those same owners simultaneously reasoned that the best place to locate an expansion team was none other than Washington, D.C.
Thus the long-suffering baseball fans in our nation’s capital, having spent decades watching the Senators flounder in the second division, saw their ball club move away just as it was about to achieve competitiveness. As a consolation prize, Washington fans were given a new ball club, one virtually guaranteed under the conditions of expansion-draft talent distribution to flounder in the second division.
And so the replacement Senators did flounder, losing 100 or more games in each of their first four seasons. They would manage a .500 record just once in the 11 years they did business in Washington before this franchise too decided to skip town. They were bad.
But they quite easily could have been quite a bit worse, and the manner in which they were spared that fate turned on a single seemingly insignificant transaction.
Claude
In the summer of 1957, the Cincinnati Reds signed a 17-year-old high school southpaw named Claude Osteen. Despite his extreme youth, Osteen progressed rapidly through the Reds’ minor league system; by 1959 he was presenting a strong year in Triple-A, and for 1960 Cincinnati installed him on the major league roster.
But Osteen didn’t thrive in 1960. He was relegated to the back end of the bullpen by manager Fred Hutchinson. The wisdom of this deployment of the prized young prospect is questionable, to say the least; in his few and brief mop-up outings, the rookie was quite ineffective. Osteen’s can’t-miss stature was distinctly reduced. He opened 1961 on the Reds’ major league roster, but after just one early-season relief appearance, he was sent back to the minors.
With regular work in Triple-A in 1961, Osteen regained his touch, going 15-11 with solid peripherals in 191 innings. Nonetheless, in mid-September of that year the Reds dealt the just-turned-22-year-old Osteen to the Senators, in exchange for cash and a player to be named later—the classic bargain-basement dump-off price tag.
What on earth motivated the Cincinnati organization to so blithely kiss off this obviously promising young left hander?
Expansion shenanigans?
I’ve spent decades wondering about it. A few years ago I encountered someone who offered an explanation that at first glance sounded logical, but upon further examination holds no water. The explanation goes like this:
The National League was preparing to hold an expansion draft of its own in October of 1961. Thus the Reds would be required to expose a proportion of the players on their 40-man roster to the draft; they could protect only so many. And, so this explanation goes, reasonably hopeful though they may have been that Osteen eventually would blossom as an effective major leaguer, he hadn’t yet, and so the Reds were going to leave Osteen exposed to the draft.
Moreover, embroiled as they were in the stretch run of a pennant race, the Reds weren’t about to make significant use of the still-unproven prospect in September ’61 anyway. And so—follow this now—the idea arises of trading him for a player to be named later: They expect to lose Osteen in the expansion draft anyway, so why not trade him and get something in return? Yet here comes the devilishly clever part: The player received won’t arrive until after the draft, and so won’t be exposed to it! Brilliant! Yes?
Well, no. Because here’s the thing. When Osteen was removed from the Reds’ 40-man roster, all that meant was that someone else on the roster would be exposed to the draft in his place. It isn’t as though the Reds gained an extra draft-protected roster spot. So instead of losing Osteen in the draft, one of the six players Cincinnati did surrender (Gus Bell, Elio Chacon, Dick Gernert, Jay Hook, Ken Johnson and Sherman Jones) went in his place.
Insofar as their expansion draft exposure was concerned, the trading-Osteen-for-a-player-to-be-named-later gambit gained the Reds nothing. (And for their sake, one hopes the guy the Reds lost instead of Osteen wasn’t Ken Johnson, who turned out to be perhaps the best player selected in the 1961 NL draft.)
So this explanation gets “nice try for creativity” points, but it’s highly doubtful that the Reds were so confused by the process as to believe that in this way they were gaming the system. No, the only way in which the Reds’ trade of Osteen made any sense for them is if they believed that the nominal cash-and-a-player-to-be-named-later package they would receive from the Senators would turn out to be of equal or greater value than Osteen.
And to that end, it’s simply the case that the Reds were guilty of a good old-fashioned talent-evaluation blunder, of major proportion.
Turning Claude into Dave
The player named later was Dave Sisler. He was a 30-year-old right-handed relief pitcher, as drab and unexciting a journeyman as could be found.
He was the son of a great major leaguer, and the brother of a good one, but this Sisler was nothing more than garden-variety bullpen fodder. He’d been acquired by the Senators in the AL expansion draft a year earlier, and had delivered an entirely predictable blah performance in 1961: 60 innings in relief, with an ERA+ of 93. Yawn. For this you trade a 22-year-old southpaw with first-rate minor league credentials?
Thus, from the Senators’ point of view, the deal was simple larceny. Kudos to Washington GM Ed Doherty; one wonders exactly what sort of compromising photographs he had of Reds GM Bill DeWitt.
But let’s imagine that DeWitt hadn’t been hoodwinked, and that the Senators had been unable to acquire Claude Osteen from the Reds. (For our purposes, we won’t know or care what otherwise would have become of Osteen, whether he went to the Colt .45s or the Mets in the draft, or whether the Reds managed to hold onto him; in our scenario all we know is that the Senators didn’t get him.)
Washington minus Claude
Had the 1962 Senators included Sisler on their pitching staff instead of Osteen, they’d have been a worse team than they were. But the difference wouldn’t have been enormous. Osteen that season established himself as a bona fide major league starter, but he wasn’t yet anything special; for sure he was a heck of lot better than the mop-up reliever Sisler, but the margin between them wasn’t more than a couple of wins.
But in 1963 and 1964, the Osteen-less Senators would be more significantly impaired. Sisler was gone from the majors by ’63, and over the course of these two seasons Osteen steadily developed into one of the better pitchers in the American League. And a signficantly impaired Senators team would be a bad team indeed, as even with Osteen on board they lost 106 games in ’63 and 100 in ’64.
But wait. It gets worse.
Claude + John + $$$ = Frank + Ken + Pete + Phil + Dick
In December of 1964, the Senators swung a blockbuster trade with the Los Angeles Dodgers, in which Osteen was the centerpiece. He was packaged along with a weak-hitting, good-fielding young third baseman named John Kennedy and a fat bundle of $100,000 in exchange for several players who would play key roles for the Senators: outfielder Frank Howard, third baseman Ken McMullen, pitchers Pete Richert and Phil Ortega and first baseman Dick Nen.
While Kennedy would be put to use by the Dodgers in a utility role, and the cash component of this deal was clearly significant, it’s certain that without Osteen the Senators wouldn’t have been able to acquire all this talent. And just what would that have meant for the Washington ball club?
Well, let’s see … in our scenario Kennedy will remain with the Senators, and he’ll hold the roster spot that actually was taken by McMullen. We’ll give Howard’s 1965 spot to journeyman outfielder Fred Valentine, whom the Senators actually farmed out that season. The spots that Richert and Ortega held on the pitching staff can be filled by Nick Willhite (another youngster from the Dodgers’ organization whom the actual Senators acquired and then returned to L.A. that year) and Jim Hannan (like Valentine, a guy whom Washington farmed out for most of 1965). Nen was promoted by the Senators from Triple-A halfway through the ’65 season when incumbent first baseman Bob Chance was sent down; we’ll keep Chance in the majors all year.
Here’s what we get:
1965
Pos Player B Age G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS+
1B B. Chance L 24 138 444 37 109 22 0 12 46 38 115 .245 .305 .376 95
2B D. Blasingame L 33 129 403 42 90 8 8 1 17 35 45 .223 .287 .290 66
SS E. Brinkman R 23 154 444 33 82 13 2 5 32 38 82 .185 .251 .257 46
3B W. Held R 33 129 432 53 106 20 3 20 63 62 98 .245 .340 .444 124
RF W. Kirkland L 31 123 405 44 92 12 1 17 61 26 86 .227 .274 .388 88
CF D. Lock R 28 148 508 53 111 18 1 20 49 69 141 .219 .312 .376 97
LF J. King L 32 132 437 56 96 18 3 21 61 66 83 .220 .322 .419 111
C M. Brumley L 26 79 216 14 45 4 0 3 14 20 33 .208 .280 .269 59
2S K. Hamlin R 30 117 362 41 99 21 1 4 20 33 45 .273 .333 .370 102
OF F. Valentine B 30 119 320 33 79 11 2 7 24 35 51 .247 .321 .359 95
3B J. Kennedy R 24 104 256 21 51 8 1 3 17 16 70 .199 .246 .273 49
C3 D. Zimmer R 34 95 226 18 45 6 0 2 16 26 59 .199 .284 .252 55
1B J. Cunningham L 33 95 201 26 46 9 1 3 19 46 27 .229 .375 .328 104
C D. Camilli R 28 75 193 12 37 6 1 3 17 16 34 .192 .257 .280 54
1B R. Sievers R 38 28 57 4 10 2 0 2 5 8 10 .175 .277 .316 70
Others 91 11 23 1 0 4 15 15 25 .253 .358 .396 117
Pitchers 389 20 37 5 1 2 18 28 184 .096 .156 .133 -16
TOTAL 5384 518 1158 184 25 129 494 577 1188 .215 .291 .331 86
Pitcher T Age G GS CG IP W L SV H R HR BB SO ERA ERA+
M. McCormick L 26 44 32 5 205 10 14 1 219 90 25 48 102 3.69 94
B. Narum R 24 43 32 3 197 5 18 0 200 116 21 109 96 4.85 71
B. Daniels R 33 42 27 2 161 7 21 1 187 104 23 54 57 4.74 73
J. Hannan R 25 44 14 2 125 4 10 1 135 67 11 58 73 4.33 80
H. Koplitz R 27 34 12 0 112 4 10 0 103 55 12 51 62 4.09 85
N. Willhite L 24 39 16 1 109 4 6 1 122 73 18 51 70 5.04 69
R. Kline R 33 74 0 0 99 6 7 16 106 36 7 32 52 2.63 132
S. Ridzik R 36 63 0 0 110 5 5 3 108 61 18 43 72 4.02 86
F. Kreutzer L 26 52 14 2 110 2 9 0 90 56 10 69 90 3.94 88
M. Bridges L 34 48 0 0 69 0 3 0 74 31 4 30 47 2.67 130
J. Duckworth R 26 17 8 0 64 1 4 0 45 30 11 36 74 3.94 88
Others 7 2 71 3 4 0 66 42 1 38 33 4.84 71
TOTAL 162 17 1431 51 111 23 1455 761 161 619 828 4.14 83
Oof. Check out that nifty .215 team batting average, there. Aside from drawing walks and hitting a few home runs, this offense could do nothing well; the OPS+ of 86 would be last in the AL by a comfortable margin. And the pitching, while not quite the league’s worst, would be very close to it.
The actual 1965 Senators weren’t good, but they weren’t terrible. Their 70-92 record and eighth-place finish were both the best the young franchise had yet achieved. However, Howard, McMullen and Richert were their best players, and in our scenario none are present. Thus this Washington team, while it may have been first in war and first in peace, would most definitely be last in the American League.
It is, of course, something less than completely realistic to assume that had the Senators been without Osteen and thus unable to swing that particular big trade with the Dodgers, they’d have gone ahead and done just about everything else exactly as they did. But it is simply true to say that without Osteen and that talent capital he provided, their options would have been severely limited.
Scraping along
So what the heck, in the spirit of sadistic amusement, let’s keep following this scenario a bit further. Suppose the Senators kept to this particular path for the next several years, making every transaction they actually made, but still missing Howard, McMullen, Richert, Ortega and Nen.
In early 1967 they actually traded Richert to Baltimore, for first baseman Mike Epstein and pitcher Frank Bertaina. Since our version doesn’t have Richert, they can’t have Epstein and Bertaina either.
So how would this outfit be looking by, say, 1968? We would still have Kennedy on hand in place of McMullen. In the absence of Howard and Epstein, we’ll have the Senators keep Brant Alyea, Gary Holman and Hank Allen in the majors all year long, and also give more playing time to a few of their other outfielders. Nen was actually gone from Washington by ’68, so nothing changes there.
To replace Ortega and Bertaina, we’ll have them keep Jim Hannan in the majors all season, and we’ll also pick up journeyman right hander Joe Moeller from the Dodgers’ scrap heap. The Dodgers actually left Moeller exposed to the Rule V draft following 1967, and he was selected by Houston but then returned to the L.A. organization. Presuming the Dodgers still had Ortega, let’s assume the Senators would have taken Moeller off their hands.
How does all this work out?
1968
Pos Player B Age G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS+
1B G. Holman L 24 128 377 38 95 16 2 2 29 47 70 .252 .335 .321 103
2B B. Allen L 29 120 373 28 90 12 4 6 38 28 35 .241 .294 .343 96
SS E. Brinkman R 26 113 300 17 56 6 1 1 12 27 50 .187 .254 .223 48
3B J. Kennedy R 27 126 447 37 101 15 4 6 39 37 127 .226 .285 .318 86
RF E. Stroud L 28 131 374 44 89 12 11 5 27 26 61 .238 .288 .369 101
CF D. Unser L 23 156 635 59 146 13 7 1 29 46 66 .230 .282 .277 73
LF B. Alyea R 27 140 447 54 104 16 1 23 62 35 131 .233 .288 .427 118
C P. Casanova R 26 96 322 16 63 6 0 4 24 7 52 .196 .210 .252 42
OF C. Peterson R 25 121 343 26 73 12 2 5 29 28 51 .213 .272 .303 77
S3 R. Hansen R 30 86 275 25 51 12 0 8 29 35 49 .185 .277 .316 83
O32 H. Allen R 27 100 252 21 56 4 3 3 18 13 41 .222 .260 .298 72
2B F. Coggins B 24 62 171 14 30 6 1 0 7 9 33 .175 .217 .222 36
C J. French L 26 59 165 8 32 5 0 1 10 19 19 .194 .277 .242 61
OF F. Valentine B 33 45 165 16 38 4 1 5 11 10 21 .230 .274 .358 94
OF S. Bowens R 29 57 115 13 22 4 0 4 7 11 39 .191 .262 .330 82
S2 T. Cullen R 26 47 114 7 31 4 2 1 15 7 12 .272 .314 .368 110
C B. Bryan L 29 40 108 6 22 3 0 3 8 14 27 .204 .301 .315 90
Others 44 4 10 2 0 2 4 5 14 .227 .306 .409 119
Pitchers 370 9 48 4 1 0 15 13 148 .130 .159 .146 -5
TOTAL 5397 442 1157 156 40 80 413 417 1046 .214 .271 .303 82
Pitcher T Age G GS CG IP W L SV H R HR BB SO ERA ERA+
J. Coleman R 21 33 33 12 223 10 19 0 212 98 19 51 139 3.27 89
C. Pascual R 34 31 31 8 201 11 15 0 181 72 11 59 111 2.69 109
J. Hannan R 28 33 29 7 193 12 12 0 208 79 7 66 101 3.31 88
J. Moeller R 25 36 32 6 185 9 16 0 198 80 15 44 93 3.45 85
B. Moore L 25 32 18 0 118 3 8 2 116 55 8 42 56 3.37 87
D. Higgins R 28 59 0 0 100 3 5 11 81 40 8 46 66 3.25 90
B. Humphreys R 32 56 0 0 93 4 8 2 78 40 13 30 56 3.69 79
D. Bosman R 24 46 10 0 139 1 10 1 139 63 9 35 63 3.69 79
D. Baldwin R 30 40 0 0 42 0 2 4 40 19 7 12 30 4.07 72
D. Knowles L 26 32 0 0 41 0 2 3 38 11 0 12 37 2.18 134
B. Howard L 25 13 7 0 49 0 6 0 62 30 7 23 23 5.36 54
Others 1 0 51 1 4 0 60 38 5 26 32 5.60 52
TOTAL 161 33 1435 54 107 23 1413 625 109 446 807 3.44 85
Not well. We thought the offense was bad in 1965? By this time, bottom-feeding in The Year of the Pitcher, it’s dwindled down to nothing: its total of 442 runs scored would be the lowest of any team ever playing a 162-game season.
But, how about this, the pitching actually doesn’t fare too badly. Both Ortega and Bertaina, after having been good in 1967, were terrible for the Senators in 1968, and by giving their innings to Hannan and Moeller this ball club actually has a somewhat better staff than the actual team. But that doesn’t make it a good staff by any means; this one would be essentially tied with that of the Angels for the worst in the league.
So our version remains a truly dreadful team, hopelessly mired in last place, 11 games worse than the actual cellar-dwelling Senators.
Where have you gone, Claude Osteen? Our nation’s capital turns its lonely eyes to you … woo-woo-woo …