By Rustin Dodd, Zack Meisel and Andy McCullough
When the Tampa Bay Buccaneers snapped a record 26-game losing streak in December 1977, head coach John McKay tried to look on the bright side.
“Three or four plane crashes and we’re in the playoffs,” he said.
It was hard to blame him. The year before, the Bucs had finished 0-14 in their inaugural season, stamping their place among the worst teams in the history of professional sports.
The list includes the winless, the hopeless, and the talentless. One owner traded all of his good players to his other team. This year, the list includes a new applicant: The 2024 Chicago White Sox.
This year, the South Siders set the modern MLB record for the most losses in a season, topping the 1962 New York Mets Friday night with loss No. 121 — and they’re not done yet. Here’s where the White Sox rank among a baker’s dozen of the worst teams ever.
So awful they were forgettable
13. 2011-12 Charlotte Bobcats, NBA, 7-59, .106
Before the season, the Bobcats’ owner sized up his team’s chances this way: “Who knows how good we can be? We’ve got some good pieces that can help us get to the playoffs. I’m not waiting until next year. I think we have a good quality basketball team this year.”
It was a rare airball from perhaps the greatest basketball player who ever lived. Michael Jordan won six NBA Finals MVP awards. His Bobcats won seven regular season games during the 2011-12 season. Jordan flirted with immortality as a player, and then as an owner he oversaw the perhaps most vincible NBA team ever assembled.
Sure, that season was shortened to 66 games because of a lockout, but the Bobcats weren’t exactly trending well toward the end. They dropped their final 23 games. Otherwise, 7-59 might have become 9-73 or 10-72 or, hell, 7-75.
………
Following a 4-2 Spiders win on Aug. 25 against the New York Giants, the Plain Dealer printed: “An eighth wonder has come into the world and the Colossus of Rhodes, the Pyramids, the Statue of Zeus and the rest of the seven wonders had better look to their laurels. Cleveland has won another game. How it happened is beyond explanation. … They put up such a sharp, fast game that the 200 people who had gone out to League Park to get a little fresh air and take a quiet siesta were soon aroused to something very close to enthusiasm.” The Spiders wouldn’t win again for three-and-a-half weeks.
Fans bailed on supporting the intentionally depleted roster, so the club wound up traveling for most of its games. They embarked on a 50-game trip in July and August, on which they went 6-44. Even the team’s uniforms stunk, according to the Plain Dealer, which wrote: “Now they are obliged to wear the castoff uniforms of the St. Louis Browns, all of which are plenteously adorned with patches.”
The Spiders were promptly booted from the National League and disbanded. Cleveland baseball was reborn in 1901 as a charter member of the American League with a franchise that still stands today as the Guardians.
(Illustration by Meech Robinson / The Athletic; Photos: Quinn Harris / Getty Images, Gregory Shamus / Getty Images, David T. Foster III / Charlotte Observer / MCT)