I remember hearing somewhere that "The Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball" will no longer be published. I can see why; The information is available on the Internet, and the book keeps getting bigger, so it's a little unwieldy to take to the beach. Still, it's a shame.

You see, I've spent many hours of enjoyment over the years looking at different versions of that book. What follows is a list of teams that sparked my interest.

This is a list of the most interesting teams you probably don't know much about. I mean, the 1962 Mets were interesting, but there are a lot of books about that team. You people are baseball fans, so you probably also know about the 1930 Phillies and the 1916 Philadelphia A's, a team that would have been lucky to win 3 out of 10 from the '62 Mets.

These are other teams, just as unusual, but for different reasons. Here we go:

1922 Chicago White Sox

If you look at the greatest managerial jobs in baseball history, you have to consider Kid Gleason's work with this team.

The White Sox spent 1921 staggering around from the Black Sox scandal. They were sixth in the league in runs scored, and had two decent pitchers. Red Faber and Dickie Kerr combined to pitch 47 percent of the team's innings. Faber and Kerr were 44-32. The rest of the staff was 18-60, and the Sox finished seventh.

At some point, Gleason learned that Kerr would be a holdout and miss the 1922 season, because Charlie Comiskey apparently decided that the best way to deal with those greedy players who wanted more money was to make sure they didn't play for his team.

Let's try to reconstruct Gleason's thinking when he learned this. It must have been somewhere along the lines of "My God, the world is caving in...I wonder if Red would go for a one-man rotation...Maybe if we get a lot of rain...Should I give him the money myself?...Aw, fiddlesticks, we're gonna stink."

Gleason had Faber throw 353 innings in 1922, and Faber finished 21-17 and led the league in ERA. Gleason got as much as he could out of Charlie Robertson, Dixie Leverett, Ted Blankenship and Shovel Hodge, and the Sox finished 77-77.

But what's really odd about Gleason that year is how he handled his lineup. The Sox again finished sixth in the league in runs scored, but had some good players like Eddie Collins, Ray Schalk, Johnny Mostil ( a heckuva player until he tried to kill himself) and Bibb Falk.

Gleason's approach was to develop a three-man bench. He had a backup outfielder/first baseman, a backup catcher and a utility infielder. That's it. Three bench players got more than three at bats for Chicago that season.

The three-man bench was fairly common in the early part of the century, but had fallen out of practice with the expanded rosters. It hasn't been seen since.

1974 California Angels

Bill James touched on this team in the 2008 Gold Mine. They also did something you'll never see again. The team leader in saves, Orlando Pena, pitched four games with the Angels.

The Angels had 64 complete games that year, which didn't even lead the league (Boston had 71). California was 39-25 when the starter went the distance, but 29-69 when the Angels went to the bullpen.

Bill speculated that Bobby Winkles tried to manage the Angels like he managed in college -- that is, expect the starters to go the distance, and use the relievers to mop up when they can't. Angels relievers threw 294 innings that season, about 90 less than the average of the other 11 AL teams.

The 294 is not a modern record -- the 1980 A's were at 210.3 -- but it was very low. When Dick Williams took over in midseason, the Angels followed the same pattern. Quite simply, pretty much whoever they tried in the bullpen pitched like they wanted to get off the mound as quickly as possible. The managers complied.

Fourteen different Angels pitched in save situations that year. None faced more than 38 batters or pitched more than eight innings in that role. Five of those pitchers had an opposing OPS of 1100 or higher.

The bottom line: In save situations, the AL ERA was 3.20. For the Angels, it was 6.08. This team never did one of those Brett Myers-let's-send-a-starter-to-the-bullpen-moves, but they must have considered it.

1905 Boston Beaneaters

I didn't include this team because it lost 103 games and still didn't finish last, or because it had four 20-game losers, or even because it was called the Beaneaters. This team makes the list because it may have had the worst bench of any team in history.

The Beaneaters Benchsitters were Tom Needham, Bill Lauterborn, Bud Sharpe, George Barclay, Allie Strobel, Dave Murphy, Gabby Street and Bill McCarthy. Of the eight, only Needham hit over .185, and he hit .218.

The totals of the not-so-elite 8: a .191 average in 794 at bats. Prorate it to 600 at bats, and you get a player with 34 walks, 35 runs and 36 RBI to go with that .191 average. This group was so bad that  Boston's team batting average was 11 points lower than the next-worst team in the league.

1965 Detroit Tigers

Many have wondered why the Tigers took so long to win a pennant with their talent core in the 1960s. Even with their 89-73 record, the Tigers are considered underachievers.

Well, here's part of the reason: In 1965, the Tigers pitchers were bad hitters. I'm not talking like Mario Mendoza vs. the league bad. I'm talking ridiculously bad.

The four pitchers with the most innings for Detroit that season were Mickey Lolich, Denny McLain, Hank Aguirre and Dave Wickersham. Of those four, Aguirre -- always in the discussion with guys like Bob Buhl and Ron Herbel when people talked about the worst-hitting pitchers in baseball -- had the highest average. He hit .086.

They were all, as you might imagine, awful. Lolich was 5 for 86 with zero RBI. McLain was 4 for 74. Aguirre was 6 for 70. Wickersham was 4 for 58.

As a group, Tigers pitchers that year hit .080 with a 214 OPS in 402 at bats. The pitchers for the other Major League teams hit .134. If the Tigers had been just average, they would have had 22 extra hits in the same number of at bats. Those 22 hits wouldn't have put the Tigers in first place, but it would have spared them the embarrassment of Hank Aguirre being their big stick.

Matt DiFilippo can be reached at allthings222@fastmail.fm