The authors of this book are drawn to baseball’s great losers. Not to individuals, but to entire teams. We prefer our calamities as the product of collective effort, a shared culpability not unlike Watergate. […] Besides, to err is human, to screw up royally requires a team effort.
—George Robinson & Charles Salzberg, On A Clear Day They Could See Seventh Place: Baseball’s Worst Teams, a 1991 volume in urgent need of updating
Parachuting into an opponent’s ongoing storyline can inject a person with presumptuousness. Good team you’re seeing for the first time all year after hearing how good they are? If they beat your team, man, they really are good. Bad team you’re seeing for the first time all year after hearing how bad they are? If they lose to your team, man, they really are bad. Historically bad team whose record would seem to say it all?
Just don’t lose to the White Sox, OK?
The Mets didn’t lose to the White Sox on Friday, which was OK. More than OK. It was the best-case scenario. The Mets scored five runs and upped their record to 71-64. The White Sox scored one run and fell to a record of 31-105. Did the Mets outplay the White Sox at a magnitude reflecting a 40½-game gap in their seasons to date? In the course of nine innings, that would be difficult to achieve.
It would also be irrelevant. Just win the game against a team it is universally agreed you can’t lose to. You lost two of three to the woebegone Angels and so-so Athletics. Those kinds of stumbles happen. A stumble here can’t, not if your playoff aspirations are genuine. We’re never sure if the Mets are, but let’s lean on the side of them being in the race and believing they can remain there.
Benintendi, get me rewrite.
The White Sox have won 31 times in 2024, so they are capable of beating somebody now and then (more then than now, apparently). Based solely on Friday night’s evidence, I can’t definitively say that I just watched the worst major league baseball team of my lifetime. They didn’t take advantage of early opportunities to score often off Tylor Megill — who seems ripe to be left unprotected in an expansion draft or a compensation pool or whatever avenue might grant his career a fresh start — and then stopped creating opportunities. They kept the Mets from crossing home plate intermittently but not enough. Their fielding looked a little logy in spots, including one that allowed an inning-ending double play to become a run-scoring fielder’s choice upon further review, yet no errors were charged. J.D. Martinez’s key home run notwithstanding, both sides lofted a ton of fly balls that failed to generate much excitement.
From the small sample size, and if I didn’t know what the record said in advance, I doubt I would recognize the White Sox as any worse a team than any team that loses on a given evening. The important thing in the present is they lost, 5-1, keeping the Mets apace with the Braves, who won. If you’re tracking the current White Sox versus the Mets of our beginnings, it was, depending on your perspective, reassuring or disturbing to see the ’24 Pale Hose grow a little more wan vis-à-vis our Originals. After 136games in 1962, those Mets were 34-102, or as many games ahead of these White Sox as the Braves of today are ahead of the Mets of today.
We know we want the Mets of today to catch the Braves of today. As you can read in this article Tim Britton wrote for The Athletic on Friday, feelings among those who’ve immersed themselves in Met history aren’t unanimous on the matter of who oughta hold the crown as worst (a crown which would be made of what…wurst?). You’ve got fans like me who are like, yeah, be my guest, Chisox, yet unperverse pride is also prevalent in the 1962 Mets not only having been THE 1962 Mets, but continuing to epitomize shorthand for all that can go wrong going wrong…yet going wrong in a manner that never raised a critical mass of ire. You’re gonna get mad at people known as Marvelous Marv, Choo Choo and Vinegar Bend? There’ve been plenty of crummy teams since the 1962 Mets, but nobody’s established a brand name so readily recognizable for a certain order of ineptitude. Crummy? Yes, but adorably so. The 1962 Mets could have sold Entenmann’s.
Imagine a world where somebody else serves as the flagship for a baseball team being the worst a baseball team can be. That world doesn’t seem far off. While I didn’t see anything obviously glaring in the performance of the 2024 White Sox in their 136th game that screamed WORST! TEAM! EVER!, I could definitely infer that their Friday night output seemed practiced and seems repeatable. Horrible teams might get blown out disproportionately relative to other clubs. They mostly lose lifelessly by scores like 5-1. Come to think of it, the 1962 Mets’ 120th loss occurred in the city of Chicago by the very score of 5-1. Joe Pignatano killed the year’s last potential rally by hitting into an eighth-inning triple play and then retired. Before long, he’d be coaching the very same franchise in a World Series and growing tomatoes in its bullpen. Let’s see Andrew Benintendi match that life path.
Incomparable flair for defeat may forever belong to us, but “they’re the 2024 White Sox of…” is poised to enter the language of lazy comparisons, meaning the legacy of the 1962 Mets will likely revert fully to family ownership. Maybe everybody else will have a new comp for lousiness. We will know who the 1962 Mets are. So be it, I figure. Records are made to be broken, even if the records have to be tripped over, crashed onto, and shattered by accident. Teams that have attempted to tank never lost 105 of their first 136. What the White Sox are doing has taken some ingenuity, but they’ve probably benefited from quite a bit of luck, too.
There’s a variety of luck, you know.
Should the South Siders surpass us in the wrong all-time direction, we will still hold the modern National League mark for futility. That’s no small detail. We exist because in the gaping void that encompassed 1958 to 1961, New York yearned for National League baseball. Leagues were separate and not at all equal. National League fans considered National League ball better. So glad to have it back, they didn’t wholly mind they were getting the least skilled version of it available (save for the teams that visited the Polo Grounds — they all seemed quite good). The circumstances that created the Mets wouldn’t exist today. Differentiation between National League and American League baseball is mostly in the mind’s eye. Hell, we’re in the midst of playing an American League team right now. Somewhere, George Weiss harumphs in disgust.
One caveat to that diminished distinctiveness, however. The 1962 Mets lost 120 games. Then the 1963, 1964, and 1965 Mets went out and lost 111, 109, and 112 games, respectively, proving one year is a fluke, four years is a trend. Since 1965, the competitively balanced National League has produced exactly four teams to as much as tour the subterranean neighborhood the Mets established. Two, the 1969 Expos and 1969 Padres, had the excuse of being expansion teams, which is an excuse we know well. Each went 52-110. The Expos ascended to the heights of 73 wins in their second year, and their losing records hung around mundanity for the most part as the 1970s progressed. The Padres stayed lousy for quite a while, but not 52-110 lousy.
The only two other National League teams to prove themselves 1965 Mets (if not 1962 Mets) dismal were both Diamondback squads. In 2004, three years after winning the World Series, Arizona went 51-111; three years later they were division champs. In 2021, the D’Backs plunged to 52-110 just four years after a playoff appearance and two years after winning 85 games. Two years later, they were NL champions. Maybe the roof was malfunctioning.
Since 1965, hardly anybody in this league has been what we once were.
The 2024 White Sox are about to become the ninth American League team since the season Casey Stengel hung ’em up to lose at least 109 games, with the infamous 1988 Orioles of 0-21 notoriety just missing the cut at 54-107. The woefully misshapen AL gave us not only the 2003 Tigers (43-119) we remember making a run at our standard, but the 1996 Tigers (53-109) and the 2019 Tigers (47-114). Lest it appear this is only a Tiger problem, the 2021 Orioles went 52-110 three years after Buck Showalter led them to 47-115 in 2018. The Astros were getting so bad that the National League kicked them out following 2012 (55-107), and as a new American League entry in 2013, they got only worse (51-111). The 2023 Oakland A’s were starved by an indifferent ownership into 50-112 territory. And pour out a Labatt Blue for the 1979 Blue Jays. They went 53-109, which was somehow not the worst record Canada ever produced. (That would be Paul Anka’s “(You’re) Having My Baby”.)
The American League has kept coming at history with a slew of 1962 Mets wanna-bes, but none has had what it takes to lose 120 games. The 2024 White Sox just might and then some. It could be that after this season no team will again be tracked for their pursuit of the worst record ever because no team could possibly be as bad as the 2024 White Sox, suggesting the 1962 Mets won’t be casually invoked outside of Metsopotamia any more than, say, the 1916 A’s (36-117) or 1935 Braves (38-115)…except by those who relish a good story well told. After 62 years, if somebody else insists on being the new avatar of abysmal, so be it. The 2024 Mets over the next two games should be happy to help the 2024 White Sox on their way to whatever winds up worse than 40-120.
Just remember: it was one of ours who didn’t touch first base first. We’ll always have that. And he didn’t touch second, either.
I don’t see it as that big a deal. Nothing will replace 1962 in Mets lore, and having the worst record ever is sort of a non-issue. The White Sox are welcome to it. Good game, btw — but the Braves are back.
I visited a friend who happens to be a White Sox fan last night so to my surprise I watched the game. Giving up a run in the first, only scoring one with bases loaded and nobody out and Megill letting the leadoff runner get on the first three innings sharpened my sense of impending doom – the nadir was the bottom of the second when the first two batters got on. But getting 3 runs after 2 outs with nobody on helped. My friend was laughing at me – he has long since resigned himself to losing. And he shares my general sentiment; if you’re gonna be bad make it memorable and he’s hoping they break our 1962 record. I do wonder at using Diaz a third straight day with a 4-run lead.
Megill was “just ok.” I have to think a better team might not let him get away with the walks and hit batsman like Chicago did. But I suppose he’ll take Blackburn’s next start.
Now I’m wondering who our callups will be. Thinking Alex Young for pitchers and DJ Stewart for position players. If we weren’t contending I’d be all for Acuna but I have to think a left handed bat on the bench would be more useful.
One down, two – or 28 – to go.
Make that 27 to go. Can’t do math Saturday mornings. :( Be nice if we could finally get more than 7 games over .500.
“Megill was “just ok.” I have to think a better team might not let him get away with the walks and hit batsman like Chicago did.”
Moving up Peterson for the Diamondbacks and using Megill against the White Sox paid off. The Red Sox, the equivalent to the Mets in the AL wildcard race, are going to be tougher on Megill. It’s a big start for him as a last impression before the post-season or next season.
“Now I’m wondering who our callups will be. Thinking Alex Young for pitchers and DJ Stewart for position players.”
I agree Alex Young and DJ Stewart make sense. Young would be a 2nd lefty and he was fine when he was up before. Slim pickings on the position side after the Baty injury. Too bad the Mets couldn’t keep Ben Gamel. He’s been raking with the Astros.
“I do wonder at using Diaz a third straight day with a 4-run lead.”
My theory is Diaz was used again as much to dial in the mechanical tweak as to finish the game. Interestingly, he threw only 1 slider again.
Was nice to see, out of nowhere, Jett Williams returned last night for Binghamton and got a lot of love for singling on the first pitch. Ulp, then struck out 4 times in a row, but that’s the Baby Mets of 2024. Revisiting the Rumble Ponies lineup after a long lag I see Parada still hitting .209 and much-hyped Clifford at .222 and no one else of note. When you mention Azuna and Stewart as call ups that reveals dire straits of Mets farm system this year. Azuna has .650 OPS and Stewart didn’t even hit .200 in majors. Gilbert hit a few dingers lately but still at .188. And don’t even mention the pitchers!
Yeah, pickings are pretty slim. The argument for Acuna is speed so you have a pinch runner. But most games Taylor and/or Bader will be available. I’d leave him in AAA to get at-bats.
Greg, I completely agree about your Paul Anka reference. It may be the worst record in the entire Western hemisphere.
I’m okay with keeping the record as long as the Mets don’t help that cause. A 1st-year expansion club, especially given the roster-building limitations of that era, has a free pass to hold the all-time season losing record. It’s not a black eye for the Mets. If anything, it sweetens the story of the 1969 championship. In contrast, the White Sox are one of the oldest franchises in baseball. Worse, the White Sox are most famous for the Black Sox scandal. Adding the all-time season losing record to that episode of baseball lore would be a 2nd black eye.
I wonder though if holding the record has been an under-the-radar curse. Maybe it’s why Mets champions and contenders have burned out soon rather than turn into eras of reliable contention. Maybe if the White Sox take over the record, the curse will be lifted, and we’ll get to find out what it’s like to root for a team that’s in contention year after year.
“A stumble here can’t, not if your playoff aspirations are genuine. We’re never sure if the Mets are, but let’s lean on the side of them being in the race and believing they can remain there.”
Everyone in the NL wildcard race has been streaky except the Mets who’ve been a shuffling .500 since the Senga game. We might be starting to see the Padres and Diamondbacks cool off. That’s mostly wishful thinking, but in large part because of the Mets, the wildcard leaders have stopped winning what seemed like every game. The view to the Braves hasn’t changed, but the wildcard standings above the Braves have tightened a bit. If the top 2 wildcards fall back into reach, the Mets hold those tie-breakers. I prefer to win a wildcard at the Braves’ expense. But any wildcard will do. In the other direction, the Cubs are hot. The Mets hold that tie-breaker too.
It sucks that the Royals lost Lucas Erceg and Vinnie Pasquantino on the same play, because that’s who the Braves will be playing when the Mets play the Brewers. The way this is going, there’s a good chance the Mets will need help from the Royals. As of now, Seth Lugo’s turn is set to come up in that series, where he can pay back the Braves as a 2022 Met.
I love Paul Anka’s “(You’re) Having My Baby”.)
It is on my ‘Today’s Greatest Hits’ album I ordered from the TV commercial in 1976.
And I want to keep THAT record too.
What a lovely way of saying how much you love that.
Nice Long Island reference with Entenmann’s. Who knew they sold five different versions of coffee cake? I’m not feeling any at the moment, but I really want to eat up a sweep today and gain more ground on the Wild Card competitors!