The worst team in a given league usually has a winning percentage under .400. Now and then, a bottom-feeder will do better than that. Just last year – 2007 – the worst team in the National League, Pittsburgh, went a merely-bad-rather-than-atrocious 68-94, good for a .420 winning percentage. Those Pirates were one of the best worst teams in baseball history, if that makes any sense.
Being someone who loves trivia like this, I set out to identify the very best of the very worst – the teams who had the worst record in their league, but who still managed to keep their winning percentage over .425. I may have missed one, but I’ve found seven such teams. We’ll take them in order.
1915 New York Giants (69-83, .454)
A rare bad year for John McGraw’s Giants. The Giants finished in the first division every year from 1903 to 1925 – except this one. In 1913, they won their third straight pennant, and they finished in second place (84-70) in 1914. So what happened to put them in the basement?
First of all, they were a little unlucky, underperforming their Pythagorean projection by about two games. Two Hall of Fame pitchers, Christy Mathewson and Rube Marquard, had had poor years in 1914 but were downright awful in 1915. The leading hitters in 1914 – LF George Burns and SS Art Fletcher – lost 32 and 31 points of batting average. And the production of the team’s catchers, center fielders, and right fielders fell off significantly.
But there wasn’t an across-the-board decline, and that’s why this team is among the best – actually, based on winning percentage, the very best – worst teams ever. 2B Larry Doyle (who, incidentally, is one of the greatest forgotten players of all time) won the batting title. 1B Fred Merkle had one of his best seasons, and outfielders George Burns and Dave Robertson both turned in solid years. Despite the last-place finish, the Giants were third in the league in scoring. On the pitching side, Big Jeff Tesreau was above-average and worked over 300 innings, and the team’s #2 and #3 starters, while mediocre, were improvements over the 1914 staff.
The Giants rebounded to go 86-66 in 1916, and by 1917 they were pennant winners yet again.
1924 Chicago White Sox (66-87, .431)
At 66-87, the White Sox were only a half-game worse than Boston and just a full game behind Cleveland. And they shouldn’t have been that bad – they underperformed their Pythagorean projection by five games.
Their star player was all-time great 2B Eddie Collins, who had a pretty routine year at age 37, hitting .349 with 89 walks, 42 steals, and 108 runs scored. 1B Earl Sheely batted .320 with 95 walks and 103 RBI. The outfield was pretty awesome, too – the team’s four primary outfielders hit .352, .328, .325, and .319. Overall, the White Sox finished second in the league in on-base percentage and third in runs scored.
The pitching was bad, but there were at least a couple of bright spots. Sloppy Thurston won 20 games, and Hall of Famer Red Faber was solid in 20 starts. Rookie Ted Lyons got knocked around a bit, but the next year he emerged as an ace, and of course he too went on to the Hall of Fame.
The White Sox were in the midst of their post-Black Sox recession, but player-manager Eddie Collins, who took over the reigns late in the 1924 season, led the team to winning records the next two years.
1925 Chicago Cubs (68-86, .442)
Like their crosstown rivals the year before, the Cubs finished in last place by just a half-game, behind Brooklyn and Philadelphia. And like the 1915 Giants, these last-place Cubs were an anomaly. The franchise had winning records every single year from 1922 to 1939, except for 1925. I’m beginning to see a pattern, too – these Cubs underperformed their Pythagorean projection by four games.
The undisputed star of the team was 24-year-old Hall of Fame catcher Gabby Hartnett, who hit .289/.351/.555 in 117 games. The pitching star was another Hall of Famer, 38-year-old Pete Alexander, who went 15-11 with a 3.39 ERA. But the team’s third Hall of Famer, SS Rabbit Maranville, was a bust, hitting poorly in half a season.
Before the season, the Cubs had traded for Maranville, 1B Charlie Grimm, and SP Wilbur Cooper in a blockbuster deal that sent star 2B George Grantham and quality starter Vic Aldridge to the Pirates. While Maranville was a disappointment, Grimm and Cooper were at least respectable. All told, though, the Cubs had to be unhappy with their take, as they watched Grantham and Aldridge help the Pirates win the pennant.
Recovery was swift. Joe McCarthy took over as manager in 1926, and the Cubs immediately returned to the first division. They won the pennant in 1929.
1958 Philadelphia Phillies (69-85, .448)
The Phillies had been a .500-ish team for most of the fifties, but they hit the bottom in ’58 and kept digging deeper, losing 85, then 90, then 95, and finally 107 games before re-emerging as a respectable team in the sixties.
But the 1958 team was pretty decent. Hall of Famer Richie Ashburn had perhaps his best season, winning the batting title with a .350 mark and also leading the league in on-base percentage, hits, triples, and walks while finishing seventh in the MVP vote. Fellow outfielder Harry Anderson hit .301/.373/.524 in the only good full season of his career. Those two were the only good regulars, but the team had a ton of quality semi-regular players. These Phillies led the league in batting average and on-base percentage, though they finished just sixth (out of eight) in runs scored.
The starting rotation was anchored by Hall of Famer Robin Roberts, who went 17-14, 3.24 in his last good year with the Phillies. The rest of the starters were unimpressive, but the team did have a solid relief ace in sophomore Turk Farrell.
1966 New York Yankees (70-89, .440)
The Yankees won yet another pennant in 1964, capping a run of dominance dating back to 1920. And then they promptly fell off the face of the earth, going 77-85 in 1965 and then bottoming out in 1966. They were just a half game behind the Red Sox and a full game in back of the Senators, but these were the New York Yankees, and they had the worst record in the league.
Truth be told, it wasn’t quite this bad. The Yankees underperformed their Pythagorean projection by a whopping nine games; their run differential was almost exactly even. Mickey Mantle, hobbled and 34, could still rake when he was healthy, putting up a .288/.389/.538 line in 108 games. Tom Tresh was excellent, splitting time between the outfield and third base and hitting 27 home runs. Clete Boyer was a brilliant third baseman and a passable hitter. Joe Pepitone slugged 31 homers, but in his case it was a Tony Batista 31 (i.e. accompanied by a .290 OBP). Roger Maris was only 31 years old but playing like a much older man. Veteran Elston Howard, 37, was in decline. Rookie Roy White, 22, was two years away from stardom.
The pitching staff was young. Mel Stottlemyre, fresh off a 20-win season, had the worst year of his career. Fritz Peterson and Al Downing were averageish innings-eaters. Jim Bouton, a grizzled vet of 27, was pretty good in limited playing time. Whitey Ford and Bob Friend were once-great pitchers at the end of the line.
This, then, was a transitional year for the Yankees. The old guard was passing away, and the youngsters had yet to fill the breach. Things would get better in the years to come, but it would take a full decade more for the franchise to emerge from its October exile.
1968 Houston Astros (72-90, .444)
This was the Year of the Pitcher, of course, and Houston’s problem was that it just didn’t have much pitching. This isn’t immediately apparent, because besides playing in the ultimate pitcher’s year, the Astros also played in the ultimate pitcher’s park. All five starters had ERAs between 2.74 and 3.31, but the park-adjusted league norm was 2.96, so those numbers aren’t too impressive.
The offense didn’t score many runs, but they had some good hitters. Jimmy Wynn’s .269/.376/.474 line was equal, in context, to Sammy Sosa’s 66-homer, MVP season in 1998. Rusty Staub also had a good year, but the team’s best all-around player, Joe Morgan, missed all but ten games. Newly-acquired SS Denis Menke slid over to second to replace Morgan, and Menke held his own, but that opened a gaping hole at shortstop that the Astros couldn’t effectively fill.
These Astros were a young team, and a whole bunch of future stars made appearances this year: John Mayberry, Bob Watson, Nate Colbert. 21-year-old Larry Dierker spent the whole year in the rotation with mediocre results, but the next year he emerged as an ace. The Astros improved to .500 in 1969, but they squandered most of their young talent and were non-contenders until the end of the seventies.
2000 Minnesota Twins (69-93, .426)
Since divisional play began in 1969, only these Twins have put up the worst record in the league and yet managed to stay over .425. The offense was really, really weak, but they did have two players with .400 on-base percentages, Matt Lawton and Corey Koskie. Cristian Guzman hit 20 triples, and some of the other young hitters showed promise – guys like David Ortiz, Torii Hunter, and Jacque Jones.
The pitching staff had three above-average starters (Brad Radke, Eric Milton, and Mark Redman), but the real strength of this team was its bullpen, which had a 4.39 ERA (the park-adjusted league average was 5.17). Oh, and Johan Santana made his major league debut at age 21.
This was the eighth straight losing season for the Twins, but things were looking up. In 2001, the team improved to 85-77, and they won four division titles in five years from 2002 to 2006.
Of these seven teams, three – the ’15 Giants, ’25 Cubs, and 2000 Twins – quickly turned things around and became contenders in the years that followed. We should be able to say the same thing about the ’68 Astros, but thanks to some really, really foolish deals, they wasted their chance at becoming a dynasty.
Only the ’58 Phillies got worse. If there’s a moral to this story, I guess it’s this: if a team is the worst in the league, but still isn’t that bad, they’ll probably get to .500 in reasonably short order. At least, that’s what precedent says; we’ll see what the Pirates have to say about it next year.