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John Bateman may have been the unluckiest player in baseball history. Although I can't prove this, having played for two expansion teams, he might be the player with the lowest winning percentage in MLB history who played a minimum of 1000 games. He also lost his job, three times, to the same far inferior player.
Bateman was an undrafted FA catcher, signed by the expansion Houston Colt .45's in 1962. He spent the 1962 season in Modesto, Houston's Class C team at the time, and clubbed 21 HR's while batting .280. 21 years old, with a large for the era (and even today) 6'3" 210lb frame, Bateman was a huge kid with big power and a cannon for a throwing arm. He easily won the Colt .45's starting catcher job in 1963, and in his rookie year led the awful 66 win team with 10 HR's & 59 RBI. He also caught the first no-hitter in Astros history (Don Nottebart).
With the 22-year old Bateman behind the plate, and a pair of highly touted 19-year old outfielders in Rusty Staub & Jimmy Wynn (with 20-year old Joe Morgan joining the club in 1964), Houston had a nice young core of position players, but chose to go with veteran pitching. The other expansion team, the Mets, chose the opposite route. Veteran hitters, young pitching. And it would be the Mets strategy that would win out, as they won the 1969 World Series as those pitchers peaked, while the Colt .45's/Astros never ended up putting things together.
Back to Bateman. Despite being the teams best offensive player in 1963, he lost his job to 21-year old Jerry Grote (a future '69 Met) in '64. Grote was bad, batting .181, but Bateman wasn't much better (.190) in what ended up as a time split. Bateman, like many of the young .45's, was clearly called up too soon, and shuffled between the bigs & AAA in '64 & '65, with the Astros trading Grote and going with Ron Brand behind the plate, a highly touted prospect who had flamed out with the Pirates.
Bateman bounced back in 1966, beating out Brand, and ended up having a very good year, hitting 17 homers & 70 RBI, with a .279/.316/.467 line. Staub, Wynn, & Morgan were also coming into their own, but the Astros had bad pitching, with aging veterans like Turk Farrell and washed up old men like Robin Roberts. Bateman's 16 HR's as catcher that season is still an Astros franchise record (being threatened as we speak by Jason Castro, who has 14 as I type this).
By 1967, Wynn, Staub & Morgan were now established stars, with Morgan one of the best player in baseball, despite analysis at the time not recognizing it. But meanwhile the fourth young star, Bateman, for some reason, lost his job to Brand again. Brand was not a good player. In fact, he was a really bad player. Brand hit .239 with 3 home runs and 103 RBI...for his entire eight year career. Yet Houston kept going back to Brand, despite the fact that whenever Bateman played full seasons, he produced. Brand lost the job back to Bateman for the '68 season, but Bateman recorded less than 400 PA's because the Astros kept giving Brand chances. Brand hit .160 that year and slugged .185.
Having tried to replace him three times, twice with the awful Brand, it was no shock when Houston exposed Bateman in the expansion draft following the '68 season. To show how respected he was, Bateman ended up being the third pick (6th overall) of the Montreal Expos, and was selected over nine All Stars and two former MVP's (Maury Wills & Zoilo Versalles).
Bateman, at 27 and in his prime, was going to his second expansion team, but was also finally going to get his chance to start again...until 52 picks later, in the 58th round, when the Expos selected RON BRAND. And thus, the odd platoon, where one player was clearly inferior to the other would continue, with Brand actually getting the majority of the playing time in 1969, meaning Bateman had in effect lost his job to Brand for the third time.
In 1970, the Expos came to their senses and gave up on Brand, even trying him at SS of all places in '71. By '72 he was back in the minors, and kicked around for a few years in the Expos & Dodgers farm system before retiring. Bateman, finally the unquestioned starting catcher at age 29 & 30, had two very good seasons, hitting 15 homers in '70 with over 40 extra base hits, and adding 10 more homers & 30 total extra base hits in 1971, which were solid power totals for a catcher in that era.
Amazingly, six years after catching the first no-hitter in Houston franchise history, Bateman did it again, catching the first Expos no-hitter, thrown by Bill Stoneman, nine games into the inaugural '69 season.
Bateman who along with former Astros teammate Rusty Staub (who Houston inexplicably traded before the 1969 season, two years before trading Joe Morgan to the Reds, leaving Jimmy Wynn as the last remaining star of the Houston "core four") were the big stars of the early Expos teams. Bateman hung around with local celebrities and civic leaders, and also the police:
Bateman had a unique, if not trivial, place in Canadian history. He was a member of the Expos in October 1970, the same time the October Crisis was happening in the city. This was one of the most notorious and tense time in recent Canadian political history. On November 6, the hiding place of one of the FLQ terrorist cells was discovered. John Bateman loved hanging out with the police, and being a star on the new pro team in town, the Montreal police also loved his company. As retold on a television documentary about the history of the Expos, the manager Gene Mauch was watching these events with his staff on TV, and the camera focused on the hiding place in the house. And what do they see, on national TV, but John Bateman's bulky frame coming out of the hiding place. Evidently the police let him have some fun. Mauch was not amused.
John Bateman played for two expansion teams and a 59-win Phillies team, never finishing above second to last. He somehow lost his job three times to Ron Brand, and then when he finally escaped Brand, ended up being pushed out of baseball by Bob Boone. In between, he led his team in HR's & RBI as a rookie, set a franchise record for HR's by a catcher that still stands today, caught the first no-hitter of two different franchises, and ended up on national TV in Canada during one of the biggest political crisis's in that countries history. It's one of the most bizarre careers in baseball history.
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