When your team is compared to the 100-loss 1985 San Francisco Giants, you know you’re doing something historic. When it’s all said and done, this year’s version of the Giants may well be the worst since the franchise moved west.
If this squad had been the 1958 version, the city might have sent them back to New York.
Will this team lose 100? They’re on pace to lose 105. It’s hard to say what will happen, because it won’t be the same squad in the second half. There will be a lot more young players, and a few veterans could be traded.
Just know this: Once the Giants secured their 22nd win of the season, they ensured they would not be the worst team in major league history. That dishonor will belong to the 1899 Cleveland Spiders in perpetuity.
They finished 20-134, a .130 “winning” percentage. After that, the club disbanded. The owners of the Spiders, Frank and Stanley Robison, had also bought the St. Louis Browns. Apparently such conflicts of interest were not forbidden in those days.
The Spiders averaged about 200 fans per game in their first 16 home games. Since road teams split ticket revenues, other National League teams refused to travel to the Spiders’ home stadium, the brilliantly-named “League Park.”
The Spiders played only eight home games in the final three months of the season. Because of the quirk of playing so many games on the road, the Spiders set another record that will never be broken: 101 road losses.
They were referred to in various newspapers as the Cleveland “Exiles” and the Cleveland “Wanderers.” The owners figured it was a better bet to send their stars to St. Louis where they’d draw bigger crowds.
So players such as future hall of famers Cy Young, Jesse Burkett and Bobby Wallace were in St. Louis. The Spiders couldn’t even keep Ossie Schreckengost, for crying out loud.
It was as if the Spiders were smashed by a Doc Martens boot. They finished 84 games out of first place, 35 games behind the woeful Washington Senators.
One historical note about the Spiders: It was the third and last season for Louis (Chief) Sockalexis, considered by some the first person of Native American ancestry to play Major League baseball. Sockalexis, from the Penobscot tribe, was enjoying an excellent 1897 rookie season with the Spiders, batting .338 with 16 stolen bases in the first three months of the season.
The likes of John McGraw, who played for Baltimore in the 1890’s, believed Sockalexis was the best player he had seen. He was dubbed “Deerfoot of the Diamond.” All during a time he had to hear “war whoops” and racist chants.
The story goes that he battled alcoholism from the time he played at Holy Cross and the University of Notre Dame …and on July 4th, a reportedly drunken Sockalexis jumped from the second story window of a brothel and severely injured his ankle in the fall.
Sockalexis barely played at all the rest of that season, and only sparingly in the next two. He was released after the 1899 season, and both he and the Spiders faded from Major League history. After the season the Spiders were shuttered, as were franchises in Baltimore, Louisville and Washington as the National League contracted from 12 to eight teams.
The new American League formed in 1901 and put a team in Cleveland, known as the Blues, who later became the “Indians,” a nickname of the Spiders at the time Sockalexis played. More than a century later, that name is somehow still around.
In the modern era, the 1962 Mets, who were 40-122, are considered rock-bottom. At any rate, Giants fans may be seeing the worst team of their lifetime, but hey, it’s not the worst ever! Any port in a storm.
