The Royals And A's Are Racing To The Bottom

Seldom has MLB seen two teams this bad at the same time.

Ever since Opening Day, the title of Worst Team In Baseball™ has seemed to be the Oakland Athletics’ to lose. They got off to a 12-50 start, MLB’s worst since the Boston Red Sox did the same to begin the 1932 season, and their pitching staff was vying for the worst performance relative to league average in more than 120 years. Combine their historically dreadful on-field play with the ongoing clown-show that is the team’s attempt to leave Oakland for Las Vegas, and it was pretty impossible to see anyone wresting away the A’s shining crown of shame this year.

But all of a sudden, Oakland has company. A quick six-game winning streak for the A’s (which included taking 5 of 6 against the top two teams in the NL Central, plus a win over the best team in baseball) has coincided with a deepening skid for the Kansas City Royals to give us real uncertainty in the race to the bottom. In fact, we are seeing a historical rarity with two teams this horrible having a loss-column duel this intense in the same season.

Oakland “led” by as many as 7 losses over Kansas City in the worst-record derby, through Game #55 of the teams’ respective schedules. But the Royals’ poor play snuck up on Oakland and they have actually been outpacing the A’s incompetence for a while now. While Oakland has won 6 of their last 10 games — unacceptably good for this competition — 8 of their last 20 and 10 of their last 30, Kansas City has just 1 win in their last 10 games, 4 in their last 20 and 8 in their last 30.

Oakland still has the slightly worse record — a .265 winning percentage against K.C.’s .273 mark — and that means they can claim to be MLB’s worst team through the first 68 games of a season since the eventual 119-loss Detroit Tigers went 17-51 to start the 2003 season. So don’t worry, A’s owner John Fisher: You still suck.

But more striking from a historical perspective is that we have not one, but two teams sitting with a sub-.275 record through at least 66 games (or more than 40% of the schedule). Before this year, that hadn’t been true since the Boston Rustlers (later known as the Braves) and St. Louis Browns were a combined 32-100 at the start of the 1911 season. While having multiple sub-.275 teams in the same season through 66 games was more common in the 1800s, this is only the third time it’s happened since the dawn of the AL/NL era in 1901.

The 2003 Tigers (17-49 through 66 games) were fending off the fellow sub-.290 San Diego Padres (19-47) early on — but then San Diego went on a downright respectable (ugh!) 45-51 run from that point onward, depriving Detroit of a spelunking partner when plumbing the depths of baseball’s darkest losing caverns. The Tigers ended up finishing 20 games below the Tampa Bay Devil Rays for MLB’s worst record.

Despite that recent winning streak, and a few diamond-in-the-rough players like Ryan Noda having solid seasons in Oakland, the Athletics’ bona fides as a 2003 Tigers doppelganger are legitimate. They’ve mostly earned their horrific record with horrific underlying stats as well. But can Kansas City keep up its recent cold streak the rest of the way?

Maybe. If you look at Elo ratings, Kansas City’s strength of schedule over the rest of the season (9th-hardest) is much tougher than it has been to date (2nd-easiest), giving “hope” that the Royals can get even worse from here. But the Royals are also sort of the opposite of a team like the Mets — their core performance has been substantially better than their .273 winning percentage gives them credit for. They might be due for positive regression to the mean, which isn’t good for the Worst Team™ résumé.

In the world of baseball tanking, though, anything can happen. No amount of embarrassment is too much — clearly, based on Oakland’s relocation farce — and no amount of losing is out of the question. The real race to the bottom starts right now.

Filed under: Baseball