Seeing Stars: Hall of Fame Week 18
Hosted by SIBR, written by BNN Staff
Rigby Friedrich
Georgias good, Georgias bad, Georgias good forever, Georgias bad forever. It’s the circle of life for the average Atlantis fan. And yet for most our career, the Georgias have been a middling team, brought down by a spectacularly bad pitcher or brought up by a spectacularly good pitcher or batter.
Every season, that player is Rigby Friedrich.
For pitchers who’ve pitched at least 100 games, Rigby Friedrich has the 9th most WhAT per inning pitched, a hair below Burke and Elvis and above Qais, Jolene, and PDP. They are 6th in Career Overhanded ERA, above Burke, Gabriel Griffiths, Jolene and Jaylen. 2 perfect games, including on Day 1 of their second ever season. No Underhanded, no defense. Just their laser focus towards being the best pitcher Wild High has ever seen.
How did they do it? Rigby achieved their dominance over the pitching leaderboards by just never missing a step. Over 2408 innings, Rigby Friedrich has posted an ERA of 2.74 over seasons 13 to 21, only posting an ERA above 3 when they spent a third of the season Underperforming and returned to the mound better than their previous season. Of their 262 games, 42 were shutouts. 2nd in Career Hits Allowed over 9 innings. 12th in career Strikeouts per 9 innings.
They did take a short siesta from pitching, sure. Doing what? Oh, just batting the 15th highest WHAT season on a regular Lineup, slotting neatly with peak Aldon, Don and Melon. It was a short but fruitful career, leaving them with 5th highest WhAT/PA with over 1k PAs. A true two way player.
Vote Rigby. They’re coming for you.
Eugenia Garbage
Throughout the roster chaos that gripped the Moist Talkers during the Expansion Era, one of the fixtures that didn’t budge until the Semi-Centennial was Eugenia Garbage. On the team’s Lineup since Season 1 (save for 15 minutes of being a Shoe Thief), Eugenia was a powerhouse from the very beginning, being one of the strongest hitters on the team in Season 3, the pinnacle of the team’s ability in Season 14, and capping off their incredible career with strong performances in Seasons 19 and 20.
The one word that can sum up Eugenia is consistency. Over their 23 seasons batting, Eugenia ranks 14th for career plate appearances, and has an outstanding 136 wRC+ / 134 OPS+, showing that not only did they play a lot, they played very well. In fact, Eugenia has never had a single season in which their OPS+ dropped below 100. In other words? They have always been better than the league average, reaching their absolute peak in Season 14.
After picking up the High Pressure modification for the team, Eugenia began to soar from the leadoff position. Another counting stat in their favour is that of hits – Eugenia ranks 4th for all time, and given that the Talkers needed to have players on base to activate their mod, Eugenia set them up to succeed. Over Season 14, Eugenia achieved a ludicrous OPS+ of 236, with a combination of .376 OBP and .702 SLG.
The aforementioned consistency bleeds over into both their own and the team’s success, with Eugenia being one of five players to claim all three championship rings that the Moist Talkers earned during the Expansion Era. In that Season 14 run, they didn’t miss a beat in converting their regular season power into the postseason, posting a 0.500 BA/RISP, helping ensure that any runner that got on base could get home. That, and maintaining the pressure to give those batting after them a boost!
Vote for Eugenia Garbage!
Lars Taylor
Lars Taylor is a very recognizable, iconic player. Lars cemented the Sunbeams identity as “the team with bad pitching,” outshining the work of players like Miguel James, Jayden Wright, and Sigmund Castillo. Even people who have praised the noted strikeout artist (and fellow member on the ballot) Sandoval Crossing have not considered there to be a good Sunbeams pitcher, and while part of this is the Sunbeams legendarily awful defense throughout their entire history as a team, certainly deliberately avoiding anything that might improve the teams pitching— solely to maintain Lars’ 0 or 1 star status! – is a notable factor in this reputation.
On top of this, nobody who is worse than Lars has pitched nearly as long, earning Lars the 2nd lowest total WhAT of any pitcher. Going off WhAT_IP, the closest player to Lars is Agan Harrison, whose 289 games is still quite a ways behind Lars’ 336. Most players who were worse have 80 or less games, frequently shadowed and never seen again- Sunbeams investment in Lars as a pitcher continued even after being shadowed. The player was so iconic that, following their Night Shift back into active play during season 24- rejoining the active roster on a Scattered team that had already seen numerous roster changes including several first-time appearances- Lars was immediately recognized.
But Lars isn’t solely noteworthy for poor performance, as they were inarguably the defining pitcher of the season 11 postseason. Pitching the 1st and 6th games against the Tigers for the Wild League Championship, it is indisputable Lars took the two most valuable games of the series and came out of them with wins. Once again handed the ball in the decisive 5th game of the Sunbeams-Garages finals, Lars repeated their game 6 performance against the Tigers- holding the opposing team to only 5 runs while a dominant Sunbeams offense ran wild. Very, very few players have defined a postseason so strongly as Lars has.
And of course, who can forget Season 14? This season single-handedly dethroned Lars from being the lowest WhAT pitcher in history. A nigh-unprecedented improvement, inspired by a cup of coffee, saw a player who had zero other positive WhAT seasons rack up 4.2 WhAT, a very respectable number. PolkaDot Patterson. Winnie Hess. Gerund Pantheocide. Betsy Trombone. Alexandria Rosales. Just a few of the excellent pitchers who saw themselves outperformed in this season by Lars Taylor, who immediately returned to normal performance from season 15 onwards.
Lars is a reminder for us to stay humble as we attempt to understand this game, that any player can break out and be a star. That at the end of the day, we play with dice, and while we can predict their results we can never do so perfectly. A reminder that the odds can be defied, a players quality is not destiny, and above all: that the only star you need is the Sun.
-Slugger Sins
Wyatt Glover
Glover is doing their best, a refrain from those early Los Angeles Taco seasons. As the worst pitcher on a notoriously bad team, an attempt to improve was made through the use of exploratory surgeries in the season 3 election:
- Wyatt’s pitching was randomized from ½ to ½.
- Wyatt’s pitching was randomized from ½ to ½.
- Wyatt’s pitching was randomized from ½ to 0
The surgeries made them worse. This was an astronomically low chance event and here it happened. Season 4 leads to one of the worst individual pitching performances of the discipline era, bottom 5 in ERA+, and then a reprieve. Wyatt Glover moves to the Tacos lineup through a full team reverb allowing them to shine briefly before moving to Yellowstone in exchange for Halexandrey Walton through feedback. While not replicating their horrid pitching season, Glover was still a below average hitter, and towards the end of their career they achieved the rare (less than fifty occurrences) negative OPS+ season.
But this is not why this name is familiar to you. Wyatt Glover is a known name because they are a Credit to the Team. With a five time payout for pendants, they were one of the more profitable players in all of blaseball, coupled with becoming a very dense attractor, Wyatt Glover became the perfect idol board manipulator outside of Chorby Soul and Chorby Soul’s Soul wielders. Through the manipulation of Glover’s idol board position, some players were saved from being vaulted through the expansion era, a fate Glover faced themself.
Wyatt Glover is not statistically great, but Wyatt Glover is doing their best, and is a credit to the team.
