Your most underrated teams

[witesoxfan]

Not that you have to do any real research, but the board is bored and I figure talking about baseball is awesome.

 

Anyways, I was actually looking at Ted Kluszewski's stats the other day, and saw that he had a 1.049 OPS in 1954 and finished 2nd in the MVP voting. I was curious to see who could have actually been better than him and it turns out Willie Mays actually was better than him that year. So then I went to see who won it in the AL - Yogi Berra with a whopping .855 OPS. 4th in voting that year was Minnie Minoso, who actually led the league in bWAR, so talk about media bias if you want to, though it was a time frame when people considered a team's success more than they did the individual season.

 

Which leads to the main focus of this - spots 2, 3, 5, and 6 in the MVP race all belonged to members of the Cleveland Indians (Larry Doby, Bobby Avila, Bob Lemon, and Early Wynn respectively). I saw that and figured that team had to have put up some gaudy numbers, and jesus did they. 111 wins (in 154 games), 2nd in the league in runs scored (746), 1st in runs allowed (504). More specifically, they had 5 regulars with an OPS over .822, and of their 5 starters who threw significant innings, Art Houtteman had the worst ERA and ERA+ (3.35 and 109). Oh, and Bob Feller was still bringing it at 35 - even though he threw the fewest innings of the staff, he put up a 3.09 ERA and a 119 ERA+.

 

They were swept in the World Series by the Giants, who "only" won 97.

 

Damn, that Indians team was ridiculous.

 

Oh, and parity in the AL? Not happening. Indians won 111, Yankees finished 2nd at 103, Chicago finished 3rd with 94 wins, and Boston finished 4th with 69 wins. Yes, that is a 35 win differential between 3rd and 4th.

[Milkman delivers]

That shows me two things.

 

1.) The Sox seemingly just always had a better team in front of them (which we all knew)

 

2.) The Indians have a tradition of being great in the regular season and blowing it in the postseason

[clyons]

Oh, and parity in the AL? Not happening. Indians won 111, Yankees finished 2nd at 103, Chicago finished 3rd with 94 wins, and Boston finished 4th with 69 wins. Yes, that is a 35 win differential between 3rd and 4th.

 

Remember there were only 8 teams in the league then. It stands to reason that with 3 teams with those ridiculous win totals, the other 5 had to have lots o' losses.