A Team with Four 20-Game Losers
This article appears in SABR’s “20-Game Losers” (2017), edited by Bill Nowlin and Emmet R. Nowlin.
As we have seen, there are lots of different kinds of 20-game losers, even nearly two dozen of whom became Hall of Famers. We noticed that more than once there was a team that had two pitchers who each lost 20 or more games.
It was with some surprise, however, that we discovered a team with four 20-game losers – in the same year. It seems almost mathematically impossible. After all, that meant just those four pitchers alone accounted for 80 losses. Actually, it was worse than 80 – although one was a 20-game winner, not one of the quartet lost as few as 20 games. The four pitchers collectively lost 94 games, and this was in the days of the 154-game schedule.
The 1905 Boston Beaneaters managed to achieve this distinction. We decided to give them their own section in this book.
The four pitchers were:
- Irv Young (20-21)
- Chick Fraser (14-21)
- Kaiser Wilhelm (3-23)
- … and the future Hall of Famer in the group, Vic Willis (12-29).
Willis’s biography we have included in the section on Hall of Famers. The other three are presented here.
The Beaneaters finished with a 51-103 record in 1905, but they didn’t finish in last place. The Brooklyn Superbas (48-104) were marginally worse despite boasting only two 20-game losers, Mal Eason (5-21) and Harry McIntire (8-25).
As it happens, the 1906 Boston National League team managed to surpass (if that is the word) the 1905 team. They did manage to finish last – 66½ games out of first place, the first year in franchise history that the team placed last. They have four 20-game losers, too. For the record, the four in 1906 were:
- Big Jeff Pfeffer (13-22)
- Vive Lindaman (12-23)
- Gus Dorner (8-25), and our returning friend from 1905 back for more:
- Irv Young (16-25)
That totals 95 losses, topping the 1905 crew by one. It’s impossible for a pitcher to win a game if his team fails to score even one run. The 1906 Boston Doves (as they were called) were shut out 28 times. In nine starts, Young saw the team shut out. Lindaman lost eight shutouts, Dorner lost seven, and Pfeffer lost four
The 1907 Doves had only one 20-game loser: Irv Young, for the third year in a row.
BILL NOWLIN has never lost even one major-league game. A member of SABR’s board of directors since 2004, he has written or edited more than 60 books, mostly on baseball, and is a co-founder of Rounder Records.