Not a ton of pitching on today's Birthday Team, but the position players are good and the outfield is fantastic defensively. Jeff Francoeur should be able to help out in the bullpen and get them a good deal on airline tickets from Delta.

C: Walker Cooper (27.3 WAR)
1B: Jason Giambi (50.5 WAR)
2B: Randy Ready (10.9 WAR)
3B: Gene Freese (8.7 WAR)
SS: Ralph LaPointe (0.5 WAR)
LF: Jeff Francoeur (6.8 WAR)
CF: Jim Busby (12.8 WAR)
RF: Mike Cameron (46.7 WAR)

SP: Carl Pavano (16.4 WAR)
SP: Jeff Francis (9.6 WAR)
SP: Brian Boehringer (3.9 WAR)
SP: Dick Kelley (3.6 WAR)
SP: Chris Paddack (3.0 WAR)
RP: Bruce Sutter (24.0 WAR)

Fun names: Joe Just, Bud Weiser
Not that one: Brian Johnson
Not the bass player in The Wrens: Kevin Whelan

Mike Cameron had almost as many WAR as Jason Giambi - surprising?

Very unrelated:
On the back of Gene Mauch's 1966 card it says that "with the acquisition of Bill White and Dick Groat via off-season trades, Gene feels that he can bring the pennant to Philadelphia this year." Come on Gene... Bill White is good, but Dick Groat is a 35-year-old shortstop who hit .254/.316/.315 last year. I never even know Dick Groat played for the Phillies.

I looked it up because I was curious: Hall of Famer Joe Fulks owns the NBA record with 42 missed shots in one game. I guess it makes sense that they don’t let bad players miss 42 shots.

Can you look up whether The Babe did better than 0-for-24 against the New York Whirlwinds?

Today's b-day team has Bruce Sutter, yesterday's had Eric Gagne, Jeff Montgomery, and Francisco Rodriguez. That's 10 percent of all pitchers to ever have a 45-save season, and 20 percent of all relievers to have won the Cy Young Award.

The modern record is by exactly who'd you think: Kobe Bryant, may he rest in peace, with 30 missed shots in 2002.

Kobe is also second with 28. Yes, it was in his final game. (He was 22/50 from the floor, also setting the modern record for attempted shots in the process.)

Third with 27 is a three-way tie between Michael Jordan (1997), Jerry Stackhouse (2001), and Russell Westbrook (fall 2016). You gotta be good to miss that many shots.

I looked it up because I was curious: Hall of Famer Joe Fulks owns the NBA record with 42 missed shots in one game.

And just 12 days after he missed 42 (13 for 55), he missed 38 (8 for 46), the second most misses in one game in NBA history. For the season, he led the league with 22.1 points per game, while shooting .259 from the field.

I'd never heard of Fulks. Thought he might have been some contemporaraneious Shaq or something but he was just 6'5", 190 and listed as a power forward. His career FG% was just over 30% but a career 77% from the line so he can't have been that bad of a shot.

Seems to be an era thing. League as a whole shot just 28.4%. In his rookie year (the year before), he got 16.3 win shares which at least sounds like a lot, more than half his career total.

I will let somebody who has a clue about early BAA/NBA history opine on whether he should be in the HoF and how in the hell an entire league shoots under 30%.

I'm pretty sure I once missed 4-5 shots on a single play in a pickup game. Something along the lines of: Grabbed a rebound but missed the easy follow, missed again, was so pissed at myself I charged over to the other side of the rim to get that rebound, intentionally missed it back to the other side, charged across and got that rebound, etc. until I finally made it. I remember it because a guy said something like "none of us were gonna be stupid enough to get in your way."

What's the workaround again to get the Hall of Merit to keep me logged in so I can post over there?

Fulks led the league in scoring average twice. He broke the single game record 4 different times, the last record held for 10 years until Elgin Baylor broke it. Surely the narrative was there. Maybe he was the Russell Westbrook of his era, impossible to stop him from getting a shot, however inefficient.

impossible to stop him from getting a shot, however inefficient.

But as I mentioned, the entire league shot under 30% so Fulks' shots weren't particularly inefficient relative to everybody else's shots. He was obviously taking more of them than most folks to lead the league in scoring but presumably that was by design. Mikan won the next 3 scoring titles by shooting 40% in a 33-34% league. I don't know how many shots you have to take to qualify for the FG% leaderboard, but the leader didn't shoot 50% or better until Wilt in 1960.

Wilt seems to have had the record at 68% until 2014-15 when DeAndre Jordan broke 70% for 3 straight years, his record since topped by Mitchell Robinson in 2019-20 (interrupted) at 74%. Seems FG% is the HR rate of the NBA where current-past raw number comparisons don't make sense.

Anyway, my main curiosity is how the entire league could shoot so poorly.

What's the workaround again to get the Hall of Merit to keep me logged in so I can post over there?

I don't do HoM but sometimes for Gonfalon Cubs it works if I post something over here then go to Gonfalon. (maybe I had to leave the site before that, don't recall.)

What's the workaround again to get the Hall of Merit to keep me logged in so I can post over there?

This is what worked for me:

I don't stay logged in on this site, so I log in every time I come here. I couldn't post in the HOM threads until I logged in to this site and selected "stay logged in." That might not apply to you, though.

Anyway, my main curiosity is how the entire league could shoot so poorly.

I don't know BAA history but based on how my Dad said how they used to play in high school, I am guessing a whole lot of long range shots.

Also, at that time, almost none of the coaches had ever shot a jump shot, the players no doubt worked in the offseason, no aau and basketball academies to sharpen skills, and most of the arenas had dismal lighting by today’s standards. I saw a game in the old Philadelphia Arena,and compared to the Spectrum of a few years later, the lighting difference was like night and day.

#12 And shot on the move. Seriously, the "set shot" was an innovation.

The style of play seems to have been shoot as soon as you got close enough to reliably reach the basket.