How, you might ask, does this post’s title have anything to do with the EFL?
Regardez:
Standings after Week 6, game 3 (May 1, 2024)
| Team | Wins | Losses | WPct | GB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canberra Kangaroos | 21.30 | 11.70 | .645 | 0.0 |
| D.C. Balk | 18.51 | 14.49 | .561 | 2.8 |
| Flint Hill Tornadoes | 17.63 | 15.37 | .534 | 3.7 |
| Peshastin Pears | 16.63 | 16.37 | .504 | 4.7 |
| Pittsburgh Alleghenys | 16.44 | 16.56 | .498 | 4.9 |
| Salem Seraphim | 15.75 | 17.25 | .477 | 5.6 |
| Cascadia Glaciers | 15.63 | 17.37 | .474 | 5.7 |
| Haviland Dragons | 15.30 | 17.70 | .464 | 6.0 |
| Portland Rosebuds | 14.46 | 18.54 | .438 | 6.8 |
| Kaline Drive | 12.37 | 20.63 | .375 | 8.9 |
| Old Detroit Wolverines | 8.69 | 24.31 | .263 | 12.6 |
Or perhaps you need more color in your life, and fewer decimal places:
As you can see, seven of the EFL’s 11 teams are under .500. Those five teams with .400+ winning percentages may be flawed, but it would be a stretch to call them BAD. The Drive are under .400, so the Wizard of Whidbey may have moments when he thinks of Kaline as being bad. That would be understandable, but it is easy to imagine how a team can be worse.
Even easier to imagine when there is a team right there in front of us, conspicuously BEING worse, having just finished a stretch of 7 straight days without recording a rounded-off win. They “ended” that nasty string by winning 0.2 of a game against the Kangaroos. They have no guarantee they won’t go BACK to having only 8 rounded-off wins. Their best day in over a week still lowered their winning percentage to .263, on pace for a 42.6 – 119.4 season record.
And that was BEFORE we learned about Byron Buxton’s knee. It’s sore again. It needs an MRI. Like clockwork, except more predictable.
There are worse teams than the Woeverines — Rockies, Marlins, White Sox — but they’re not in the EFL.
The Wolverines are so bad they have barely half the winning percentage of possibly the worst-run franchise in all of professional sports: the Oakland Athletics. Sure, the A’s are 15 – 17, a .469 winning percentage that would put them in the middle of our EFL pack (where the average winning percentage is .476). But they’ve maneuvered themselves out of having a stadium to play in after this year, have almost nothing to show from trading their last wave of stars for prospects, and have had days when there were at least as many diehard A’s fans outside the stadium protesting than there were inside watching a home game. (That last one applies to the W’s, too, now that I think about it.)
For the next three years they are going to be sleeping on the couches of the AAA Sacramento Rivercats, one spilled bag of Doritos from homelessness.
The Wolverines, as I said, are about half as good as the A’s.
This morning I read a post on MLBtraderumors that was officially about the A’s, but applied even better to the W’s. . Here are some excerpts from this damning exchange:
“Phillip asks: Mason Miller … [is] amazing, and totally wasted on the [W]’s right now… But any trade would best be for solid prospects-SEVERAL solid prospects- who are 2-3 seasons away instead of MLB-ready guys who would also be wasted on the current and near-future teams. Given that, what team has those far away prospects to pay for [this]… splendid slinger?
“This brings up a philosophical question: should bad teams have nice things? Mason Miller provides a reason to watch the [W]’s, and his season has been insane so far. And while he’s under team control through the 202[8] season, we can’t count on him to hold up ...
“So the cold-hearted logical answer is for the [W]’s to trade Miller as soon as possible, as he might be at peak value and could be a lot less valuable the next time this organization has a realistic shot at contending…
“I don’t know where the hell the [W]’s are going to be (as an organization) in 2026… Given the extra uncertainty around the franchise these next few years, Phillip’s case makes some sense: trade Miller… now for prospects who are several years away from the Majors…
“It all might be too cute, though – maybe just enjoy Miller where he is now…”
It probably is all too cute. Mason Miller is a Woeverine, one of a very few lights in our vast, ugly, dark colosseum of despair. I will just enjoy him until the day he follows Buxton into brokenness. Which could be any day now.
o
