(Add your writeups of how you built your terrible teams here)

Congrats to jtvaughey for drawing the short straw to manage the Beasts of Burden. You’ve got your work cut out for you.

There are many roads to awfulness, and my goal was to include every filthy truckstop restroom on the trip. The question is whether I had to include any potential strength or area of decent usefulness, and if so how do I minimize it?

The hallmarks of my roster are inflexibility, depth where you need it least, and brutally painful defense. So let’s start by pointing out that there are 18 catchers on this roster. Originally I had 10 versions of Bill Bergen, one of the worst hitting catchers ever if not the worst, and it was kind of hysterical. But it turned out that wasting more salary on some of those spots allowed me to make the team much worse, so I settled for 5 Bergens. The marginal increase of putridity started to decline a lot once I got to 5, so I preserved those.

We had to have 500 PA at each fielding position, so I aimed for the worst hitter who met the goal of having barely over 500 PA while providing an iron glove. I ensured that only one player qualified at each defensive position, although technically the roster’s only SS can also play 1B or 2B but then you’d have no SS. That would be 1905 Hal Chase, the only non-catcher. In a 10-game spring league, Chase made 20 errors. I think you’d do worse with anyone else on the roster there, though.

Let’s look at the starting lineup, aside from catcher where there is no shortage of soft-hitting options. On the plus side, you’ve got a lot of great throwing arms.

1B: 1941 Harry Danning (.244/.292/.355), .964 FLD, 2.27 RF, 522 PA
2B: 1944 Mickey Owen (.273/.326/.336), .866, 0.43, 530
SS: 1905 Hal Chase (.249/.277/.329), .746, 1.93, 545
3B: 1897 Bill Wilson (.213/.257/.273), .838, 0.79, 518
OF: 1993 Benito Santiago (.230/.291/.380), .924, 1.48, 515
OF: 1981 John Wathan (.252/.298/.312), .960, 0.31, 520
OF: 1920 Patsy Gharrity (.245/.307/.322), .904, 0.47, 517

Everyone bats right-handed, except switch-hitting Matt Walbeck (.204/.246/.284) if you’re really wanting a lefty in there. Three guys have speed in the 60s, and all the rest but one are in the 40s. All told the team slashes .210/.255/.273 with 8699 PA for the hitters. There are 55 total homers, 13 by Benito, who almost looks too good for this team. I also made sure I didn’t include any decent-hitting pitchers who might help their cause.

As for those pitchers, well there are only 6 of them. Sure, one is 2003 Eric Gagne to hold down all those leads you might manage. But he will also get forced into other games because of the arm shortage and will get hurt by the defense. Another of the six pitchers is 40-inning 1896 Jake Boyd, so you know he will be fatigued often. The other four are just an assortment of badness.

About the only positive is they don’t give up a lot of homers, should this team face some sluggers. But they won’t get many strikeouts, which means more balls in play for the lousy defense. With just 1424 IP in Coors, it’s possible that they’ll suffer some fatigue, but more likely it will be the lack of anyone else to pitch that causes the grief. The team landed in a division with two other Coors teams and an AL with many hitters’ parks, so that ought to accelerate the damage.

Here’s how I see some of the pain developing: With way more than half the games in Coors, the eight position players will start to suffer fatigue fairly quickly, I think. The only possible backups for any of them are weak catchers. So as the season progresses, I actually think the team will get worse, unless those OOP catchers turn out to field better than I expect them to. They made 38 errors and had 3 minus plays in the 10 spring games. The lack of range and the errors will lead to a lot of big innings and wear down the pitchers, too. Gagne will get used in blowouts here and there and won’t have many leads to protect anyway.

Maybe you’ll find some holes I didn’t foresee. Maybe playing nothing but bad teams evens the field enough that since someone has to win it might as well be these guys much of the time. Good luck!

Quite an insightful writeup! I'm hesitant to write too much about Uncle Kunkel and his team, as I tried to be a little sneaky about the ways in which I made it bad. I'm hoping I made it look deceptively decent only for the new owner to discover otherwise partway through the season.

Mlipo11, I'm sorry you ended up with That Desperate Feeling....

I started with hitting. Having just wrapped up the Win by Losing league and seeing just how painful errors can be, I wanted to make sure the defense was atrocious as possible. I searched for the absolute worst FLD% at each position with 500 PA or more, and found some real painful defenders. Then, to make sure these were the guys that played every game, made sure their backups would be worse by only drafting DHs who would have to play out of position or guys like Frank Bonner who had a .698 FL% at his primary (and best % of the three he qualifies for). When there were multiple fielders with similar FLD% at a position, I chose the worst hitter of the bunch, which is why I drafted Lou Bierbauer at C over the other 4 that met the qualifications I set.

You do have two hitters that can hit, but Edgar Martinez is genuinely the only guy you can play at 3B without making your defense even worse than his .835 FLD% and Franmil Reyes has an .880 in the OF, which with the majority of the hitters and pitchers likely being deadball guys, means these two FLD# is going to look more like .795 (Reyes) and .789 (Edgar). So, have fun with Reyes and his 60+ errors in the OF and Edgar's 200 at 3B.

I wanted to give a little hope by including Bill Hallman (who has A FLD at 2B and B+ FLD at 3B) just to have whoever gets this team realize, that if they were to actually use Hallman at either of those positions it would mean using Canavan at SS (or Bonner or a DH at SS), and it's better to just leave Hallman at SS, Edgar at 3B, and Canavan at 2B.

Your pitchers are the strength of this team, but that's not saying much. You have 3,556 IP with a slash of 5.39/.318/1.72 with 9 pitchers having 300+ IP. I was kind enough to gift 4 pitchers with less than 40 IP, but all four have a slash worse than 11.57/.405/2.36 and all of them give up HRs at a rate of 14.40/9 or worse.

I focused very hard on finding pitchers that matched specific criteria for awfulness, while also keeping them to pre-1908 to make sure the fielders committed as many errors as possible. Morrison and Crowell normalize better than I'd like, but the rest will perform much worse than their stats already look. Not to mention they'll keep the ball bouncing off of your fielders gloves.

I also made sure to include the hitless wonder Jose Martinez as though his fielding bug has been much communicated to admin (and shared in the forums), they still haven't found a fix for him. They found a bug that was impacting multiple fielders without fielding stats, but that fix didn't effect him, then they changed him from 1B to DH, and that didn't fix it either, so it's still a work in progress, so not only will he not get any hits for you, but he won't field any balls either, with an error for every opportunity that comes his way until he can be fixed.

Trading is your only hope, and I did at least give you some financial flexibility by including some scrubs and a little buffer from $80m to allow some trading, so good luck on that front, you don't have any players worth acquiring, so flexibility there still might not help you move anyone.

I haven't brought up the most dasterdly deed in this team building strategy, but I'll share that as we get a little further into the season...

mattedesa
As I put in the comments, Cory Snyder was a favorite of mine as a kid - I loved his cannon of an arm. I think MLB used to have skills competitions around the All-Star break that he did well in. Knowing he was also a SS for a bit - I am throwing him there.
The Kunkel Klones will rotate in and out at 2b.
And I like Rob Deer - so as flawed as the offense is, I like a lot of these guys - from a baseball side of things - probably not so much in this particular set up ha ha ha

As for Right Said Fred Bobby (Witt)
Lots of speed - they just don't know when to stop. And a 1B whose expertise is the one-base hit. Also only right-handed hitters.
For pitching, 5 Bobby Witt clones set up the theme for the pitching. A lot of strikeouts, a lot of walks sprinkle in a good number of wild pitches and hit batters. You might be tempted to use Clement in the rotation, but his innings may be of more use as a mop-up guy hitting every other batter he faces. Also - everyone throws right-handed.

I ran this team through a preseason. A lot of close games. I tried to give someone a line up that would make the box scores fun to read, filled with lots of things happening.

I see some folks tried to limit at-bats, I went about it by buying at-bats that will never be used.

Gold Gloves at Every Position

Well...basically I wanted to construct a team that would give up 20 runs a game on average, if not more. We'll see if that happens here.

Let's start with the pitching staff. I see that a lot of guys went with the "load up with thousands of innings that will never be used" strategy. I went the other way...I want bad awful execrable pitchers to throw the vast majority of your innings. I did give you Gagne, Eck, and Kimbrel...that's 220 IP of the very best IP in SLB. Of course those innings cost ~$23.5M, so I was able to allocate the rest of your pitching budget to the wonderful sextet of George Keefe, Ed Green, Jack Wadsworth, Adonis Terry, Scott Stratton, and Steve Blass. Let's just look at Green: .322 OAV, 1.89 WHIP. That should go well at Hilltop...did I mention you get to play in Hilltop? Oh, Green is by FAR the best of those six pitchers. The good news is they only give you ~1180 innings, meaning you jussssst barely have 1400. We'll see how quickly that fatigue kicks in.

My goal for the defense was not to help you out a bit. So, you have exactly 8 players who have any defensive ratings at all.

Frank Isbell is a decent C+/A first baseman. But I don't think you'll be able to use him there, because he is your only rated catcher, where his .743 fielding percentage should be fun to watch. Isbell is also rated at SS (.784) but I don't expect you'll use him there either. Sadie Houck gives you an upgrade with his ,853 fielding percentage at short. Ivy Griffin is your only 2B (other than Houck)...Ivy weighs in at a solid 189lbs at second. Oops, sorry, that's not his weight...that's his error rate, .189. His fielding percentage is .811. At the hot corner, meet Billy O'Brien (.830), and in the outfield you have Khris Davis (.893), JD Martinez (.906), and Mitchell Page (.894). All told I expect about 15% of the outs your pitcher's generate to become errors.

Every other position player is DH with no defensive ratings at all, including the above referenced Jose Martinez.
Suffice to say none of the above mentioned players can hit. Oh, there's a little bit of HR power on the team, some of which will be wasted at Hilltop. But nobody gets on base except Ruth.

Yes, of course, there is the Babe ($14M, 1926 version) whom I assume you will use at first base. Babe has a shot to win the triple crown...but even if he drives in 300 runs, I don't think it will be enough. The combination of terrible pitching, worse defense, fatigue, and Hilltop will hopefully allow way more runs than even the Babe could create on his best days.

Posted by vaugheyj on 12/17/2020 2:14:00 PM (view original):
mattedesa
As I put in the comments, Cory Snyder was a favorite of mine as a kid - I loved his cannon of an arm. I think MLB used to have skills competitions around the All-Star break that he did well in. Knowing he was also a SS for a bit - I am throwing him there.
The Kunkel Klones will rotate in and out at 2b.
And I like Rob Deer - so as flawed as the offense is, I like a lot of these guys - from a baseball side of things - probably not so much in this particular set up ha ha ha

Deer was part of some of the Tigers teams I followed closely as a kid. I wonder how he, Snyder, and and the other all-or-nothing guys will fare in the worst park for homers against a high percentage of pitchers from the deadball era. It could backfire on me, but only time will tell.

The Rangers were the other team I followed as a kid. My dad and I like to refer to Uncle Kunkel just 'cause it sounded funny. He seemed to always be around, but never doing much of any importance. He's not the absolute worst, but is symbolic for me of a low-value player. Ironic that he may end up being one of the best middle infielders in the league.

in creating "2020" i attacked the pitching first...

pitching and defense wins games.

you have 3 starters with more than 400ip each. 3 day rotation of dead ball pitchers. great, each of their whip's tops 1.7... oav over .32...
hopefully they can get a lot of complete games for you as your 4 man (109.3 ip) bullpen won't hold up if they actually have to toe the rubber. at least two of them are lefty which seems to be a rare commodity judging by the other write ups.

and hilltop should help them keep the arms healthy.

now the defense.

you have 8 players with defensive ratings. one for every position. some of them have a reason to bring a glove, some not so much. all of them float around the mendoza line. they hit poorly enough that the 500-600 pa each might let them play all season.

if they have to sit? in tribute to 2020 including a universal DH you have thousands of pa from players with no fielding grades. look at all those big inning pinch hitters. hand them a glove and hope they can overcome the errors?

the pitchers should be able to overcome that right?

Old Hoss Badbourn

My goal was disaster fielding at SS, 2B and C, the three positions that get the most chances. Gil Hodges is going to be a passed ball machine, and I can't remember the names of the scrubs with D-/D- ratings I drafted for SS and 2B, but they're awful and worse, there's no backup so those guys are almost certainly going to get tired and be even worse in the field. The other hitters are all bad fielders and bad hitters, and the bench is a long list of DHs who can't hit to get barely over the 5400 PA minimum. The plan was to force micromanaging to the point of exhaustion. Then I just drafted six bad 19th century pitches who have 3000 innings between them. One of them is the legend Old Hoss Radbourn, where the team name comes from. Sadly his incredible 1884 season was one year too early to make WIS or he'd be even more of a WIS household name than Silver King

Have fun with this squad, contrarian!

Created Dung Beetle Heaven

No great mystery what the theory was if you look at the roster - waste as much salary as I could on terrible pitchers, combine that with horrible defense, and put the whole shebang into Coors so they'd give up a crazy amount of runs, but provide no hitting (either average or power) so the team won't even have a puncher's chance in most games.

Early returns on the team I drafted.
Lots of steals and they have been caught the second most. However - I am guessing so many catchers have D arms (catchers have a CS% of 30%) - that is helping with the SB percentage.
Bobby Witt is crushing it. Lots of strikeouts and they have been able to keep the walks to about league average. For now. Leading the league in wild pitches and league average in hit batsmen.

One thing I got right - 11 games in and no one has hit a home run yet

There are lots of ways to make a poor team. I tried to knock out the fatigue strategy with the roster restrictions, and so far, that seems to have worked, though we're still early. To me, just shorting people on PA or IP is the cheap, easy way out, and quite frankly, boring. I wanted to make people be a little more creative than that. Also, the last time I played one of these, there was a lot of argument about people using the work-around to draft people out of position, so that's why I made the 500 PA at each position requirement.

Bad defense does seem to be a common strategy, and there does seem to be a correlation between defense and W/L record so far, with only a couple outliers. Do we adjust the defensive requirements to eliminate the all D-/D- defensive team? I've considered allowing only players from 1900 and later, as that would knock out a lot of the terrible defensive players and the ubiquitous 300-500 terrible IP guys from pre-1900.

My hope with this league was to inspire creative ways to be bad. For instance, when I built my team, I spent money on home run hitters. I went with all or nothing, low OBP guys that might hit homers, but usually with no one on base. Put it all in a park that suppresses homers, and I figured it would be pretty ineffective. Looking at the home/road splits, it is working to some degree. Additionally, I only gave the team 1 pitcher with more than 2 IP/G, hoping that the new owner would have difficulty effectively managing what was essentially a team of high IP setup men. I spent money on defense in the less important positions, and gave them bad defense in the middle infield. Admittedly, I went for the chuckle by selecting an all Rob Deer outfield and Jeff Kunkel for all the backup infielder positions, and I could have probably chosen worse, but I thought it would be fun. That's why we're here, anyways, isn't it? For fun?

The reason I elected to allow trading was to give good managers an opportunity to make shrewd trades and improve their terrible team. An excellently bad roster would be one that had few tradable pieces that anyone else would want, but still, the manager who stayed active through the season and tweaked things would have a better chance of succeeding than the one who set an opening day roster and left it alone.

Just like in a normal league, there are always going to be some people who only do a so-so job of building a roster. I don't think there's any way around a few owners getting lucky with a better than average team.

I welcome your thoughts - please explain your reasoning!

I'd go even further and make it 1950 or later, you just about completely eliminate the innings-eating scrub pitchers and you introduce home runs into the picture, which are always fun, right now even against deliberately bad pitching staffs the league average is 12 HRs in 31 games, I promise that will not happen in the modern era. there are also a lot fewer train wreck fielders to choose from when you take out the deadball era.

then there's the added bonus that people will actually be familiar with many of the players on their team, and not just familiar with them as WIS players, but as real players they saw play. that makes it a lot more fun.

for the position players you could require a minimum 20 games as well as 500 PAs for each position to weed out the guys who played 1 game at a position and have a D-/D-

Love the idea of a post-integration only time period. Would setup a while slew of new strategies to overcome... or at least harder to execute strategies if anyone was trying to mirror the current strategies. I don’t mind the positional requirements, it does save from the all DH teams.

And some strategies need to be played out to see how they work. Matt Clement seems to be able to overpower weak hitters - his wildness does not seem to be coming out (yet) - I tried to draft pitchers that had (seemingly) a lot of walks, wild pitches, and hit batman - and so far they have been able to keep themselves in check. Baserunners do better, as I suspect there are a lot of bad catchers, negating the poor baserunning skills. And the players I gave him have only hit 2 home runs so far. So a team may look bad, but they are playing mostly their equal. I also wanted the team to be entertaining (lots of running, sometimes being safe - and a box score full of pitching surprises) - I would probably take a different approach next time.

So maybe a cap on how much a player can make? or a certain number of over $10M or $15M players? I don't think you want to overcomplicate it.