Every ranking has a bottom. These are the 100 lowest Stat Above Average scores among hitters who stuck around long enough to matter — 3,000 career plate appearances, a dropped bar from the 5,000 the main list uses, because at 5,000 the bottom is nothing but names from the 1890s and the fun is lost. Nobody down here should feel bad: they all made the major leagues, which is more than the other eight billion of us managed.

This is not a list of the worst players ever. The genuinely bad ones never get 3,000 plate appearances — you get benched, released, sent down. To land here you have to be good enough to keep playing and below average the whole time you did it. It's a monument to durability without production.

Measured against the league, not against a replacement. SAA asks how far above or below the average hitter of your own season you were. Baseball-Reference's WAR asks how far above a freely-available bench player. Those are different questions, and a steady regular can post a respectable career WAR and a deeply negative SAA at the same time — the WAR column on each card shows how often that happens here.

Batting average alone won't save you. Several of these men hit .290 or .300 for their careers. Average is one of five inputs, weighted 30%; with no power, no walks, and a glove that grades out flat or worse, a lot of empty singles nets out below the line. The expanded card breaks down all five — click any row.

The mound basement: the 100 lowest Stat Above Average scores among pitchers with 1,000+ career innings — the same bar the main pitchers list uses, so this is simply its bottom hundred, turned upside down.

The list rewards volume of mediocrity. A pitcher's career SAA sums each season's score scaled to a 200-inning workload — there's no peak component softening it — so the way to the bottom is to be handed the ball a thousand-plus times while sitting a step under the league. Short careers can't sink this far. You have to earn it.

Some of these men were nearly average. The punchline names — Mike Torrez at a 101 ERA+, Liván Hernández at 99, Jim Abbott at 107 — weren't bad pitchers. They were par pitchers for a very long time, and "above" is the operative word in Stat Above Average. Par, compounded across seventeen years, is a large negative number.

bWAR often disagrees. Measured against a replacement arm instead of the league, several of these careers read as genuinely useful — 20-plus WAR. Both things are true: above a Triple-A call-up, below the league. Click a row to see the split.