Have You Heard The One About The Worst Pitching Staff Ever?
How one of baseball's most-repeated fun facts took over the world.
Installment 4:
Jon Miller: In 1930 the Phillies hit .315—that was their team batting average. They scored 6.2 runs a game. Pretty good—
Shawn Estes: Yeah. Real good! I think their team average is .215 this year.
Miller: —And they lost 102 games.
Estes: They— They lost 102 with that kind of offense? [Laughs] Wow! Obviously the pitching wasn’t that great.
—SF Giants’ broadcast, June 1, 2022
1.
Claude Willoughby threw about 10,000 pitches in the major leagues, many of them undoubtedly perfect. He was a below-average major league pitcher, and when he was active there weren’t 300 people in the whole world who could pitch a baseball like he could. In his best season, he threw 243 innings with an ERA better than the league average and he won 15 games for a fifth-place team. He faced one of the greatest right-handed hitters ever, Rogers Hornsby, 52 times, and he got Hornsby out 26 times. That isn’t quite as impressive as walking on the moon, but it’s at least getting into space.
Six years into his career, something big and out of his control changed the premise of his job: The ball got juiced. In 1930 Willoughby had one of his worst years, in one of the toughest seasons anybody ever had to pitch through, in one of the smallest ballparks anybody ever had to pitch in, with one of the most hapless defenses anybody ever had to pitch in front of. After that season happened to Willoughby, the Phillies traded him to the Pirates, and then after a little while the Pirates released him, and then he started down the minor-league twisty slide, and in 1937 he retired from baseball, moved back home to Kansas, and became a pump mechanic.
Some years later, he became a punchline, closely associated with one of the most repeated fun facts of the 20th century, thanks to a teammate named Fresco Thompson.
Thompson was the team captain of the 1930 Phillies, who finished in last place. Just like Willoughby, he was traded after that season, and not long after that he was also released by his new team, and then he as well went down the twisty slide. But after Thompson retired from playing he stayed in baseball as a minor league manager, then scout, then executive, and eventually the Dodgers’ GM. So while Willoughby was working on pumps, Thompson was telling stories to baseball writers. In 1951 the Saturday Evening Post—with a circulation close to 5 million—ran an article naming Thompson Baseball’s Mr. Wisecrack. Much of his material was about the 1930 Phillies, whose hitters scored a ton of runs but whose pitchers allowed even more. They have, in fact, the worst team ERA in AL/NL history.
Thompson told the story of taking the lineup card out to umpire Bill Klem one day. In the pitcher’s spot, Thompson had written: “Willoughby—and others.” Klem made him scratch it out and admonished, “this is a serious game, young man.” To which Thompson replied, “Wait and see,” and then, after Willoughby was knocked out in the first inning, Thompson hollered: “'See Bill, what'd I tell you?”
That’s not that funny. But the rules are that if a baseball person says something that acknowledges the concept of humor it will be repeated over and over and over. Baseball is a photocopy machine for funny stories, with quotes and stories like Thompson’s being eternally regathered by sportswriters, broadcasters, authors and fans. Columnists around the country thirstily slurped up Thompson’s Saturday Evening Post stories and repeated them, immediately in 1951 and for decades after. And, near as I can tell, the repetition of Thompson’s stories corresponded to the public discovering that the 1930 Phillies were weeeeeeeeeird. Super weird.
I will not overwhelm you with press clippings of the 1930 Phillies’ growing legend after 1951. (They had almost no press clippings before 1951.) But three important details are relevant:
1. In January 1954, a syndicated sports trivia box appeared in newspapers with these two questions:
Q. What major league baseball team had eight men with averages .313 or better and still finished 40 games behind the pennant winner?
Q. What big league ball club had three men who drove in a total of 389 runs and nevertheless finished last?
The answer to both was, of course, the 1930 Phillies.
2. In the early 1960s, an advertising agency created the Sport Fans! I Bet You Didn’t Know template. These advertisements, which ran in local and regional papers, were made to look just like a local sports column, except the columnist (with a columnist photo and everything) was the owner or general manager of some local business. In Dayton, Ohio, the column was “written” by R.H. “Bud” Boos of White-Allen Chevrolet. In Lafayette, Indiana, the credit went to Sam Ziffrin of Better Brands Inc., the local Rolling Rock distributor. The names and faces were localized, but the main text was not: It was always a little sports trivia, with a sales pitch wedged into the middle or tacked on at the end. The 1930 Phillies were a constant in these bits. From 1963 to 1979, under dozens of generic businessmen photos, versions of this fun fact were used to advertise, among other things, insurance, spring jackets, new and used car dealerships, brewing supplies, appliance repairs, suits, auto repairs, tires, Rolling Rock and Schlitz, a 1964 Ford Falcon 2-Door Sedan With The Big Engine for $1,999, and a 1979 Pontiac Firebird with 4,871 miles on it for $6,495: “One of the strangest teams in baseball history was the 1930 Phillies. All eight regular players on that team batted over .300 that year—yet the team finished in last place!”
3. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the 1930 Phillies were fodder for dozens of actual sports columns. Some of those sportswriters were just hacks copying the same quotes and repeating the same figures and sometimes outright plagiarizing each other. But some of these writers were legends. Just as every stand-up comic tells a version of the Aristocrats joke, just as every magician performs some twist on Cups & Balls, it seems every post-Fresco sportswriter had their version of the 1930 Phillies fun fact.
In 1962, the LA Times’ Jim Murray—perhaps the most celebrated sports-page columnist ever—retold the “Willoughby—and others” story, along with this: “That team which had eight men batting over .300 … yet lost the pennant by 40 games and finished last!”
In 1975, the legendary Red Smith of the New York Times wrote that the 1930 Phillies “wouldn't dream of taking the field with fewer than eight .300 hitters in the batting order. They had a pitcher named Claude William Willoughby, alias Weeping Willie. Starting and relieving, Willoughby won four games, lost 17, and compiled an earned run average of 7.59 in 1930. Which explains why Weeping Willie Wept and the Phillies with their eight .300 hitters finished last.”
In 1959, the great San Francisco columnist Charles Einstein wrote, in an aside about local restaurants, that "the food has to be good, but it isn't everything. Every man in the starting lineup for the 1930 Phillies was a .300 hitter, but they finished dead last.”
That fact apparently stuck to Einstein. He apparently couldn’t get it out of his head. Decades later, in his magnificent opus Willie’s Time—the only sports biography to be named a Pulitzer finalist—Einstein wanted to make a point about the ability of small numbers to tell huge stories. The evidentiary fun fact that he pulled out of his lifetime of baseball experience was this one:
When the record proclaims that the 1930 Phillies collected 1,783 hits, had eight players with batting averages of .313 or higher, with just three of them driving in a total of 389 runs among them, and finished dead last, 40 games behind the pennant winner, then it has taken just four numbers to describe the 1930 Phillies.
I will note that I strongly disagree with that conclusion.
2.
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