The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation… But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.


—Henry David Thoreau (even though Pink Floyd claim that it's the English way). The last sentence should be repeated ad nauseam to Paul DePodesta for the Derrek Lowe signing

There's an email trail going on in SABR-L, the mailing list for the members of the Society for American Baseball Research, trying to find the "biggest loser". That is, the player with the most seasons exclusively on losing teams. Here are the results (note, mine differ from SABR-L since I list by a player's team-seasons and I don't include .500 seasons as losing seasons—They count as half a winning season in the percentages):

Kendall is a good bet to get off that list this year with the A's. Higginson is a good bet to break the "record". Win Mercer has to be the most ironic name in sport. By the way, that the Pirates, not the Marlins, Abraham Nunez, and the Brewers, not the Royals, Jeff D'Amico (though he was a "loser", too).

I included team winning percentage in the study to add depth to the loserdom. Here are the players that lag the farthest behind in that category (min. 5 seasons):

Barnie's luck improved somewhat (.438) as a manager. Charlie Gould was a member of the Cincinnati "Red Stockies" and enjoyed their winning streak for the better part of two seasons, 1869-70. I guess he "forgot" how to win. My friend Chris points out that Dick Harley and Crazy Schmidt were members of the team widely regarded as the worst in baseball history, the 1899 Cleveland Spiders.

Next, I took a look at the biggest winners, the players who spent the most seasons on winning teams:

You'll note that there are quite a few Yankees from the last decade or so. There are good number of Yankees and, unexpectedly, Orioles on the list. The active leader is the Braves' Chipper Jones. For those of you who don't remember Tom Burns, he was a long-time Cub—actually they were still known as the White Stockings back then—infielder from the nineteenth century.

Now here's the list by team winning percentage (min. of 5 team-seasons):

The highest team winning percentage (min. 5 years) for an active player is (.618) Orlando Hernandez followed by three Braves: Chipper Jones (.614), Mark DeRosa (.610), and Andruw Jones (.609). By the way, the worst active is Jamie Walker (.383), Eric Munson (.389), and boatload of players who were on the Devil Rays over the last five years (.395).

Finally, if you are not yet sick of this, I re-ran the data solely for Hall of Famers (i.e., those selected as players).

Here are the best by percentage of winning seasons:

Now the worst:

Here are the best by team winning percentage:

And the worst:

Finally here is a comparison between the totals and average for Hall of Fame members and all players overall:

By the way, the overall numbers are below .500 since losing teams tend to have more players. Therefore, it's not a zero-sum result.

So is team performance a criterion that influences Hall voters or just a happy byproduct of great individual performance? I ran a correlation between a Hall of Famer's wait, i.e., the time between retirement and his induction to the Hall (ignoring years prior to the first vote in 1936), and his team's performance. Do players on perennial winners gain entrance to the halcyon Hall more easily? Well, the correlation doesn't indicate it. Neither percentage of winning seasons nor team winning percentage had any relationship whatsoever to a short wait for induction.

Next, does longevity come from being on winning teams or vice versa?

Well, you can't stick around if you don't perform, but it does flatten out rather quickly. Apparently, players who wash out rather quickly are not involved with the best organizations, however.