I never expected to be strong, but feet all hands are fortune, we're bad, share bad luck.

But now we won't change, and memories just rearrange, and fall into place, so I'm back again.

Hello and welcome to episode 1528 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Faggraphs presented by our Patreon supporters.

I am Ben Minberg of the Ringer, and I'm joined by Sam Miller of ESPN Pillow Sam.

Hello. Do you have a little bit of banter? Do you have any? No.

Okay, well, mine is inspired by a listener email. Actually, we're doing listener emails on today's show, and I was just looking through to see what we were going to answer today.

And there was one that I didn't necessarily think was worthy of answering, but I answered it just to indulge a Patreon supporter, and that led me to an interesting story that I don't think we've discussed before, and I don't think I was aware of before, although I had one of those weird moments where I reacted to it as if it was something I had never heard before.

And then 15 minutes later, I started thinking, wait, have I had that exact reaction to that same story before? Is this the second time I discovered this?

So someone may write in and say, you guys talked about this on episode 150 or something, but nothing on the wiki.

So this is a question from Adam, who says on a recent episode, Sam mentioned the season when Pete Rose had an OPS plus of just a little over 68.

This made me wonder, what would it look like for someone to have an OPS of 420 or an ERA plus of 420? Is this even possible?

How would this person change the game in the ways that Ruth and Bons both players with obscene OPS pluses before changed it?

And obviously Adam is asking if it's possible to do this over a full season, and it's conceivable, but it would be the best season ever by far.

I mean, Bons's best OPS pluses are what in the low to mid 200s. So that's about as good as it's ever gotten, and you'd have to be about twice as good as that.

So almost inconceivable, but just for fun, I look to see if anyone had done this in extremely small sample seasons.

And both have been done three times if we take away all played appearance and innings minimums. So three hitters in baseball history have had a 420 OPS plus all in seasons of one played appearance, the most recent being RJ Alonese in 2019.

He is a pitcher, of course, but he had one played appearance and he went one for one, and that was a 420 OPS plus for one for one with a single.

Yeah, with a single. This is something that I suppose could change in the future because park factors change in retrospect.

And so maybe in the future, he will not have had a 420 OPS plus, but he has for now on the pitching side, I was expecting to see maybe a bunch of guys who had pitched in one game or something.

And they're actually a few slightly larger sample seasons. So the three Kimberl's got like 300s on his right in a real season. So yeah.

So like I would imagine a like a Zach Brittney R.A. might be better than a 420. Yeah. When he had the 0.5 issue.

Yeah. So there have been three seasons again. So it was 2007 Joey divine had a 420 OPS plus in eight and a third innings 2013 Sean Burnett had one in nine and two thirds innings.

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