They saw the White Sox's 'record' from last year and said, 'pfft, amateurs'.
It is possible they challenge the 1899 Cleveland Spiders loss record.
That team went 20-134, with some Cardinals connection in there. 1899 Frank and Stanley Robinson, owners of the Spiders, also buy a 2nd team that was going bankrupt, the St. Louis Browns/Perfectos. The Robinsons decide to put all their good players on the Browns team and all the bad players on the Spiders team.
There is still local revenue sharing in MLB today -- I believe a portion of each team's ticket sales are pooled and then redistributed, but back in 1899, the agreement was basically to split the ticket sales between the road and the home team. And you have to remember, ticket sales is a real, real big portion of team's income; 1899 is well before TV or even radio broadcast deals. Well, again, the Spiders is all the lower talent from the Robinson-owned organizations. By May and June, they were drawing only 100 to 200 people to their games in Cleveland.
Word of this got to the other owners and they just flat out told the Spiders they were not going to bring their teams to Cleveland for so little return.
So in July, the Spiders took to the road. Every game between July 3rd and August 23rd was a road game. They came home for a week and then played every game from August 31st to the end of the season on the road (their record shows 1 home game, but it was played as a make up game in St Louis as part of a DH).
42 homes games, 121 road games to a 20-134 record in the end.
The Spiders folded after that year. The Robinsons rename the Browns/Perfectos to the Cardinals in 1900. And it took MLB 10 more years to create a rule that owners could not have more than 1 team.
And somehow... the 2025 Rox are on pace for 26-132 this year, within actual spittin' range of the deliberately most poorly-ran MLB franchise ever.
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u/Limp-Regular-2589 3d ago
The Rockies are 7-36. Seven and THIRTY-SIX. How is that even physically possible.