The Worst Seasons in Baseball History: 1899 Spiders, 1962 Mets and 2024 White Sox

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 10 min read

The three most famous losing seasons in baseball, the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, the 1962 Mets and the 2024 White Sox, with the records, the rosters and the context that explain each collapse.

The worst team in the history of major-league baseball won 20 games and lost 134. The 1899 Cleveland Spiders won about one game in every eight, a .130 winning percentage in a 154-game season, and the historical record's standings show them 84 games behind the pennant winner. Two later teams are remembered for the same reason: the 1962 New York Mets, who went 40-120 in the first year of the club's existence, and the 2024 Chicago White Sox, who went 41-121, the most losses of any team in a single season since 1900.

Each of these clubs failed in a different way. The Spiders were a good franchise that was gutted on purpose by its own owners. The Mets were a brand-new team assembled from the leftovers other clubs would give up. The White Sox were an established franchise that ran out of talent while still being asked to play 162 games. This article tells all three stories with the numbers, explains why the "worst ever" title is more complicated than it looks, and says what a bad record cannot tell you.

What "worst" means, and why it is contested

Pick the measure and you pick the champion. By winning percentage across every season of 100 or more games in the historical record, the 1899 Spiders are the worst at .130, and no other team is close. The next-worst, the 1890 Pittsburgh Alleghenys, went 23-113 for a .169 percentage. Those are 19th-century results, from leagues that were smaller, rougher and less stable than the modern game, and many writers set them aside.

Since 1900, the list of bad seasons looks like this. The percentage ranking and the loss-count ranking give different answers, which is why the debate never ends.

If you rank by percentage since 1900, the 1916 Athletics at 36-117 are the worst team, with the 1935 Braves second and the 1962 Mets third. If you rank by losses in a modern 162-game schedule, the 2024 White Sox come first at 121. The 1962 Mets rank second on that list, and the 2003 Tigers and 2025 Rockies tie for third. The length of the schedule matters here: the 1916 Athletics played a 154-game schedule and the Mets 162, so a team with the same percentage as the Athletics would have lost more games under the modern calendar. Every ranking is defensible, and which one you prefer depends on whether you think a record should be measured against its own era or against a fixed schedule.

The 1899 Cleveland Spiders: a team built to fail

The Spiders were not a bad franchise in 1898. They went 81-68 that season and drew 70,496 fans, and their roster included Cy Young, one of the best pitchers in the league, whose career is profiled elsewhere on this site. What changed was ownership. The same family owned the St. Louis club, and before 1899 it moved much of the best Cleveland talent to St. Louis, including Young, who went 26-16 with a 2.58 earned run average in St. Louis that season. The St. Louis club went 84-67 and finished fifth. Cleveland went 20-134 and finished last in a 12-team league, 84 games behind Brooklyn's 101-47.

The season's numbers describe a team that could do almost nothing right.

They allowed 723 more runs than they scored, the worst run differential of any club in any season in the historical record. Four pitchers lost more than 16 games: Jim Hughey went 4-30, Charlie Knepper 4-22, Frank Bates 1-18 and Crazy Schmit 2-17. The database lists 31 batters and 15 pitchers for the club, and it changed managers during the year: Lave Cross managed the first 38 games at 8-30, and Joe Quinn managed the last 116 at 12-104.

The attendance figure of 6,088 for the entire season should be read with care, because it is the figure the historical record shows for the club's year and the database does not say how many home dates it covers. By most accounts the club spent much of the second half of the season away from home because crowds in Cleveland were so small, and it was a team that nobody in its own city wanted to watch. After the season the National League cut from 12 clubs to eight, and Cleveland was one of the four dropped. Cleveland was without a major-league club in 1900 and returned when the American League began play there in 1901.

The context also changed what a bad pitcher looked like. In 1899 major-league clubs averaged 5.25 runs per team-game, with fewer than 0.2 home runs per game, so games were decided by singles, errors and bunts rather than by power. The Spiders scored 3.4 runs per game and allowed 8.1. A team that gives up that many runs against an offense that thin loses nearly every game.

The 1962 Mets: an expansion team in a ballpark that was not meant for them

The Mets had a different problem. They were new. The National League added two clubs in 1962, the Mets and the Houston Colt .45s, stocking them through an expansion draft in which existing teams offered players they were willing to lose. The Mets began play at the Polo Grounds, the old ballpark of the departed New York Giants, and Casey Stengel, who had managed the Yankees to ten pennants and seven World Series titles, was hired to run them.

Four pitchers took 80 of the club's 120 losses. Roger Craig went 10-24 with a 4.51 ERA, Al Jackson 8-20 with a 4.40 ERA, Jay Hook 8-19 with a 4.84 ERA and Craig Anderson 3-17 with a 5.35 ERA. Craig and Jackson each worked more than 230 innings, and a pitcher who starts that often for a team that scores little will pile up losses even with an earned run average in the 4s. The club hit 139 home runs, led by Frank Thomas with 34 and 94 runs batted in, but allowed 192. Richie Ashburn, the veteran center fielder, hit .306, and Marv Throneberry, who hit 16 home runs, became one of the most popular figures on the team for his mistakes on the field.

A few capable hitters did not save the team. The Mets finished 24 games behind Houston, 19 behind the Cubs and 60.5 games behind the San Francisco Giants. They were the worst team in baseball in 1962 by a wide margin: Chicago's 59-103, the next-worst record, was 19 wins better.

What makes the Mets special is what came next. Their record in 1963 was 51-111, in 1964 53-109 and in 1965 50-112. Then it improved, to 66-95 in 1966, 61-101 in 1967 and 73-89 in 1968, and in 1969 the club went 100-62 and won the World Series, defeating the Baltimore Orioles four games to one. The club drew 922,530 fans in that first season, and it took seven years for the franchise to go from the bottom of the standings to a championship.

The 2024 White Sox: a franchise at the bottom of its cycle

The 2024 White Sox did not have an excuse like expansion or an owner's scheme. They were a member of the American League Central with an established history and a manager in his second season. They lost 121 games anyway.

The first thing to notice is that the White Sox were not unusually bad at fielding or at preventing home runs. A .984 fielding percentage is typical of the modern game, and the pitching, which allowed 5.02 runs per game against a league scoring 4.39, was about two-thirds of a run worse than average. What failed more was scoring: 507 runs, roughly 3.1 per game, a run and a quarter below the league. A team that scores three runs a game needs shutout-quality pitching every night to keep up.

The roster tells the story. Chris Flexen went 3-15 with a 4.95 earned run average, and Mike Soroka went 0-10. Garrett Crochet, a left-hander and the club's best pitcher, went 6-12 with a 3.58 earned run average and 209 strikeouts in 146 innings, a good season attached to a poor record. The lineup was led by Andrew Vaughn with 19 home runs and a .246 average, Andrew Benintendi with 20 home runs and a .229 average, and Luis Robert, who batted .224 with 14 home runs in 100 games. The historical record credits the club with 63 batters and 35 pitchers for the season, a measure of how often the roster was reshuffled.

Pedro Grifol, in his second season as manager, led the club to 28-89 before the club made a change; Grady Sizemore finished the season as the interim manager, and the club went 13-32 under him. The White Sox followed 2024 with a 60-102 season in 2025, and a 61-101 season in 2023 had preceded it. A club that wins 41 games is one thing. A club that loses 100 or more three seasons running is the signature of a rebuilding project that did not work quickly.

Were they as bad as their records?

Baseball analysts have an old rule of thumb for judging a team's record against its scoring, usually credited to Bill James, called the Pythagorean expectation. It estimates winning percentage as runs scored squared divided by the sum of runs scored squared and runs allowed squared. Applied to a full season, it predicts how many games a team should have won given how many runs it scored and allowed.

All three clubs underperformed the formula, by 3.3, 7.6 and 4.4 wins. The Mets' shortfall is the largest. Their run differential was minus 331, which the formula turns into about 48 wins, yet they won 40. Gaps of that size usually come from close games going the wrong way, and the data here cannot show how the Mets' were distributed. None of this makes them good teams. It means that run differential is a steadier guide to a team's quality than its record.

The Spiders, by contrast, were close to the formula's expectation. Their record was not bad luck; it followed from allowing 8.1 runs per game.

What the bad seasons did to the clubs

Losing comes with costs and opportunities. The Spiders lost their franchise, which was dropped in the 1900 contraction. The Mets became a franchise whose fans stayed through the lean years and were there when the team improved. The White Sox's rebuild was still in progress as of the 2025 season, when the club went 60-102.

Modern rules were designed to soften the consequences of a long collapse. The amateur draft is built to steer top picks toward weaker clubs, and revenue sharing and the competitive balance tax narrow the gap between big and small payrolls. Neither guarantees a recovery. But the structure means that no modern team is permanently shut out of contention, the way the Spiders were in 1899.

Talent concentration also matters. In 1899 a single ownership group could move players from one team to another, an arrangement the sport later barred. In 1962 expansion rules gave the new clubs mostly players that other teams were willing to lose. In 2024 a club that wanted to compete had to do it through the draft, free agency and trades. The reasons a team is bad have changed, even if the ways a bad team feels have not.

Common questions

What is the worst record in baseball history? The 1899 Cleveland Spiders, at 20-134 for a winning percentage of .130, in the historical record. The worst record of the 20th century by percentage is the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics, at 36-117.

Which team lost the most games in a season? Among 162-game seasons, the 2024 Chicago White Sox, with 121 losses. The 1962 Mets lost 120, and the 1899 Spiders lost 134 in a shorter schedule.

Did the 1962 Mets really lose 120 games? Yes. The database lists them at 40-120, playing 160 decided games, and finishing tenth in a ten-team league.

Why were the 1962 Mets so bad? They were an expansion team that stocked its roster with players other clubs were willing to lose. They also played in the Polo Grounds, an old park, and their pitching staff had a 5.04 earned run average.

Did the Mets improve quickly? By 1969 they were champions. The club's record from 1962 through 1969 was 40-120, 51-111, 53-109, 50-112, 66-95, 61-101, 73-89 and 100-62.

Has any team been worse since 2024? Not in 2025. The Colorado Rockies went 43-119, tying the 2003 Tigers for the third-most losses in a 162-game season.

Where to go next

To see the other end of the scale, read about the best single-season teams by winning percentage, and for what a good pitching staff looks like, the article on the lowest ERAs in baseball history. The vocabulary of a lost season, including what it takes to be mathematically eliminated, is in magic numbers explained. To check where today's clubs stand, the standings page shows every division, and the history topic collects more stories from the sport's past.