RIP Peter Angelos (I guess)

[micropolitan guy]

The 1969 Senators were 86-76 and drew more than 900,000, which I think was a franchise record. Then Bob Short made the awful trade with Detroit for Denny McClain, essentially ruining the team.

He also charged some of the highest ticket prices in the league and was very fan unfriendly. He was leveraged to the hilt, ran the club on the cheap and ran it all the way to Texas, where he screwed it up there too.

Again, bad ownership is at the root of almost every single franchise move. Or, in a very, very, very rare case (Brooklyn), good ownership, which saw how much richer his team could be on the opposite coast.

 

[BYH 2: Electric Boogaloo]

I just looked this up. I had no idea that everybody in the AL West was way, way under the .500 mark. The division-leading Rangers were 52-62.
Gwynn was at .394 when the strike hit but was 19-for-40 in August.

On one hand, as we all know, it's forking HARD to hit .400. Gwynn was on pace to play in 153 games, or 43 more after the strike hit. In his final 43 games of the season he hit .406 (67-for-165). Add another 43 games at that clip and he would have finished at .397 (232-for-584). He would have hit .400 for a month-and-a-half and only gained three points in his overall average!

On the other hand, Gwynn was the greatest hitter of his generation and he surely knew, at age 34 with bad knees, this was probably his last shot at it. I really think he would have gotten there. He "only" would have needed two more hits in that final stretch of 165 at-bats. Going 69-for-165 (.418) over his last 43 games would have gotten him to .401 at 234-for-584 (actually .400684etc). I think he would have smelled it and gotten a lot more than those extra two hits. He might have pushed Ted Williams' mark.

To me, this is the biggest and most regretful what-if from 1994...we all saw cartoonishly muscular dudes shatter Roger Maris' mark over the next few years and the randomness of the playoffs (1994 would have been the first year of the wild card) probably means the 105-win Expos lose to the 83-win Dodgers (the NL West was also a disaster of mediocrity when the strike hit). But .400? This was our last shot at seeing that happen. Damn.

 

[swingline]

Excellent. Jane Hathaway would be pleased.

Oh, Jethro!

 

[jr/shotglass]

Excellent. Jane Hathaway would be pleased.

Miss Jane most certainly would not! She was fundamentally opposed to Milburn Drysdale's miserly ways!