In every baseball game, there is a clear winner and loser. Every game that I have participated in, the goal is to win. Winning one game leads to winning two. Win much more often than you lose, that gives you a chance to be close or at the top of your division and be in the running to win a championship. Most organized baseball leagues from Little League to MLB crown a champion. No one really cares about the team that finished last. Teams that are truly awful make for a good story though. Let’s first focus on the worst team that the columnist ever played on. This team was awful, and I have played on some bad teams. We will also look at the worst team in MLB history, the 1962 New York Mets.
The Broadway Jaycees of the 1990’s managed to go two full seasons without winning a game. We didn’t just lose, there should have been arrests made for assault and battery. Most softball leagues have a slaughter rule that ends the game if a team is losing by 10 runs or more after 5 innings. The problem was, we had to play a minimum of 5 innings. Most games, the Jaycees were losing by 20 runs or more before the 5th inning came around. The team was so bad, people came to watch us just for the entertainment value of it. Kind of like those folks on the local news that interview people after a tornado when their house has been leveled. Tell me sir, what are your emotions after giving up 22 runs in the first inning? Do you feel like giving up?
The 1962 Mets had the worst record in MLB history with a record of 40 wins and 120 losses. Luckily for them, two games were rained out and not rescheduled. Believe it or not, there might be a team in 2023 that can take the ignominious title of worst team ever. The Oakland A’s are a team constructed by their owner to lose baseball games. They are doing a marvelous job. As this article is being written, the A’s lost again today. Their record of 10-38 equates to a winning percentage of 20.8%! Do some quick math of the 62 Mets record and it comes up to winning 25% of the games that season. A’s ownership desperately wants to move the team to Las Vegas, who will build them a shiny new stadium. The best way to do that is to field a team so poor that no one will show up to the games. Ever see the movie Major League? Same premise. Oakland fans understandably are very upset with ownership and are staying away from the Oakland Coliseum in droves. One Monday night game drew 2500 fans to a stadium that holds 50,000. Didn’t stop the ushers from making people stay in their assigned seats. The ushers probably outnumbered the fans. After 45 games of the 2023 season, Oakland has been outscored by 153 runs.
Until the 1958 season, New York was the capital of MLB and had three teams in the city, the Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers. After the 1957 season, the Giants moved to San Francisco and the Dodgers to Los Angeles. This left New York without a National League team for the first time ever. Justifiably, the Giants and Dodgers fans felt abandoned, and the city immediately started petitioning the league for an expansion franchise. MLB leadership approved and two new teams were created in Houston and New York, who were christened the Mets. The two new teams needed players and each MLB franchise was instructed to make some of their roster available for the new teams to choose from. The guys available were not the cream of the crop. The Mets hired Casey Stengel, a legendary manager but at 71, was long past his prime. He was not given much to work with. At times during the 1962 season when his team was getting pummeled, he had to be nudged awake by his coaches after falling asleep in the middle of the game. The team was beyond awful and played in the Giants old stadium, the decrepit Polo Grounds which, like Stengel, was great once but showing its age. This did not stop the fans from showing up to cheer on the lovable losers. NY fans were just glad to have another team besides the Yankees to cheer for. Can’t say that I blame them. Stengel, always quotable, urged the fans to come to the ballpark. “I’ve been in this game a hundred years, but I see new ways to lose that I never knew existed before!”
The Mets played their first game in St Louis and lost 11-4, a sign of things to come. They proceeded to lose 8 more games in a row before defeating the Pirates for the first win in franchise history. They finished the month of April with a record of 3-13.
The “ace “of the pitching rotation was Roger Craig with a record of 10 wins and 24 losses. He fared even worse in 1963 going 5-22. “Marvelous” Marv Thornberry was the player that I personally resembled in my slow pitch softball days. He led the team with 15 home runs, but committed an unsightly 17 errors at first base. No DH in those days. If they wanted his bat in the lineup, the errors were part of the package.
As bad as the 1962 Mets were, they still drew a paid attendance of over 900,000 fans, which was more than the Yankees. Only six years passed before the Amazin’ Mets won the World Series in 1969. The 2003 Detroit Tigers came closest to setting a record for futility when they finished at 43-119. Guess it remains to be seen if the Oakland A’s can claim the dubious distinction of being the baddest of the bad. Looking forward to the start of the Valley League Baseball season. Opening Day at Rebel Park is Friday, June 2nd at 7:30. Hope to see some of you there. Great chance to take a kid to a baseball game. I’ll leave you this month with a quote from the great Bob Uecker playing Harry Doyle in the movie Major League. He should have been the announcer for the 62 Mets. “Haywood swings and crushes one toward South America. Tomlinson’s going to need a visa to catch this one. It is outta here, and there’s nothing left but a vapor trail.”
