So I was thinking that the Yanks own the Twins and the Twins were the original Senators, so a bad team for a long time. Probably the team the Yanks have the best winning percentage against.
I did some data mining.
It turns out the Yanks really own KC, a lot less games but still over 538 games they have a .617 Winning percentage. Twins were only second at .596. Baltimore & Oakland have also help the Yankees with their MLB winning pct.
Now the other side of the coin, is I thought Boston likely had the best record vs. the Yanks, close they’re #2. The Detroit Tigers have the best. Yanks are only .532 against them.
The Yanks are .570 all-time. I didn’t bother with NL teams.
Here is my chart with the Winning Pct. calculated.
The Phillies have a .479 winning percentage all time. According to the only source I can find on this, they have all time winning percentage of .579 against the Rockies, their best record not counting tiny 19th century sample sizes, and their worst is .424 against the Giants.
I figured the Cardinals were probably close to .500 against the Yankees, since they played in 5 World Series, winning 3 of them. But, it looks like the in the WS their head-to-head record is 13-15 (getting swept in 1928 hurt).
Interleague play the Yankees lead 15-12. So overall it’s 30 wins for the Yanks and 25 for the Cards.
The Orioles are quite a bit worse than many would guess, .475, but of course unlike some relocated teams they kept the abysmal records of the St. Louis Blues when they moved to Baltimore. Of course neither the Orioles or the Phillies are anywhere close to the worst over the last 50-60 years.
The actual 3 worst teams are the following:
Rockies .454
Marlins .461
Padres .470
A team I am VERY surprised to be above .500 are my hometown Guardians, .513; while they had a 35 year stretch in the 2nd division (as they used to call the cellar dwellers) from c. 1960 to 1990’s, they actually were above .500 quite often before WW2 (kept being beat out by the Yanks natch), and have had solid stretches above .500 since the mid-90’s.
For the first sixty years or so no one saw Cleveland as a joke franchise. They were usually a good team and had a legacy of great players. It was hard to win a pennant in the AL because of the Yankees (after 1920; before that the Red Sox and Tigers) but they were always a respectable outfit.
It was in the expansion era they started usually sucking and making stupid decisions, until the 1990s teams that were so good. Really, their run of genuine mediocrity wasn’t THAT long; it lasted 25-30 years, more or less. By baseball standards, in an era that making the playoffs was was harder than other pro sports or how it is now, that wasn’t an usually long run of shittiness. The Blue Jays went 22 years without coming close to the playoffs and that franchise doesn’t have the same reputation. The Rangers didn’t make the playoffs for the first 34 years they existed and don’t have a terrible reputation. The Padres. I could go on.
The reason the Indians/Guardians have earned that reputation is
Their shitty period precisely coincides with Baby Boomers and Gen X being into pro sports, and they dominate popular culture perceptions, and
Even in their era of success since 1994 they haven’t won a World Series to help wipe away the bad reputation.
I think all the listed franchises retain their records for the entire existence of the team across all home cities.
If you sort that list by games, there’s only 30 franchises, and all of them have played more or less the same number of games as the franchises they entered the league with.
It’s still true of the DC teams. The first Senators’ record is part of the Twins, the second are part of the Rangers, the third retain the Expos’ wins and losses.