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6/25/2021 Getting BetterWhen I realized the Seagulls had won 36 more games in 1956 than they won in 1955, I wondered if they had set the league record for the greatest single-season improvement. Nope. 36 games (a .222 improvement in winning percentage), is only good enough for third on the list. The greatest one-season improvement was achieved by the 1944 Detroit Wolverines, who went 85-73, improving by 39 games over the 1943 club, which went 46-112. They improved their winning percentage by .247. I made a list of all the teams that improved by .150 or more from one season to the next, starting with the 1893 season. That’s the beginning of the “modern era” for this league. It’s when the old ABBA collapsed, and four of its teams joined the NBBL, which reduced the total number of teams from 18 to 12; it was also the first year the league used a 158-game schedule. Prior to that, the number of games being played was in constant flux, and there were franchises being born and franchises dying almost every year. 1893 is when things got “normal”. There were some teams that improved by .150 or more in the pre-1893 era, but that was a different game in a lot of ways, so I opted not to count it. .150 is an arbitrary figure, but using just a slightly smaller number like .135 would have more than doubled the list, which tells us an improvement of .150 or more is something rather rare. There have been 12 teams since 1893 that have improved by .150+ in a single season:
Almost half (5 of the 12) “big improvers” made their leaps during what we might call the “really modern era”—the post-war era. The number of teams has doubled between 1945 and 1956, so talent has tended to be spread out, not necessarily evenly, which creates opportunities for a quick rebuild. The post-war era is also the “human GM era”. Good human GMs are much sharper than A.I. GMs, and are better equipped to engineer a rebuilding plan that bears fruit. The ’44 Wolverines slightly pre-dated the expansion/human GM era, but the war years were also a time of uneven distribution of the league’s rapidly-thinning talent, so that may have aided the Wolverines in their dramatic turnaround. Most of the teams on this list were bad teams that got decent or good the next year, or so-so teams that got really, really good. The obnoxious exception is the 1909 Chicago Traders. They were already a very, very good team in 1908 (98 wins) and improved by 25 games the following year to become arguably the greatest team of all time. |