The Oakland Athletics are currently at 29-53 and on track to lose 100 or more games for the third straight season. There have been a lot of tweets on Athletics Twitter claiming that this is only the second time in franchise history that this has happened, and while that’s technically true, the Athletics have had some pretty terrible seasons.
Just how bad was this period? Since 1980, the A’s had never finished with a winning percentage below .400 in any season until the first of these three years. They finished 54-108 in 1979. In fact, that was the last year of baseball’s poor run, with the A’s finishing with winning percentages of .391, .426 and .333. They started the decade with three straight World Series wins, but ended it in ruins with the introduction of free agency.
Though the results are dire, and despite a string of 100-plus losing seasons, it’s not the worst record in franchise history: From 1964-1967, the four years before the team moved from Kansas City to Oakland, the team won 57 games, then 59, then 74, before dropping off to 62. Admittedly, this record does seem to rhyme a little with history, and the team’s flow is good.
Between 1950, while still in Philadelphia, and 1967, his final season in Kansas City, the Athletics finished with a winning percentage below .400 10 times, with a low of .331 in his final season in Philadelphia (1954) and a high of .513 (79-75) in 1952.
This was also a time when the Athletics were considered a development team for the New York Yankees. One example is Roger Maris, who played for the Athletics in 1958 and 1959 before being traded to New York. Maris won the AL AVP award in 1960 and set a home run record with 61 home runs in 1961. He also won the MVP award that same year.
The fact that they’ve lost 100 games in a row is impressive, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Is it a good thing that the team is continuing to win like this? Not at all. Is it a good thing that the team is leaving Oakland? Again, not at all. But this isn’t the team’s worst losing streak ever.
Back in the day, teams only played 154 games, so to lose 100 games meant that a team had to perform very poorly in eight fewer games. To reach that mark, they needed to lose 65% of their games. Nowadays, they only need to lose 62% of their games, which is a pretty big difference.
From 1915 to 1921, the Philadelphia Athletics had a very poor record, including three consecutive 100-loss seasons from 1919 to 1921, the only time in franchise history that they did so.
In 1915, the team was 43-109 for a winning percentage of .290. That’s a 116-loss team in a 162-game season. The next season they were 117-98 (.235), which, adjusted for inflation (baseball schedule), would be a 124-loss season. In 1917 their official record was 55-98, but adjusted for a 162-game season, it would be 58-104. There were two periods of three straight years of 100+ losses in a seven-year span.
The Athletics performed very poorly during this period, finishing with a winning percentage above .400 just once (.406) during a 52-76 season in 1918. That was a good year, but it was cut short by the United States’ entry into World War I.
Look, no one is happy about Athletics owner John Fisher’s decision to move the team. This is a tragedy for baseball and the Oakland community. This team is now trying to accomplish something the Athletics haven’t done in over a century. And it’s all a scheme for one guy to make a few bucks.
Sadly, this kind of incompetence sometimes pays off in the game. The Houston Astros lost over 100 games from 2011 to 2013 while building their analytics department, and now they’re being ridiculed (for cheating) while also being praised as a franchise for how much they won over the past decade. But the Astros made consecutive appearances in the American League Championship Series after that terrible record.
The difference with A is that the light at the end of the tunnel still seems a little far away.
