As originally aired on The Rochester Press Box
Baseball is big on two things I really enjoy. History and numbers. Take the number 120 for instance. In an historic sense, it is the essence of a record that has stood sixty-two years but is now being seriously threatened. One hundred twenty is the record for the number of losses for a season in the modern era, which is post 1901. Held by the immortal 1962 New York Mets.
It was the first year of the franchise. New York still bore the fresh wounds inflicted by the departure of the Dodgers and Giants to the west coast a mere four years earlier. This new team was a collection of mostly over the hill veterans. It hired former Yankee manager Casey Stengal to lead them.
Casey quickly realized that a sense of humor was his only ally in such an endeavor. So he said stuff like, “This team has found more ways to lose than I knew existed.” And, “the only thing worse than a Mets game, is a Mets doubleheader.” They were so bad, New York finished 26 games behind, the Houston Colt .45s. The National League’s other expansion franchise. But the fans ate it up. Almost a million turned out to watch as the Mets finished 40-120.
That record was challenged by the 2003 Detroit Tigers. Who somewhat miraculously, on the heels of a ten-game losing streak, won five of their last six games to finish with 119 losses. One off the mark. It’s going to take a similar miracle to save the 2024 Chicago White Sox. With sixteen games left, they had 113 losses. Unless they go better than 8-8 the rest of the way, the record is theirs.
Chicago’s GM recently said, in effect, that he thought the team had the talent to lose only 100 games. Not 120. To which Stengel would have remarked, because he did, “They say it couldn’t be done. But sometimes it doesn’t work out that way.”
Leave a Reply