[special op-ed commentary from www.StevedoresFan.com – the premier Canton Longshoremen fansite]

Canton, OH (www.StevedoresFan.com) – It’s small consolation to long-suffering Canton Longshoremen fans, but the disappointing 2017 edition of the long downtrodden franchise was historically. . . something.  Whether that something is historically unlucky or historically un-clutch is the question that must be bedeviling the Longshoremen brain trust in this winter of franchise discontent.

What do we mean? Well, it has long been an article of sabermetric faith that OBP is life, and life is OBP, a dogma to which the Longshoremen front office has doggedly clutched as it has attempted to remake the franchise in an image of sabermetric purity. OBP, for you non-stat geeks, is on-base percentage, or the percent of a player’s plate appearances that a player reaches base. Sadly for Longshoremen fans, 2017 saw that faith shaken, as the Longshoremen recorded a 3rd-best in the Sovereign League .337 on-base percentage, but slipped all the way to 9^th in the Sovereign League in runs scored, scoring only 7 runs more than the 2016 edition that got on base at a mere .332 clip (8^th in OBP, and 9^th in runs scored).

Here is how odd that is: there have only been four teams that have finished with a ranking in runs scored of at least 5 spots worse than their corresponding ranking in OBP. In most seasons, if you had a list of teams ordered from highest OBP to lowest OBP, you would have a great idea of the order in which those teams would be ranked in runs scored. For the Longshoremen, however, the difference in rank between runs and OBP of six places was the second highest such difference in PEBA history. Only the 2015 London Underground were worse, finishing first in the Imperial League in OBP, but 8^th in runs scored. The other culprits were the 2017 Arlington Bureaucrats (5^th in OBP, 10^th in runs scored) and the 2010 West Virginia Coal Sox (4^th in OBP and 9^th in runs).

What has the Longshoremen front office learned from this debacle? Well, it should have learned that it had one thing in common with all of those teams: a poor slugging average. True: the Longshoremen had the highest ranked slugging average (8^th) of all of those teams (two 9ths and a 12^th for the others) and the highest raw slugging average as well (.392 vs. a range of .384 to .369), but that’s cold comfort for a team that has seen 132 runs shaved off of the total of a surprising 2015 team that recorded the only winning record in franchise history.

So who have the Longshoremen signed? A glove-first center fielder with a career slugging average of .371 and a career high single-season home run total of 6. Sigh. At least he slugs better than he of the perennially sprained bat, António Chávez, right? Ha! No. Chávez, as bad as he was in two of his three years manning center field for the Longshoremen, enters free agency with a slugging average of .372!

It may be a long 2018 in Canton.