Happy holidays, everyone!  Like many of you, I'm spending the holidays thinking about the St Louis Browns.  What's that you say?  Only me?  Huh.

 Well, be that as it may, here's one nice thing about the PI feature.  B-ref has long had team leaderboards, allowing you to see who, for example, is third all-time in doubles for the Phillies (Bobby Abreau).  But it's annoying because HR leaders are always from modern times, ERA leaders from the deadball era, and so forth.  What if you want to look up a particular period?  For example, what if you want to construct the all-time Browns roster? 

PI makes that possible.  Go to Pitching Season Index (or batter), click off on the career total part in the yellow horizontal bat.  Then - HERE's THE TRICKY PART - if you click on the league chooser bar, a team chooser bar appears.  I know a lotta people who use this site regularly who didn't know about this.  (Hell, I didn't know about it until sports-ref full-timer Justin Kubatko showed it to me).  But it's there for both pitchers and hitters.  Oh, and of course don't forget to pick the appropriate years on the left side.

With it, you can find the best starting pitchers in all St Louis Brown-dom.  It's Urban Shocker and the sucks, innit?  Only three guys have ever thrown 1000+ IP for the franchise and had a winning record.  One of them went 91-88 with a 100 ERA+.  C'mon.  I guess, if I had to, I'd say their all-time starting rotation was Urban Shocker, Harry Howell, Jack Powell, Ned Garver, and Carl Weilman.  Allan S. Southron can go pitch his initials off for someone else. 

Best hitters?  These guys.  Let's see how that breaks out by position . . .

1B - George Sisler

2B - Del Pratt

SS - Vern Stephens

3B - Harlond Clift

OF - Ken Williams

OF - George Stone

OF - Baby Doll Jacobson

C - um. . . Hank Severeid, I guess

Not surprisingly, almost none of these guys would crack the all-time Orioles team.  Shocker would, but none of the others could hang with Palmer, Mussina, McNally, Cuellar, or Bedard.  Brooks Robinson, Cal Ripken, Bobby Grich, and Eddie Murray win out in infield.  Frank Robinson, and Ken Singleton would start in the outfield, but I guess Ken Williams could win out for the last slot.  And I'll take Rick Dempsey over Severeid. 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 at 7:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.