Loving Losers: The Trend of Losing Teams in Major League Baseball

Recently, living here in Pittsburgh, PA, the sports papers and talk shows have been filled with conversation about the record-setting Pirates and their ongoing seasonal losing streak. The streak is entering what appears to be its eighteenth season, with possibly no end in sight. Even the bringing up of several young and high draft picks has not given fans of the Bucs much hope of breaking the losing streak. Having been to one of the last playoff games in 1992 gives me at least some memory of how rich Pirates history used to be. It got me thinking about other "losing" teams and their pitifully suffering fans.

In the past ten plus years, several franchises that used to be proud and hopeful have gone through very dry years. Teams like Baltimore and Kansas City in the American League and Pittsburgh and Cincinnati in the National League have progressively been failing, not being able to spend with the bigger, richer markets. More and more the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox have placed team payrolls in three categories, the rich markets, the markets trying to periodically keep up with them, and the poor markets that have little or no chance of competing. Drafting high and signing mediocre free agents is the lot of their existence, with the hope that somehow they can have a good year on the field, and possibly at the bank as well. It is, however, increasingly evident that this is quite difficult to do in today's world of baseball.

It made me think of past teams and their records. If you look into baseball's rich past you can see many examples of today's current trend of losing. The Twentieth Century was filled with many franchises that saw dry periods where they constantly frustrated their fans, and many of them survived. This gives us hope, perhaps in a more realistic way, that eventually the losing can and will stop. You never know.

In the first two decades of the last century, several teams failed annually to amount to much winning. One franchise in particular comes into mind: the Washington Senators. Even with the great pitching of Walter Johnson, future Hall of Famer, the Senators continued to struggle until the 1920s. In fact, even after the early 1930s when they won their third and last pennant, the team struggled to break out of the bottom half of the standings. Gradually the Senators failed enough to force their owners to move the team to Minneapolis, becoming the Twins, where they have succeeded much greater than ever in D.C. An old saying about being "first in war and last in the American League" was prominently joked about in public circles. The Twins have won twice as many World Series than the Washington Senators did.

Another dismal team in much of the first half of the Twentieth Century was the Philadelphia Phillies. Through their history the Phillies competed with the Athletics of the AL and lost, both on the field and at the turnstiles. At times the Phillies were perennial doormats in the NL and gave rise to many jokes of their own. Not until their great teams of the 1970s and 80s did they begin to shrug off the label of losers.

Meanwhile, over in the AL, the A's, or Athletics, were going through unusual changes. Throughout most of their history, the Philadelphia Athletics had been owned and run by Connie Mack, an eccentric and quite skillful field manager. In fact, in the first two decades of the American League the A's were perennially competitive. Twice, however, Mack broke up winning teams and sold off players to keep his franchise solvent. In fact, one of the greatest teams in Major League history was the team that won three pennants and two world championships during the late 1920s and early 30s. This team consisted of some of the greatest to play the game, with Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons, Mickey Cochrane and Lefty Grove as future Hall of Famers. After the 1931 World Series where Mack saw his team fail to retain its world championship to the Cards, he began to contemplate selling off key players to remain in solid financial condition. Eventually the franchise would not recover and would be moved to Kansas City and then to Oakland.

One of the most dismal franchises in baseball history was the St. Louis Browns, which won only one pennant and never won a World Series title. Even with one of the most prolific hitters in history, George Sisler, the Browns could not win a pennant until 1944. It had taken more than four decades to win one AL flag and the team would not win another in St. Louis. The franchise has had much greater success after it moved to Baltimore and became the Orioles.

The Pirates are on a very bad losing streak, but it has gone through rough times before. During the second half of the 1940s the Bucs were known as one of the worst franchises in history. In fact, through most of the fifties the only thing Pirates fans had to cheer about was the home run hitting of Ralph Kiner, who was eventually traded to make up lost revenue. The team did not win a pennant between 1927 and 1960. Strange that one of the best franchises of the sixties and seventies had to wait so long to win again.

These last many years have been trying times for many franchises but the point here is that baseball has seen these situations before. While the NFL, NHL and NBA have tried to reach a level of competitive parity, Major League baseball has not. The last twenty years have seen the power of the Yankees and Red Sox grow, the weaker teams falling more on hard times and the fans becoming increasingly accepting of the status quo. And it doesn't look like it's going to change soon. The winning ways of teams like the Orioles, Royals, Reds and Pirates are becoming more and more distant, and the fans are becoming more cynical and pessimistic than ever.

The hope for the future, though, remains forever true even though disappointing seasons continue. The franchises of the past that have been discussed here at one point or another finally crawled out of the depths of despair so there is some grounds for optimism. We can continue to dream, if dreams are not nightmares. Keep your chins up, baseball fans, and perhaps happy days will come again.

sources: Thorn, J., Palmer, P., Total Baseball: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Baseball, Third Edition. Harper Perennial (1993).

Gillette, G., Palmer, P., The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition. Sterling Publishing, New York, (2008).