The Oakland A's were 10-39 as of Monday, a .204 winning percentage. That projects to 129 losses.
Even the woeful 1962 Mets lost only 120.
Would 127 losses be the most ever? Would .214 be the worst record?
The answers are No and No.
The 1899 Cleveland Spiders, a National League team, is the worst major league team ever, by a wide margin.
When the National was the only major league during the 1890s, it operated with 12 teams. For most of the decade the Spiders were one of the best teams, finishing in the first division seven straight years (1892-98), including two second place finishes.
It was Cy Young's team.
The team was owned by brothers Frank and Stanley Robison. Prior to the 1899 season, the brothers purchased St. Louis. Incredibly, they were allowed to own two teams in the same league.
Feeling St. Louis was the better investment, they transferred all of the Spiders top players, including Young, to St. Louis. Also incredibly, the National League allowed that.
Playing with essentially a minor league team, the Spiders won 20 and lost 134 in 1899, a .130 percentage. That is by far the most losses ever and the only team to win fewer than 20 was Pittsburgh in the Covid-shortened 2020 season, The Pirates won 19 in a 60-game season.
The 1899 Spiders also allowed a record 1,252 runs, more than eight per game, while being outscored by nearly five runs per game. Another dubious record was finishing 84 games out of first place.
At that time, visiting teams received a percentage of the gate. When Cleveland fans understandably stopped attending Spider games, other teams refused to play there, so the Spiders played most of their games on the road the second half of the season.
The National League contracted to eight teams in 1900.Mercifully the Spiders were one of the teams jettisoned. A year later, Cleveland had major league baseball again with the launch of the American League.
And speaking about the A's, the team hopes to move to Las Vegas in 2027. If so, that would make the A's the first franchise to be located in four cities.
Connie Mack's A's were an original American League team in Philadelphia in1901. The A's moved to Kansas City in 1955, then to Oakland in 1968.
Despite having an all time winning percentage of .488 – 9,218 up and 9,686 down — the A's are second to the Yankees among American League teams in pennants (15 — nine in Philadelphia and six in Oakland) and World Series wins (9 — five in Philadelphia and four in Oakland).
The 1916 A’s had the worst winning percentage in AL history — .235 with a 36-117 record, and there’s a reason for that. A star-studded A’s team dominated the American League with four pennants between 1910 and 1914. But after being swept by the Boston Braves in the 1914 Series, Mack sold or release all of his top players, resulting in seven straight last place finishes.
It was after Mack’s death in 1956 that his son said Mack suspected that some of his players had taken payoffs to throw the Series, five years before the notorious Black Sox of 1919.
The A's are the ultimate feast or famine teams. The current famine is history's worst since the Irish potato blight of the 1840s.
