Monday, May 12, 2008

Two bits of trivia

1 -- on question from post below about what ML teams have never lost a series in post-season. Well, there's the, ahem, Marlins, and the team that was formerly known as the Devil Rays. But what about the Washington Nationals. Certainly, never in post-season. Their predecessor, the Expos. were leading in 1994 when the season was wiped out. But a web search showed that in the 1981 split season they were in the playoffs. They defeated the Phillies, 3-2, then lost to the Dodgers.
2 -- When I went to a ball game with Tom, he asked -- which pitcher won the most games for the Marlins in the inaugural season fo 1993. The answer is Chris Hammond. Remember him?
-- This is written from the Marlins foreign outpost of Barcelona ....

1 comment:

rdfrench said...

Not that I particularly care, but it seems to me that the question of which teams can be said never to have lost a post season series can be answered in a variety of ways, depending on how you define the term. Here are two examples: the Kansas City A's and the Seattle Pilots. The A's lost in Philadelphia and in Oakland, but never in Kansas City; the Pilots only existed for one year, went broke, and MLB reorganized the franchise the next year as the Milwaukee Brewers. Similarly, the second version of the Washington Senators never made the post-season. After they moved to DFW, and became the Rangers, they did lose in the post season.
And, of course, if you look in Baseball-Reference, there appear to be dozens of 19th century teams that never won in the post-season.
I do agree that of the teams currently in operation, if you ignore their vagabond incarnations (e.g., the Nats), the the Marlins and Rays stand alone.