A WIDENED POOL OF BADNESS: THE A's HARROWING START

 Going into today's game at the embattled ballpark beckoning bleakly from Highway 880, the Oakland A's had lost 15 of their first 18 contests, many of them by a wide margin. (They would end up losing a third consecutive game later, despite a promising debut from pitching prospect Mason Miller, to take them further down the rabbit hole of a dreadful start to the 2023 season.)

They aren't the first team to start this badly--and of course, a few other teams have started with even fewer wins than the A's have--but, as our chart demonstrates, no team has begun the year with a pitching staff in such frightening disarray.

That earned run average (7.47) would give anyone pause, but note that the team closest to them (the '36 St. Louis Browns) played in a hitters' park during one of the most robust offensive seasons in baseball history. The A's play in a league that's currently about at the historical average for run scoring, and their home park has always favored pitchers. 

As you can see from the additional data supplied about these twenty other teams who've lost 15 of their first 18 games, only two teams got back to .500 after such a start--the 1996 Red Sox, who won 85 games, and the 1973 Cardinals, who started 5-20 but battled back to .500 by season's send. (Missing here are the 1907 Cardinals, whose ERA for the 18 game span is still unknown, and several teams who won only three games out of their first eighteen but who lost only 13 or 14 games due to ties: one of those teams, the 1914 Boston Braves, are the only team to have such a terrible start and make it into the postseason. They're still called "the Miracle Braves" more than a century later.)

While some of the worst teams in baseball history are shown here (the 1962 Mets, the 1952 Pirates, the 2002 Tigers, the 1932 Red Sox...), the fact is that these teams on average tend to recover to some a bit less catastrophic: their aggregate final season WPCT is .380, which works out to a 62-100 season. The A's won only 60 games last year, however, and while they're pushing a youth movement, not much of that seems to be located on the mound, which could make for a long season.

AND they're not alone--now after 19 games, there is a chance that we'll have two teams begin the year with a WPCT of .200 or lower in their first twenty games of the year. The Royals are 4-15, and they are showing attributes similar to the A's. Over in the National League, the Rockies and the Nationals both have five wins, but they are looking like teams that will fuel the greatest level of competitive imbalance in the game that we've seen for quite some time. "Tanking" has been for some time now the sobriquet for a component of the small-market substructure in the game, but it could be spreading to some of the larger markets as well. 

That said, it's still relatively rare to have teams start out this badly, as shown in our TimeGrid™chart at left. We made this chart before the A's loss today clinched them as the 44th such team in baseball history, but the Royals could join them, which would be only the sixth time that two or more teams had such catastrophic season starts in the same season. (The classical clustering of such early stumbling occurred in the 1960s, but that was clearly due to two rounds of expansion that took place in that decade; as you can see, the 2010s brought more of these events than in any decade other than the 60s, and things seem to be proceeding apace in this decade as well. As we like to say at this juncture: stay tuned...

[UPDATE: The A's staged a comeback in their game on Friday 4/21 and won 5-4 over the Rangers, to win their fourth game of the year and up their WPCT to .200. Later that evening the Royals were totally shut down by Shohei Ohtani and two Angels relievers, suffering their 16th loss in twenty games to become the 45th team to start a season with a WPCT of .200 or lower. It's looking like an extremely long year for these two enfeebled franchises...]