Thanks to ownership that doesn’t care and has been selling of the team piece by piece, the Oakland A’s are currently on pace to have one of the worst records ever for a major league baseball team. Up to now, the worst baseball teams over a full season have been:

* Expansion team in their first year

The Cleveland Spiders are a bit of a special case. The team’s owner also was a part owner of a team in St. Louis. Since St Louis was a bigger market (with a bigger stadium) than Cleveland, whenever a player started getting good for the Spiders, he was “traded” to St. Louis for a player who was underperforming. After a while, all the talent was in St. Louis, and Cleveland had the dregs.

In a way, though, the A’s ownership shenanigans are similar. This Oakland team is on pace for a record of 41 – 121, for a winning percentage of .250. It should be noted that they are being given a “run for their money” by the Kansas City Royals, who are on pace for a record of 46-116 (a winning percentage of .282). Since the Royals’ ownership isn’t holding a “Moving Sale”, one might actually have to consider them the worse on-the-field team.

I’ve been wondering – what are the worst teams ever in the other major sports?

NOTE: I’m not including teams from seasons that were shortened by a strike or other stoppages. As above, an asterisk denotes an expansion team in its first season.

After baseball, the oldest of the “Big 4” leagues is the National Hockey League. They’ve undergone several rounds of expansion since the six founding teams, and pretty much every new team has been really bad in their first few seasons. Given that, I will extend the courtesy of excluding teams in their first three seasons from this list:

Hockey has a “points” system that allows for ties and losses in overtime to be factored in to the standard Won-Loss record; I’m not bothering with any of that here. It wouldn’t make that much of a difference.

The National Football League is next. Organized in 1920, they would grow and absorb other smaller leagues in addition to expanding on their own. Their season is short enough so there have been teams that went a full season without a single win.

(The 1960 Cowboys had one game end in a tie)

It might be more useful to track teams over the course of two consecutive seasons, but I’m not going to bother with that.

The National Basketball Association can trace its history back to 1946. Like the NFL and NHL, they’ve absorbed rival leagues along the way. There have been quite a few bad teams; for some time the way the draft was organized, teams would choose to “tank” (deliberately be awful) in the hopes of getting a top draft pick.

OK, so the A’s are very bad this season. But, when compared to the other major sports, they aren’t abysmally bad. Perhaps there’s something about baseball that allows a team to win games no matter how hard they try not to….