TBS: Terrible Baseball Season

Ted Turner had a lot of jobs over the course of his life, largely related to either his father’s advertising business or to the broadcasting conglomerate that he started forming with the acquisition of southern radio and later television stations in the 1960s and ‘70s. But for one day, he also work one of the most exclusive jobs in the world, one that even now only thirty people at any given time can hold: major league manager. In Pittsburgh, facing the Pirates on May 11, 1977, Ted Turner took the field with his recently purchased Atlanta Baseball Team like a (then) modern day Connie Mack. This was an absolute spectacle in itself for Turner’s team, their opponents, and the sparse reported crowd of 6,816 that were on hand to witness it; but the game itself was nothing special, a 2-1 loss that was identical in score to the one they had suffered in game two of a doubleheader the day before. While it is fun that Ted Turner will now forever have an 0-1 managerial record¹ , the loss was notable in one other aspect aside from Turner’s participation - it was the seventeenth consecutive one suffered by the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad 1977 Atlanta Baseball Team.

Not a lot of fans saw this in person, but the thing about this loss, and every single one of the 101 Ls that Atlanta took during 1977, is that a lot of people did watch it in a different manner. Turner had purchased both the baseball team and the Atlanta Hawks in no small part to make sure that he would have sports to show on his newest broadcasting venture. The two franchises had both been broadcast already on his local WTCG station for nearly a decade, but in 1976 the FCC made allowances for Turner to begin sending his programming out via satellite to other cable networks across the country.

Now, with the Turner Broadcasting System or TBS ready to hit the airwaves nationwide, Ted Turner consolidated two of Atlanta’s franchises under his growing umbrella, and was all set to make these teams everyone’s problem. Entering the 1977 MLB season, America was going to become intimately familiar with Atlanta’s roster, including our main character.

This is Jerry Royster. He was the leadoff hitter for Atlanta in that May 11 game against the Pittsburgh Pirates, as well as for most of this 1977 season - of the 140 in which he appeared during that year, 65 of them featured Royster in the leadoff spot. Combined with another 37 games in which he started off in the on-deck circle, Jerry Royster played in 102 games for this team in which he was in one of the arguably two most important spots in the lineup. The year prior, Royster had made his Atlanta debut after a sparse 29 games with the Dodgers across three seasons; and 1976 Jerry Royster was a “valuable” player for Atlanta, producing 1.1 bWAR largely as a result of solid defense on the left side of the infield. His below average OPS+ of 72 might have been a poor fit towards the top of the lineup, but at least he stole 24 bases at a 64.8% success rate - less than you would want now with the hindsight of better analytics, but roughly around league average for the time.

All of this is to say that entering 1977, Jerry Royster was a perfectly average ball player for a slightly below average 70-92 ball club. There was nothing that stood out about this situation, nothing that would make you sit up and pay attention when his slash line stood at .225/.267/.300 through the start of May. There was no indication that we were watching the beginning of something historic when, on May 1, Royster made his first of those 65 appearances in the leadoff spot.

Baseball stats, the kind that you see on the back of a trading card at least, can typically be broken into two broad categories: rate stats and counting stats. Rate stats, like batting or slugging average, can be misleading at times due to small sample size - we’ve all watched in April as some batter tries to see how long they keep an early season average above .400. Counting stats, on the other hand, depend at least in some part on bulk. A player can have the worst batting average imaginable² , but in order to be a real drag on a team’s production, they don’t just have to be bad - they have to be bad for a significant amount of time.

Looking back on this nearly 50 years removed from that season, what’s most impressive is how well Royster’s overall lack of production can hide in plain sight if you’re just looking at the stats of the day. It’s a garbage batting average for sure, but look how quickly the back of that card highlights the team lead in stolen bases that he managed for 1976 and 1977, one of the most important stats for justifying his place in the lineup. Sure, there’s a big drop off in just about everything else year-over-year; but if you didn’t see him play, one could be forgiven for thinking that this was just a normal bad year. The problem, though, to which we’ve already alluded is that many people did watch Jerry Royster play, and play a lot. This was, again, probably the single most viewed team in the history of the sport to that point, and Jerry Royster featured on it prominently.

WAR, despite being an “advanced” stat, is fundamentally a counting stat - you can’t lose your team a lot of wins unless you appear in a lot of games, and Jerry Royster’s 140 games rank 3rd overall on the team³ . Quite simply put, Atlanta fans saw a whole lot of Jerry being not good at the plate while also being equally putrid in the field. Whereas he had spent all of his time in 1976 on the left side of the infield, Royster also played 38 games at second base this season and made a handful of appearances in the outfield.

Royster is not alone, and it’s worth taking some time to shout out another LVP and a few other LVP candidates on this roster, because this team is, to this date, the single worst roster in baseball history in terms of cummulative Wins Against Replacement, with a team total of -10.0 bWAR. Negative Ten Point Oh bWAR. Say that out loud a couple more times to really let that sink in. And an astonishing -4.0 of that belongs to none other than Jerry Royster. Still, that leaves at least -6.0 to be found elsewhere, and a good chunk of that belongs to none other than the season’s other LVP winner on the pitching side: Frank LaCorte.

LaCorte, a righty signed as an undrafted free agent by Atlanta out of Gavillan College in 1972, made his major league debut in late 1975 for a couple spot starts before earning a slightly more permanent spot in the rotation for the 1976 campaign with Royster and co. Much like Royster, he was a slightly above average player during that ‘76 season - he didn’t earn his first win until his 7th start of the season, more than 40 innings into his big-league career by then, but that was more a product of the team’s lack of success than his. To illustrate that, you don’t need to look any further than the gap between his 7.22 ERA and 4.31 FIP entering the 7th start in which he would finally earn that first win. The defense of players like Royster wasn’t doing him any favors, but LaCorte managed to finish the year with a respectable 4.70 ERA⁴ . As for the win-loss record… just don’t look at it, it was a bad team, okay?

Anyway, much like Royster, these results were not good, but they were not an active detriment to the team - all of that was still good for 1.0 bWAR worth of production. And looking forward, there were reasons to be optimistic about the young pitcher entering 1977, just his age-25 season. From the back of one of his contemporary trading cards:

Also like Royster, that is unfortunately not what came to pass. His FIP more than doubled in what ended up being pretty limited playing time the next season, from 3.55 to 7.25; and his ERA was even worse, jumping from an already inflated 4.70 to 11.68. In 37 innings pitched, LaCorte allowed 48 runs, nearly the same total as he’d had in all of 1976 across almost three times as many innings. That quote was pulled from a SSPC card because there is not a single Topps card available featuring Frank LaCorte with Atlanta; and while I doubt his atrocious 1977 is the exclusive reason, it probably didn’t help!

All in all, LaCorte managed to post -2.0 bWAR in just 7 starts and 7 additional relief appearances for the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Atlanta Baseball Team. That would lead all pitchers on the roster, and all pitchers across baseball that season, despite TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE pitchers tossing more innings than him. This is the kind of season that challenges the “WAR is a counting stat” wisdom that we espoused just a few paragraphs ago, but really what it does is show just how atrocious LaCorte’s rate stats were in the limited chances he got. And yet it’s still only the 4th worst total on this team.

Rowland Office and Pat Rockett, two of Royster’s teammates, are an important part of this story. Rockett in particular stands out due to sharing time in the infield with Royster, while Rowland set up his Office in the outfield (sorry). All three of these batters posted an OPS of .633 or lower (which translates to an OPS+ of 64 or lower, i.e. each of these men was, at best, 36% worse than the average hitter). All of them were worth no more than -6 total field runs, with Office the only one to not be a below average fielder by range factor. And despite these three men contributing, between their contributions at the plate and in the field, a grand total of -132 runs according to baseball-reference, these three men accounted for 21.5% of the teams total non-pitcher plate appearances.

In this historically unproductive season, Jerry Royster’s rate stats are bad - .216/.278/.288 is a putrid slash line in any era - but not unprecedentedly so: in 1977 alone, there are 9 other batters to record at least 100 plate appearances with equal or worse marks in each of those three slash line categories, and plenty of other players in the preceding decades have looked even worse. Hall of Famers like Brooks Robinson and Ozzie Smith have posted seasons with incredibly similar lines - they were just doing that while also often leading the league in defensive metrics.

Jerry Royster is as bad at the plate as many of these players, but clearly that’s not what makes this season historic in terms of his production. What does make it historic is that day after day, Atlanta kept penciling him into the lineup because ultimately, it’s not as though they had better options. It goes further than just Royster, Office, Rockett, and LaCorte⁶ - 59% of all of the team’s non-pitcher plate appearances that year were taken by batters with negative bWAR for the season, with 13 different players contributing to that total. Sure, you can take Jerry Royster out of the leadoff spot if your want - now who are you going to replace him with?

The pitching side wasn’t quite as bad, thanks to the titanic efforts of a 38-year-old Phil Niekro leading the league with 330.1 innings in which he accumulated 8.9 bWAR, by far the highest total on the team. No one else on the pitching staff had even half of those innings or bWAR total, with Dick Ruthven’s 151 the second highest mark for innings and closer Dave Campbell⁷ second in bWAR with 3.7. All in all, only 19% of the team’s innings came from 10 below-replacement-level arms, and Frank LaCorte is by far the worst of them even in his comparatively small sample size. However it’s not as though some secretly dominant pitching staff was being somehow obscured by the much more atrocious offense.

The 1977 Atlanta Baseball Team was, top to bottom, garbage. 23 of the 42 players to put on the jersey that year posted a negative bWAR total. If you threw a dart at a board featuring them all, you had a 54.7% chance of landing on a player with negative value. Jerry Royster doesn’t appear in 140 games if all of the other infield options are nearly as bad - he can’t stack up his record-setting total without the maybe-not-equal-but-still-significant negative contributions of all of those teammates. Royster and LaCorte were deserving LVPs, but if there’s any one point that all of these words about such a terrible squad can reveal, I’d hope for it to be this: the LVP is an honor that can only go to two players every year, but this is absolutely an award that requires teamwork.

1  It was made very clear after this one appearance that MLB would not be permitting Turner to continue the charade

2  And for what it’s worth, 3140 players in major league history have a batting average of .000

3  His 491 plate appearances rank 4th overall because he got yanked for defensive replacements not infrequently, put a pin in that

4  Good for an 81 ERA+ that season, and compared to a 3.55 FIP

5  9.7 K/9 across all levels of the minors through the end of 1976

6  That would make a hell of a personal injury lawfirm name

7  He’s listed as the closer and did lead the team in saves… with only 13 all year