Tuesday, July 28, 2009

The Cleveland Spiders


I was kind of hoping baseball's woeful Washington Nationals would go into a second-half depressive funk, and break the major-league record for most losses by a team. (Sadly, it appears as though they have some fight left in them, and will likely finish the season as merely the worst team in baseball this year).

Who was the worst team of all-time, you ask? Surely it was the '62 New York Mets (40-120), right? Wrong! Well, wrong if you count the 19th Century (few people do).

The worst team was the '99 (as in 1899) Cleveland Spiders, who went 20-134. Even more pathetic, they were 11-101 on the road. How could they have played 112 road games in a 154-game season? Easy - they were so bad, visiting teams refused to travel to Cleveland to play them! They finished a whopping 84 games out of first place.

You can read about why they were so bad here.

And while we're at it - here's my nominee for worst professional team name of all-time.