Stories from the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña

[lnpgaceta]

Quick rundown:
The Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña is the league of an independent Republic of Puerto Rico, inaugurated in 1871*, and currently in its fifteenth season.
* I may or may not have originally misdated the Grito de Lares to 1863, which would have given the LNP eight years to start operations, rather than three.

You can see what I've been doing with it in the links below. The main thing is that every town in Puerto Rico gets a team, and since there are 78 towns in (modern) Puerto Rico, there are two leagues of 39 teams, divided into thirteen divisions of three teams apiece. Yes, this means the playoffs have 32 total teams and five rounds. It's a Whole Thing.

Anyway, I wanted to post a few stories from it: the good sometimes, the bad certainly, but most importantly, the weird, and it doesn't get much weirder than this.

The man I want to talk about right now is Fernando Rodríguez, who has pitched for the Petroleros de Peñuelas since 1875. His stat** card is below.
** If you're not used to 1880s baseball, based on his engine ratings, a modern equivalent of Fernando would be rocking a 5.52 ERA and a 5.66 FIP, with -1.1 WAR. He'd have struck out 61 and walked 48. (In a season, mind you.)

[lnpgaceta]

Now, Rodríguez shuffled around a few other teams (the Rebeldes—where I'm pretty sure I signed him—the Murciélagos, and the Soles) before the Petroleros picked him up, and, to their credit, they've stuck with him for ten seasons.

Or perhaps been stuck with him, because over those ten seasons, Rodríguez has posted exactly one winning record (16-14 in 1877), and since I know pitching record isn't useful even in this era, I should add that his ERA+ has never even reached league average.

Over those ten seasons, he's allowed an average of 10.8 hits and 12.6 runs per nine innings.

In other words, Fernando Rodríguez is not a good pitcher.

But on June 3rd, 1879, against the Maratonistas de Coamo, Fernando Rodríguez threw 87 pitches. That's already weird in 1879—pitchers routinely went the distance and usually threw 110-120 pitches per outing.

What's even weirder is that 53 of those 87 pitches were strikes, but he didn't strike out a single batter, even the opposing pitcher.

What's weirder than that is that he didn't walk any Maratonistas, though he hit one.

The other thing he didn't allow a single Maratonista to do was reach base safely, though his second baseman allowed one reach on error. (The next batter GIDP'd immediately thereafter, so Rodríguez still only faced the minimum.)

That's right: Fernando Rodríguez, who in 1879 went 15-21 with a 3.05 ERA (86 ERA+), threw an 87-pitch Maddux no-hitter without fanning or walking a single hitter. Of the 27 batters he faced, 16 of them lasted three pitches or fewer; four connected with the first pitch and got retired by the defense.

I had zero connection to the 1879 Petroleros, but I'm weirdly proud of these three innings: the first two for being metronomic six-pitch frames, and the latter for, after struggling to a full-count groundout on Iracheta, proceeding to get the next two batters to swing at, and get out on, the first pitch.

[lnpgaceta]

I mentioned that Rodríguez pitches for the Petroleros de Peñuelas, and that they've stuck with him despite the fact that he's been stinking up the mound for three or four seasons in a row.

Well, Los Petros have always been a little unconventional. In 1871, when the LNP held its first (and so far only) draft, they were one of only four teams that didn't use their first pick on a starting pitcher.

They have two of the greatest hitters in this early league:

• Guillermo Gómez, who is posting a 138 OPS+ / 133 wRC+ as a 40-year-old left fielder in 1884, even if he is an absolutely horrible fielder, and
• Jorge Peña, the aforementioned first-round shortstop (and later first baseman), whose career OPS+ is still 151 despite having three seasons of indifferent hitting, who is the only person to have hit .400 since 1871, and who was one of only four players to post a .900 OPS season in the 1870s. He is also possibly one of the worst fielders at any position

You know what they don't have? A bullpen.

As I was researching this, I looked at the Petros' "meet the team" and couldn't find an RP listed. I checked the reserve roster: nothing there. Checked the individual players and the pitching tab, and there are no two-way players on the team.

The Petroleros are carrying three pitchers. This is a little odd, even for 1884; most teams have at least one medium-stamina reliever they can use in emergencies or in save situations, and there's a new breed of fairly dependable reliever emerging, with an amenable enough manager.

What's even weirder is that there's plenty of pitching prospects available each year. In fact, there's one sitting in the free agent market right now, with better stamina, equal rating, and higher potential than the Petros' #2 and #3, but they're just not moving on him. They're passing up on an unknown quantity to stick with a 32-year-old guy who went 7-34 with a 73 ERA+ this past season.

I figured that maybe pitching prospects had just flamed out for them a lot, so I manually checked the transactions log. It turns out that the Petroleros did carry more pitchers before 1884.

But they lost Arturo Mora and Guillermo Muñoz to retirement, and they didn't sign a single pitcher to replace them. They also didn't sign a pitcher in 1883. Or 1882. Or 1881, or 1880.

They also didn't sign pitchers in 1879, 1878, 1877, or 1876. In fact, Fernando Rodríguez is the last pitcher the Petroleros signed, in 1875, a month after his colleague Antonio Castillo.

To recap, the Petroleros:

• have wasted the careers of two of the greatest hitters (and worst fielders) of the LNP;
• haven't sniffed the playoffs since 1874;
• haven't signed a pitcher since 1875;
• haven't finished .500 since 1876;
• have an owner who insists they win a championship despite, apparently, not giving them the cash to sign the pitchers they desperately need.

I have a sequence of which team I work with each season, which I generated randomly before opening the league, but damned if this doesn't make me want to take the Petroleros next year.

Bad baseball teams happen. (And in the LNP, given its structure and current reserve-clause-era rules, boy, do they happen.) But this, honestly, feels more like an entirely avoidable tragedy, as far as baseball goes.

As I discover oddities like these in the data, I'll share them with y'all. I'm currently gearing up to take the Capitanes for a spin—they've never lost their division, and I certainly don't intend to change that.

[lnpgaceta]

The Cuervos de Patillas took a 20-18 record into the 1871 playoffs, made it past the Serie Preliminar, and got promptly owned 3-1 by Dorado, who was the #16 seed in Liga Betances that year

(It's okay. 1871 was weird like that.)

As it turned out, that would be the Grajos' only ticket to the postseason in the pre-market era, and one of only three seasons where they finished .500, let alone above; they managed a .408 in 1872, and again in 1874, and since then they have become one of those teams that ironic fans love, because they have a cool name and post 23-103 records.

So now that you know what the Cuervos are like as a team, we can talk about José Saenz, whose 35-year-old self, in the modern era, would have a season something like this:

218 IP
214 BB / 46 K
.366 oAVG
7.56 ERA
7.61 FIP
-4.9 WAR

(You know how starters are supposed to get a little bit of a leg up if they're converted into relievers? He's somehow rated worse.)

Saenz was actually around for that magical 1871 season—but not in Patillas. He was the ninth-round pick for the Leones de Ponce, who released him at the end of the season. He signed for a little more with the Macabeos de Trujillo Alto . . . and got dropped a month later. In January, he signed with the Cuervos, and was named the #98 prospect in the league in April 1872.

One year later, he was #86. Two years later, he was #98 (again). Three years later, he was #61. This is early baseball, too, so there's no minor/developmental leagues to work with: even as the Cuervos rotation sucked, Saenz was riding pine year after miserable year because they were too afraid to try him out.

By the time he made his pitching debut, in 1878, he was 29, no longer a top prospect, and he'd lost most of his velocity. The Cuervos were expecting a miracle from a man who'd been paid to sit on the bench and throw, at most, live BP for years.

On July 8th, they sort of got one.

[lnpgaceta]

On July 8th, 1878, in the middle of a 40-74 season, the Cuervos could only watch in awe as their new pitcher cut apart the Valencianos lineup.

It was a glimpse of the greatness he might have obtained otherwise: Saenz, who struck out three batters every two games and threw 120 pitches per appearance, needed only 89 to fan four and walk zero.

His defense let him down, which allowed some runners on base—but of those, only one, catcher Orlando Prieto, made it to third, due to his only wild pitch of the game.

For years afterwards, his teammates called him "Cadatrés" ("Everythree") because his 3rd, 6th, and 9th innings, as you can see here, had been so incredibly dominant.

Of course, in the fullness of time, we have two much-needed correctives for this performance:

- one, the 1878 Cuervos were the worst hitting team in their league, but the 1878 Valencianos were only a little bit ahead of them;

- two, Saenz, at that point, was 10-20 with a 3.08 ERA, and would end the season at 12-24, with a 3.16 ERA (88 ERA+) and 20 walks to 49 strikeouts.

Really, that second one makes it much more impressive, when you consider that he was only the fourth pitcher to throw a no-hitter in LNP history.

The other three were Juan Laboy (Patriotas), Javier Ramos (Titanes), and Isidro Pérez (Corsos), and they were all good to great pitchers. For Saenz to join them, and so efficiently, was so ridiculous the Gaceta refused to print it until they checked the game log by hand.

[lnpgaceta]

In 1879, Saenz knew the entire league thought he was a fluke.

He worked on his mechanics a bit, and in his second season as a starter, managed the following three games within a month of each other:

• 6/15 vs. the Titanes: 2 hits, 1 run, 1 walk, 1 strikeout.
• 7/7 vs. the Petroleros: 3 hits, 3 runs, 4 walks, 2 strikeouts. (I checked. Rodríguez wasn't the opposingpitcher.)
• 7/13 versus the Navegadores: 3 hits, 1 run, 1 walk, 1 strikeout.

The Cuervos won eight games in that period. Three of them were due to Saenz . . . and then he ended the season 12-25 with a 3.61 ERA (74 ERA+) and 50 BB / 60 K.

It didn't get better from there. At least, not for the most part.

1880:
11-25, 3.21 ERA (95 ERA+), 72 BB / 66 K.
1881:
10-25, 3.09 ERA (90 ERA+), 52 BB / 69 K.
1882:
11-30 (yikes), 3.60 ERA (85 ERA+), 62 BB / 64 K.

That was bad enough, but in 1883, Saenz, whom the Cuervos were still putting out there, managed something unique, something even other famously terrible rotations (like the Ingenieros and the unfortunate Valencianos) had not yet gotten any of their pitchers to do.

Saenz:

• led the league in losses (34);
• posted an ERA above 6.00 (6.11 / 48+);
• had a WHIP above 2.00 (2.04);
• walked 155 and fanned only 56;
• had a WAR of -4.6—in an era where even merely bad pitching could record 2 to 3 WAR.

Future generations of LNP analysts referred to the combination of posting the league's worst record, ERA, and K/BB ratio as the "Reverse Triple Crown."

In 1884, Saenz was 34, and he and pretty much everyone who went to a Cuervos game that year knew it would be his last season. Every pitch except his fastball and splitter were gone, and even those were barely hitting upper eighties, but he wouldn't leave without managing two more quintessential proofs of his unique prowess.

First, on April 21st, he held the Corsos de Yauco to three hits over eight innings. Yes, only eight innings: he walked five and otherwise allowed four runs to score, and the Cuervos only got one across, so Saenz is one of the few pitchers in LNP history to lose a three-hitter.

Second, as if he had something to prove, that year Saenz posted one of the funniest pitching seasons in the early Liga Nacional:

286.1 IP, 3-38 (¡!), an ERA of 6.44 (46 ERA+ (¡¡!!), a WHIP of 2.12 (¡¡¡!!!), a 209 BB / 62 K campaign, and -5.6 WAR.

Except for the K/BB ratio, in which he was tied, Saenz sat at the worst spot in the league in every other category I've just enumerated.

He retired, having just turned 35, at the end of the season where he "won" his second Reverse Triple Crown.

And that's the story of José "Cadatrés" Saenz, or, as buffs of this early era of Puerto Rican baseball call him, The Worst Pitcher to Throw A No-Hitter.

[lnpgaceta]

Originally Posted by lnpgaceta

Quick rundown:
The Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña is the league of an independent Republic of Puerto Rico, inaugurated in 1871*, and currently in its fifteenth season.
* I may or may not have originally misdated the Grito de Lares to 1863, which would have given the LNP eight years to start operations, rather than three.

You can see what I've been doing with it in the links below. The main thing is that every town in Puerto Rico gets a team, and since there are 78 towns in (modern) Puerto Rico, there are two leagues of 39 teams, divided into thirteen divisions of three teams apiece. Yes, this means the playoffs have 32 total teams and five rounds. It's a Whole Thing.

Anyway, I wanted to post a few stories from it: the good sometimes, the bad certainly, but most importantly, the weird, and it doesn't get much weirder than this.

The man I want to talk about right now is Fernando Rodríguez, who has pitched for the Petroleros de Peñuelas since 1875. His stat** card is below.
** If you're not used to 1880s baseball, based on his engine ratings, a modern equivalent of Fernando would be rocking a 5.52 ERA and a 5.66 FIP, with -1.1 WAR. He'd have struck out 61 and walked 48. (In a season, mind you.)

Update on Fernando Rodríguez: in 1885, he's currently 16-8 with a 2.45 ERA (lowest of his career by 0.51) / 1.07 WHIP (lowest of his career by 0.13) / 3.15 FIP line. His BABIP is .257, the lowest it's been in his career by 24 points


Also, there's currently a Juan Soto being a pretty good CF for the Soles de Luquillo who looks pretty much exactly like current Washington National Juan Soto.


When I looked at the 1872 Marcianos (who won the title that year), I found out they had a catcher named Juan Soto.


Who looked exactly like the CF on the Soles.


Who, as previously established, looks exactly like current Washington National Juan Soto.



So I asked a friend who's in another league if I could steal the pic of the current Juan Soto from there, he obliged, and uhhhh . . .


Apparently Juan Soto is a baseball vampire?