The Colorado Rockies baseball team has a dismal 9-50 record so far which is only .153 winning percentage. At that rate they will finish 25-137. According to Gemini, that would give them the most MLB losses of all time, and lowest winning percentage of the modern era. I wonder if they will accomplish either of those, and why are they so bad?
Gemini: "The absolute worst MLB team season record ever belongs to the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, who finished with a dismal 20-134 record (.130 winning percentage). It’s important to note that this was in a very different era of baseball. For the “Modern Era” of baseball (generally considered 1901-present), the worst records are:
Most Losses: The 2024 Chicago White Sox currently hold the modern era record with 121 losses. This surpassed the 1962 New York Mets, who went 40-120.
Lowest Winning Percentage: The 1916 Philadelphia Athletics have the lowest winning percentage in the modern era, finishing at 36-117 (.235)".
Whew! My Baltimore Orioles are sucking this season but at least their wins are in double digits.
That’s gotta be real discouraging to Rockies fans. (I assume there still are some.) What’s the problem? Pitching? Fielding? Hitting the ball? Or all three?
In the biggest hitter’s park in baseball, they have exactly ONE hitter above average (Jordan Beck, and he has a .319 OBP, which there is still pretty poor), and in the pitching staff just 2 there (the closer and setup man). Worst out percentage (.652), worst fielding percentage (.977), so yeah all three.
Looks like all around team effort with bad hitting and pitching. Out of 30 teams their team hitting is 30 in batting avg, 27 in home runs. Team pitching is 29 in ERA and 30 in batting average against.
Most of the team is batting below .240 with only 3 starters above that. For pitchers, Freeland is 0-8 with 5.72 ERA, Marquez 1-7 and 7.13, Senzatela 1-10 and 7.14. Agnos, Bird, and Herget have good to great ERA’s but only 1 win between all 3 of them.
Things tend to regress to the mean, and a baseball season is long enough that this usually bears out.
The Rockies are clearly a terrible team, and probably are going to stay terrible all year; the question is whether they can maintain this historically-terrible pace. They’re almost undoubtedly going to be a 100-loss team, probably even a 110-loss one. Beyond that, who knows?
Even last year’s White Sox had periods where they weren’t entirely awful, including playing .400 ball in September, which nearly “cost” them the all-time loss record.
It’s entirely possible that some of their players will start performing a bit better as the year goes on, or they bring up a few prospects from the minors who prove to be a net positive for the team.
OTOH, it’s also possible that anyone on the Rockies who has any value (or has a big contract) gets traded away before the trade deadline, or flat-out cut; this site indicates that they currently have a payroll of $124 million, including $37 million to guys who are on the injured list (though $27 million of that is Kris Bryant, who hasn’t played since mid-April, and who may well be done).
Usually, typically, and commonly, yes, that’s true. On the other hand, baseball players being a habitually superstitious lot, we may be about to find out what it looks like when an entire team collectively gets a bad case of the yips.
We kinda saw that on the south side of Chicago, last year. Similar to this year’s Rockies, the 2024 Sox were coming off of a 100-loss season the previous season, weren’t expected to much better in '24, but got off to a horrific start (6-29 in March and April) – even worse than expectations – and never really recovered.
When I said “regress to the mean” in my earlier post, what I meant was that a bad team in MLB is about a 95-loss team, +/- five games or so. Even if you have the worst team in baseball, your team isn’t tremendously worse than an average team, and you’re still good enough to win about 1/3 of your games.
Just as it’s not easy to be a 100-win team, it’s not “easy” to be a 100-loss team, either, and losing substantially more than 100 games becomes statistically unlikely: only six teams in the post-WWII era have lost 110 or more. On the other hand, four of those six have been in the past 22 years.
In fact, in the last seven years, MLB has had a spate of really bad (i.e., 105+ loss) teams:
2018 Orioles 47-115
2019 Orioles 54-108
2019 Tigers 47-114
2019 Marlins 57-105
2021 Orioles 52-110
2021 Diamondbacks 52-110
2022 Nationals 55-107
2023 Royals 56-106
2023 A’s 50-112
2024 White Sox 41-121
I’m not sure if its a sign of a structural change in the competitive balance, or just a run of teams winding up on the far left side of the bell curve, but we’ve had six 110+ loss teams in just the last few years.
The Spiders were not a major league baseball team in the real sense of the term; their owners owners two teams and deliberately stripped the Spiders of talent to staff the other team, a thing that does not happen in modern professional sports.
I love awful teams; when the White Sox set the loss record last yer I was just delighted. The Rockies may be worse, but it’s early to predict that. A team with many below-replacement-level players will tend to get better simply by replacing them, and by definition they’re easily replaced with replacement level players. Bad teams get better, good teams get worse.
The Rockies won’t keep playng Adiel Amador or Michael Toglia is they keep stinking this bad (Amador hasn’t played in four days, actually.) They’re not gonna keep starting Antonio Senzatela. They can find better players with trades to get players stuck at AAA on other teams.
Tho it’s been 60+ years now, the Yankees used to use the KC Athletics as a quasi-farm team for a number of years (note before the A’s moved there KC was the Yanks’ AAA affiliate).
The KC A’s were just stupid and poor, and the Yankees were ludicrously rich and smart enough to keep fleecing the A’s. It was gross situation, but the A’s were a very resource-poor organization and I get the sense Arnold Johnson, who owned the A’s, was just in thrall of his former business partner, Dan Topping, who ran the Yankees. He was an idiot, basically.
Not all of the Yankees-A’s trades were lopsided for the Yankees. Some even worked out for the A’s, like getting Bob Cerv for a handful of cash and then getting some legitimately solid years, including his monster MVP-level 1958 season . But we remember the real disasters, like the Maris trade.
The 2025 Rockies will start to resemble the 1899 Cleveland Spiders when and if they trade away a bunch of players with a semblance of being good, for prospects who are not yet ready for the major leagues.
A problem for bad teams is holding onto their “assets” too long, so the value of what they can get in return drops. There’s been a lot of talk about teams trading for the White Sox’s Luis Robert, who had a fine 2023 season but has since declined (he’s hitting .180 this year with modest power numbers).
kenobi, I didn’t know there have been so many teams with bad records in last 7 years. Three in 2019, wow. I wonder what is causing that. Not enough talent for 30 teams? Free agency? Looks like the big losers are all small market teams so probably can’t afford a good team some years.
They’re almost undoubtedly going to be a 100-loss team, probably even a 110-loss one. Beyond that, who knows?