Joe Morgan @ baseball-reference.com
The Big Red Machine @ Wikipedia
Joe Morgan won the National League MVP award in 1975 and 1976. He is considered one of the greatest second basemen in the history of the sport. In 35 simulated timelines of Game 4 of the 1972 World Series, he hit .211 with a single home run. He went hitless in 13 games. 32-for-152 with 1 homer across 35 postseason games.
If you had told Sparky Anderson that his second baseman would go 32-for-152 with 1 homer across 35 postseason games, Anderson would have benched him. But you can't bench Joe Morgan. And the multiverse knew it.
The 1972 Cincinnati Reds were supposed to be one of the most fearsome offenses in baseball history. Pete Rose. Joe Morgan. Johnny Bench. Tony Perez. Four future Hall of Famers in the same batting order. The Big Red Machine.
In 35 simulated timelines, the Machine ran on two cylinders.
Johnny Bench hit .286 with 7 home runs and 17 RBI. Tony Perez hit .266 with 4 home runs and 23 RBI. Bench and Perez showed up, every timeline, every strategy engine. Bench and Perez did their jobs.
Joe Morgan hit .211 with 1 home run and 8 RBI. Pete Rose hit .205 with zero home runs and 3 RBI.
Bench and Perez combined for 11 home runs and 40 RBI. Rose and Morgan combined for 1 home run and 11 RBI. The greatest lineup of its era was carried by its catcher and its first baseman. The left fielder and the second baseman - the two players history remembers most fondly - were passengers.
The Machine was not broken. It was half-broken. And in a series of one-run games, half a Machine is not enough.
Six at-bats. The game lasted 15 innings. Morgan came to the plate six times and failed to reach base even once. Cincinnati won 2-1 anyway. Fifteen innings of baseball, and the back-to-back MVP contributed nothing at the plate.
In Timeline 7, Pete Rose went 0-for-5. Joe Morgan went 0-for-6. The two best contact hitters on the Big Red Machine combined for 0-for-11. Between them: zero hits, zero walks, zero times on base. Cincinnati lost 4-3 in 12 innings. The Machine's two biggest stars combined to produce absolutely nothing.
The quietest game in 35 timelines. Fourteen innings. A single run scored. Morgan went 0-for-5. Five at-bats across fourteen innings and nothing to show for any of them. Cincinnati won 1-0, and Morgan had no part in the only run that scored.