Is 1953 Bowman the most error-filled card set in history?

1953 Bowman is the perfect set on its front: beautiful and pure.

But error lurks within its backs. 

Can you see the monstrous mistake? 

 If you look online for "1953 Bowman errors," you won't find much. PSA's article on 1953 Bowman Color mentions a few fumbled birthdates, a picture of one player used for someone else's card, and one mediocre pitcher (Al Corwin) with two cards. That's it. 

Al Corwin, #126

Al Corwin, #149

If you look further on the web, you won't find any errors in the set more substantial than a few misspelled names. 

As far as I can tell, no one has ever pointed out that almost every single card in both the Color and Black and White sets has some kind of statistical error. For example, Allie Reynolds' career ERA was 3.30, not 2.76, going into 1953. 

Most of the cards have miscalculated career batting averages or ERAs, just like Reynolds. Many of the errors are small - a 5.04 ERA instead of 5.02 - but some, like Reynolds, are kind of obscene. And if the batting average isn't wrong, some fielding stat probably is, and some cards even have seasons missing from the career totals. (The most flagrant of these even mention the missing season in the write-up. Al Corwin is a good example. His bio mentions his 5-1 1951 season, but his career stats only show his 1952 season. The backs of his two cards are identical except for the card numbers, so this holds true for #149 too.)

When you put all these different types of errors together, only 29 of the 224 cards Bowman released in 1953 do not have a statistical error. If there's any set with a higher percentage of error cards, I'm unaware of it.

Some back-story: 

I noticed a few cards with truly flagrant errors long before I realized that they were part of a theme. I noticed the mistake in Allie Reynolds' career ERA not too long after I got the card for Christmas, 2019. (An Ode to 1953 Bowman: Christmas Edition) 

If I remember correctly, the card that made me realize that the error was not an isolated event, that 1953 Bowman was rife with the iniquity of incorrectness, was a card I got in a lot this spring: Matt Batts, B&W #22. 

My mathematical mind writhed when I saw a man with 268 hits in 979 at-bats listed as having a batting average of .260. 

When I began noticing all these blatant errors, I wondered whether there might be subtle errors in other cards. I started checking and behold: errors were here, there, everywhere. I began checking every card sometime this summer, and worked on the project off and on until I finally finished yesterday. 

Disclaimer, required by law: The same love of statistics that led me to notice these errors in the first place, and then check every single card for more, also prompts me to provide various statistical breakdowns about aforesaid errors. You have been forewarned.

A preliminary note on my method: My goal was to see how many cards had errors, not to exhaustively determine every single error. For that reason, I only checked a player's fielding stats if his batting stats were squeaky-clean, which means that there may be significantly more fielding stat errors than I found. 

Acknowledgments: I used TCDB's pictures both for my statistical sleuthing and for this post, and Baseball Reference for the players' career totals up to 1952. I used Since I Left You by The Avalanches for musical distraction as I checked and rechecked; stats become banal even to the most hardened stat junkie after a while. 

In Bowman Color, out of 160 cards, 13 are errorless. Of these, three of the cards have no stats listed (44, 69, 93), five are of rookies with just one year of stats (83, 97, 98, 112,153), and one is a coach (95, Wally Moses). Only four cards of players with more than one season in the majors are errorless: 16, Bob Friend; 47, Ned Garver; 53, Del Rice; and 78, Carl Furillo.  

Out of 94 batters, 73 have incorrect batting averages, nine (at least) have incorrect fielding stats, two have incorrect batting counting stats, and five have one or more seasons not included in their career stats. (George Shuba was missing three.)

Out of 53 pitchers, 48 have incorrect ERAs and five have a season not included in their career stats. (Two of the five are Al Corwin.)

Out of eleven coaches and managers, six have incorrect fielding stats, two have incorrect batting counting stats, one is errorless (95, Wally Moses), one has no stats (Charlie Grimm), and one has both incorrect fielding and incorrect batting counting stats: 57, Lou Boudreau. Notice that they all have correct batting averages. 

For Black and White:

Out of 64 cards, 16 are errorless. Of these, eight are rookies with only one year beneath their belts: five pitchers and three batters. The other eight are all pitchers. 

Out of 33 batters, 29 have incorrect batting averages, and one (36, Jim Piersall) has a season missing from his career stats. Only three are errorless, and they're all rookies. 

Out of 29 pitchers, only 14 have incorrect ERAs. Another one has a counting stat error and another one has a season missing from his career stats. Of the thirteen errorless cards, eight are veterans - a relatively impressive number. 

You can actually pinpoint the place where Bowman suddenly started getting their ERAs right. Every pitcher who'd pitched in more than two seasons received incorrect ERAs up to card #40, which gives Larry Jansen's correct career ERA. After that point, Bowman got 7 ERAs correct out of 11 non-rookie pitchers, including five in a row from #40 through #52. 

There were only two managers - Casey Stengel and Bucky Harris. They both have incorrect RBI totals, and Bucky is shorted a game from his career total. 

A clear pattern emerges from the batting averages: In both Color and B&W, a clear majority of the batting averages are too low. In Color,  26 of the listed batting averages are too high while 47 are too low. In B&W, 8 are too high while 21 are too low.

There isn't strong evidence of a pattern in the mistaken ERAs. In Bowman Color, 22 of the listed ERAs are too high while 24 are too low. In Bowman Black and White, four are too high while ten are too low. 

For your possible delectation, I will list the most egregious errors:

#22 Color - Bob Porterfield's ERA should be 3.56, not 4.66
#53 B&W - Morrie Martin's ERA should be 4.64, not 5.67
#114 Color - Bob Feller's ERA should be 3.21, not 3.93
#68 Color - Allie Reynolds' ERA should be 3.30, not 2.76
#88 Color - Joe Dobson's ERA should be 3.62, not 3.13
#29 B&W - Sid Hudson's ERA should be 4.33, not 3.89
#66 Color - Mel Parnell's ERA should be 3.38, not 3.79

#58 B&W, Jim Konstanty, lists 76 career strikeouts instead of the correct 177. 

#8 Color - Al Rosen's AVG should be .280, not .221
#134 Color - Johnny Pesky's AVG should be .310, not .270
#18 Color - Nellie Fox's AVG should be .284, not .253
#7 Color - Harry Chiti's AVG should be .293, not .321
#24 Color - Jackie Jensen's AVG should be .275, not .250
#6 Color - Joe Ginsberg's AVG should be .245, not .269
#30 B&W - Walker Cooper's AVG should be .288, not .264
#34 Color - Gil Coan's AVG should be .258, not .281
#29 Color - Bobby Avila's AVG should be .301, not .280

I'm not sure what it means for three of the worst batting average errors to take place on three consecutive cards. 

I'm bugged by the question of why exactly Bowman made so many errors - was whoever calculated the career averages and ERAs just really bad at using a slide rule? And how could a baseball fan have not seen the implausibility of some of these figures? Al Rosen had been a big major league star for three years; how could his career batting average have been listed as .221!? My summer job this year (okay, my first summer job ever) was as a proofreader. I really wish I could have been there for Bowman.

And why did they make the specific errors they did: why were averages and ERAs wrong for career stats and right for 1952 stats? Why are the career batting averages correct for managers? Why do the career ERAs become way more accurate two-ways through the B&W set? If the statistician discovered his error, why didn't he go back and change his prior mistakes? I can't think of any plausible hypothesis to account for these mysteries. 

I will leave you with a spreadsheet instead of a solution. Here's a Google Sheets file with the details on every card in both sets: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vU10-rGByr7aXHSZdzNrQve1-RMUumK8M5TgMDTa2_g/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Update: CardBoredom pointed out that a number of the batting averages were calculated by adding up the player's season batting averages and averaging them out. That method seems to work all the way for batting averages all through card #121 of the Color set but not afterwards.

I've only checked the method for a few pitchers' ERAs. It works for #66 and #87, but it can't explain Bob Feller (#114.)  More research is required.

Green seats wasteland (Requiem for a Coliseum)

 The Athletics played their last game in the Oakland Coliseum yesterday, beating the Texas Rangers 3-2 before 46,889 fans. J.T. Ginn, the A's rookie starter, gave up two runs in 5.1 innings to receive the win, his first in the majors. The epically named Kumar Rocker, the Rangers' rookie starter, received the loss. The A's rookie closer Mason Miller pitched 1.1 perfect innings to become the last man to pitch in the Coliseum in a major league game. Travis Jankowski of the Nordic locks was the last man to face him. 

The Athletics have played in the Coliseum for fifty-seven years. In that time, they won four World Series and lost two more. They made the play-offs twenty-one times, and won 229 more games than they lost.

In that same time, they finished in the top half of the AL in attendance just eleven times. They finished fourth or higher five times, and four of those times were from 1989 to 1992. When they won three straight World Series from 1972 to 1974, their highest annual attendance was 1,001,000. 

Oakland got a raw deal from their owners both at the beginning and end of their Athletics era. Charlie Finley, who built the A's dynasty of the 1970s working as his own GM, was as much of a genius of obnoxiousness as he was a baseball genius. In his time as owner he alienated the fans, the players, the press, his employees, his wife... pretty much everyone. The A's hit their Finley nadir in 1979. That year, they lost 108 games and drew 3,787 fans a game. A grand total of 653 fans attended their game versus the Mariners in April. (653 was a generous number.) The Oakland Coliseum, just a dozen years old at the time, was prematurely old; A's players publicly called it the worst stadium in the majors as early as 1973. It was dubbed the Oakland Mausoleum by both fans and players. 

Charlie Finley (Getty Images)

Things started looking up a little in 1980. Finley hired Billy Martin as manager, 21-year-old Rickey Henderson stole 100 bases, and the A's finished 2nd in the AL West. But Finley's wife filed for divorce that summer, and wouldn't accept a stake in the team. Finley was forced to sell the team to Walter A. Haas Jr., president and chairman of Levi Strauss of jeans fame. 

Fans turned out in droves to see the Finley-less A's in 1981. (Ding-dong, the witch is dead about sums up their attitude.) After the A's had never drawn better than 1,075,000 fans in a year in 20 years of Finley, they drew 1,304,000 in 1981 - a year with a strike-shortened 110-game schedule. 

The Oakland Athletics' fifteen years of Haas ownership turned out to be their glory years. Their farm system was rebuilt and yielded stars like Canseco and McGwire, they hired Tony LaRussa as their manager, transformed Dennis Eckersley from washed-up starter into MVP closer, and built a fantastic starting rotation around free-agent signing Bob Welch and other teams' castoffs. 

They were in the World Series every year from 1988 to 1990, winning it all in 1989. After having slumped in attendance in their mediocre mid-1980s years, they finished 2nd, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th in attendance from 1989 to 1992. 

But they started losing again in 1993 despite having Rickey, Eckersley, a 41-year-old Goose Gossage, and three bench players named Scott, and attendance began to decline. 

Haas died in 1995, and the team was sold to a group led by two Bay Area real estate developers. The developers didn't believe in throwing around money, so they got rid of their stars and invested in their farm system. And they hired Billy Beane as their GM. Thus began the Moneyball years.

Photo from "Where has the old Billy Beane gone?" (Athletics Nation, 2017)

The Moneyball years were (famously) characterized by analytics, homegrown stars, and stingy spending. They would have plenty of success - until the postseason began. They lost four straight American League Division Series three games to two from 2000 to 2003. Attendance was middling. 

The A's were sold again in 2005, this time to a group fronted by a real estate developer, Lewis Wolff, with John J. Fisher Jr., son of The Gap's founder, as majority owner. Under this new consortium the A's have had some good teams and some bad teams, but they've never spent much money and attendance has always been bad. 

These last four years in Oakland have been particularly grim. The stadium, for one thing, has been left to molder.  

"The concrete behemoth was never the warmest stadium, but its character was unmistakable. In recent years, it hasn’t exactly fallen into disrepair; rather, it’s been deliberately pushed. Like the team on the field, it’s been allowed to atrophy in order to demonstrate how badly the organization needs (never wants) out of Oakland." - Davy Andrews, from Fangraphs' tribute to the Coliseum: Memories of the Oakland Coliseum. A good read. 

The A's payroll went from $95 million in 2021 to $50 million in 2022 after they gutted their team, and it has remained at that level since. Their payroll this year of $56 million was less than their payroll in 2004 - and in 2004 their payroll was less than a third of the Yankees'. 

The A's drew 1,671,000 fans in 2019 - and less than half of that, 701,430, in 2021. They drew 4,068 fans to a September game that year against one of their rivals in a tight Wild Card race. Some of the blame for low attendance that year was due to lingering concern over COVID, but raised ticket prices, $30 parking, minimal promotions, the aging Coliseum, and rumors of a move didn't help either. 

(From the San Jose Mercury News, 2021-9-23)

Since then, the team has turned from good to ugly, and attendance has remained rock-bottom. The A's set their plan to move to Las Vegas in motion last year, and by December 16 the move was official. Until their new stadium in Sin City is finished, they'll play in Sacramento's AAA ballpark. 

This will be the fourth time the A's have moved. 

The Oakland Athletics and their Coliseum deserve a requiem. There's a song I love that talks about death and the Coliseum: Dead Dogs Two by cLOUDDEAD. I think it's a fitting epitaph.

The first verse of lyrics (some of my favorite from any song):

From the height of the highway on-ramp we saw
Two dogs a-dead in a field
Glowing on the Oakland Coliseum green seats wasteland
Dogs, dogs we thought were dead
They rose up, rose up when whistled at
Their rib cages inflating
Like men on the beach being photographed
A guard dog (guard dog) for what? (for what?)
Against overzealous penniless Athletics fanatics
Getting into games through a hole in the fence
For the owner of the blue tarp tent
Pitched by a creek beneath the on-ramp
In the privacy of the last three
Skin-and-bony trees, devoid of leaves
And us undeceased, and with our new CDs
Zipping on dead east, Oakland

The original version of the song is pretty good, but the definitive version is Boards of Canada's remix of it. I'm a huge Boards of Canada fan, and they do a great job with this song. (It's also one of their more accessible songs, in my opinion.)

If you're interested in listening: