Maybe they’re teams with worse records, ERAs or Runs Scored, but the 2008 Seattle Mariners are a special kind of suck. They are on pace to be the first team with a payroll over $100 million to lose 100 games AKA the 100/100 Club. With that kind of money, you would think even an idiot could manage close to .500. How can you spend that much and get so little?
Blargh. Don’t remind me. 
This whole season has just been one long suckfest. They just can’t seem to pull it together offensively when it counts (i.e., most of the time), and their pitching staff always seems to be suffering. The managerial and coaching purges that took place earlier in the season are just another sign of the panic and despair that seems to have gripped the team. It’s all the more frustrating since they actually did reasonably well last season.
While they are a pretty bad team this year, it seems that they’re not quite as bad as their win-loss record suggests.
They are, along with the Atlanta Braves, further behind their Pythagorean expectations than every other team in the Major Leagues. Both the Mariners and the Braves are a full 6 wins behind their Expected Win-Loss, based on runs scored and conceded. And the Mariners are an awful 11-22 in 1-run games, suggesting that they’ve suffered some bad luck along the way.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that they’re a good team. Even if they were exceeding their X W-L by three games, they would STILL only be 50-60.
Q: Are the Mariners the worst team ever?
A: Hard to say, there’s always next year.
It’s a little sad checking the daily standings and most days the only bright spot is that the Nationals have lost more games.
Either way it can be said that the two worst teams in the majors are based in Washington.
First in war, first in peace, and last in the American AND National Leagues!!
For badness and expensiveness, it’s hard to top the 1993 Mets, aka “The Worst Team Money Can Buy.” Third-highest salary in the league and they went 59-103.
Like the Mariners, they were a very unlucky team, but 103 losses is 103 losses.
I was hoping they would blow the team up. Anybody but Felix. But the trade deadline has come and gone and the BoSox traded away Manny the Malcontent, the Reds traded away the Old Kid, and the Mariners trade away Arthur Rhodes? Things aren’t looking up.
BAH! I turned this game off when the score was 6-0 Twins. Then I checked the box score just before I went to bed.
ETA: What the…?! The story changed between me posting the link and testing it.
Worst team ever? No way.
The Cleveland Spiders posted a 20-134 record in 1899 for a winning percentage of .130, far and away the worst ever. The second-worst season (the Philadelphia Athletics of 1916) had almost twice as many wins, at 36. The Mariners at 43-69 couldn’t achieve a winning percentage that low even if they lost all the remaining 50 games for the rest of the season (which would give them a percentage of .265).
Even if they did lose out for the rest of the season, they’d be tied with the 2003 Detroit Tigers (who went 43-119) for merely the 8th-worst season ever.
In fact, in order for the Mariners to beat the Spiders’ record for worst-ever baseball team, the commissioner would have to add 171 additional games (an entire season, and then some!) to the schedule and the Mariners would have to lose all of them — the 50 remaining in the regular season, and the 171 additional games.
Disappointing performance? Of course. Worst team ever? Not a chance.
Perhaps worst team by a Money Spent / Winning Percentage ratio?
But that might go into the meaningless statistic category as salaries have exploded in recent years even allowing for inflation.
Well you could just use the average salary of players back through the years to figure out the “baseball inflation” and use that to compare.
As a Cleveland Indians fan, I can at least take some cold comfort in this thread.
Even then it’d be hard to judge the 2008 Mariners against the 1899 Spiders, who well predate the free agent era and the death of the reserve clause. Prior to that you’ll find comparatively little salary inflation, not just year-to-year, but from least-to-most within the same year. (You wouldn’t find a superstar in 1899 making 100-150 times the league minimum.)
The owner of the Spiders also owned the St. Louis team, a setup which is now illegal. He renamed St. Louis the Perfectos and piled all the talented players into it (notably Cy Young), then scraped the dregs into the Spiders. Any player who showed promise was put in the Perfectos; any player who started to slip was shuttled to the Spiders. The Spiders were essentially a minor-league team. They were so bad, teams refused even to play at Cleveland; they played something like their last 36 games on the road (and lost 35).
Of course, the Perfectos only placed fifth with a record of 84-67, giving the two teams a combined 104-201 record.
It should also be mentioned that the situation for the Spiders was supposedly so dire that they were literally hiring guys off the street to play for them. I remember reading a story about how they hired a bartender who had no prior experience playing professional ball to be a starting pitcher. Of course he got knocked around in his only appearance but, on the whole, didn’t do much worse than the other “professional” athletes on the Spiders’ staff. He went back to bartending right after his one outing. As for the Cleveland Spiders, at the end of the 1899 season, they became one of the last teams in MLB history to be contracted out of existence.
As bad as things for the Mariners are now, at least nobody’s talked about contracting them … yet.
I believe he was a tobacconist named Eddie Kolb, but yeah — they were awful.
Wow. That’s a sad story. I would guess that, in addition to being starved for talent and kneecapped by the owner, morale would be somewhere between rock bottom and Hell Frozen Over. I mean, after the team’s been gutted and pushed round, would you even bother to do more than show up for games?
It may piss off the fans, but this has been my favorite Mariner season ever. Tickets are dirt cheap, you can sit anywhere in the empty stadium, there are no lines for food or souveniers…it is “real” baseball the way it’s meant to be, relaxed and laid back, wandering around chatting with folks, beers and dogs instantly waiting for everyone. Baseball was not meant to be about crowds, lines, The Wave, hours of traffic, or high-priced tickets.
Here’s to the suckage, Mariners! Cheers! 
Common sentiment. The last couple winning seasons for the Seahawks have been bitter sweet for many fans. While winning is great, many have also been priced out of tickets as demand has risen. In fact I’ve heard many say that struggling for a season would at least have a silver lining in reducing the waiting list for season tickets. 