FURTHER ADVENTURES IN BADNESS...THE 39-GAME EDITION

One little chart and one GIANT chart for you tonight, to keep you off the streets...though we should all be keeping an eye on the A's players, who are enduring some of the cruelest (if not exactly unusual) punishments possible. Sure, they're in the big leagues, but the combination of ingredients--feckless owner, a front office that seems to have forgotten how to evaluate talent, and, of course, relentless inflation (the go-to excuse for all manner of blameologists...)--has transformed that into a curse stranger than any you'd encounter in a late-night zombie movie. 

We're now at game 39 of the Oakland death march, and they've moved into contention for being the worst team since the 1899 Cleveland Spiders. Their 8-31 record isn't the worst ever after 39 games, but they are within spitting distance. 

Since misery loves company, the chart at right shows you the miserable company that the poor A's are currently keeping. (Note the team's ERA, count to three, and recoil in horror.)

Looking at this chart made us morbidly curious to determine the very worst performance in a 39-game span in baseball history. (As you might suspect, those Spiders have the all-time record, going 1-38 late in their exceptionally miserable 1899 campaign filled with extenuating circumstances, but we're not going to count them just in case Lake Erie gets roiled up by our doing so and catches on fire again.)

No, give us the twentieth century, please (and who'd have thought we'd be yearning for its return just two decades into the twenty-first, eh?). As we'll see, the A's tie into this bitches' brew of badness, being the franchise that has gone down for the count in more sub-sections of baseball seasons than any other--their forlorn Philadelphia ancestors, chiseled into purgatory by Connie Mack, set the record for 39-game futility in 1916 by posting a 2-37 mark over a six-week period from June 28 to August 5. 

That sets them all alone at the bottom, chased closely by only themselves, with a 3-36 mark in an adjacent section of that frenetically forlorn 1916 season. Recently, however, the Arizona Diamondbacks had a horrific stretch (just two years ago, in 2021, from May 14 to June 25) where they went 4-35. 

And, depressing as that was (and still is, for that matter), it made us want to see just how often teams curl up and die for six weeks. We used 8-31 as the limit, since it's clearly a couple of notches below the worst season record posted from 1901 to now (the Boston Braves in 1935: 38-115, for a .238 WPCT). 

So, as you can see at left, we mapped the realms of badness by franchise from 1901 to now, and created a diagram (at left) that might induce natives of Philadelphia to consider slitting their wrists.

Why's that, you ask? It's because the two Philly franchises have combined for 56 instances where they've fallen into a deep, dark 39-game sinkhole. That's an enviable amount of catastrophe, to say the least! During the six pre-expansion decades, only Boston gave Philadelphia any kind of run for its money in this ongoing fall-down-go-boom floating crap game kerfuffle.

In the expansion era up to the fin de siecle of that now-strangely lamented twentieth century, the Mets took charge, with two eras of futility that were finally jettisoned in the early 80s. Other expansion clubs joined in, but they just didn't have the panache displayed by those Metsies. 

The A's and Phillies kept their hand in, of course, and there was the shocking collapse of the Orioles in the 1987-88 time frame (as you'll recall from the chart at the top of this post, it's the O's who've set the mark for worst 39-game record from the start of a season). The Detroit Tigers joined in toward the end of the century, and the Chicago Cubs bookended the millennium with two swoons in 1999 and 2000.

In 21st century, it's been the D-backs, the Tigers, the increasingly futile Kansas City Royals, the Orioles, and (temporarily, at least) the Astros who've done the quarter-season swan dive. And, of course, the A's have returned to the fold (get it?) with a vengeance thus far in '23.

But hope springs eternal. Tonight we get word that the A's got a three-run walk-off homer from Royals castoff Brent Rooker (his eleventh of the year) and pulled out their ninth win of the year, a 9-7 victory in ten innings. The A's have the makings of a passable offense--they're in the middle of the pack in homers--but their pitching is nothing more or less than deadly. In 2023, teams that allow seven runs in a game manage to win those games about 19% of the time (not to be obscure...that's a 15-64 record, with a WPCT of .190). 

SO--now you have a capsule history of baseball futility, a veritable anatomy of badness. And you know that the A's are following in their hallowed tradition, as represented by their ancestors taking int on the chin 37 out off 39 times just over a century ago. Don't say we never did anything for you!