Amazing.

When the Beloved New York Mets were formed in the lead-up to the 1962 season, they did not look too good. The team was a huge collection of the washed-up and the never-to-be. Guys like journeyman Don Zimmer, who had had a couple of good years in Brooklyn, were pretty bad by the sixties; still, he was lucky to get out of Queens after 14 games. They ran through a vast number of players; they had two different guys named Bob Miller. Catcher Choo-Choo Coleman was remembered (by Ralph Kiner, I believe) as being a terrible interview, a guy who answered every question with "Yeah, bub." Poor Marv Throneberry made a colossal 17 errors at first base, half his career total of 34, and he hadn't even started the season with the Mets. And 1962 put an end to the career of one of the greatest-named ballplayers ever, Vinegar Bend Mizell, a 90-88 career pitcher who crawled through three teams that year to lose his last two with the Mets.

Casey Stengel was the colorful manager, of course, The Old Perfessor who had played on championship New York Giants teams twice and led those guys from the Bronx to seven more as skipper, including five in a row. While he defended his new team and gave them the nickname "the Amazin' Mets," he was frustrated out of his mind with the constant losing.

“I've been in this game a hundred years, but I see
new ways to lose I never knew existed before.”

People think that the Mets that year finished with a record of 40-120, but they are wrong. The actual record was 40-120-1. On September 9, 1962, the Mets played fellow expansion team Colt .45's in Houston to a 7-7 tie with the game stopped by curfew after eight innings. Since the two teams had a combined record of 91-196 at that point in the year, I guess Major League Baseball decided to not worry about resuming the game another time. Technically only the individual records for the game went into the books, not the team records, thus the usual 40-120 stat for the 162-game season. (There was also a rainout that was never made up.) The Mets couldn't even tie properly.

All that said, I assumed the Mets' 120 losses would be like the Great Pyramid, the Parthenon, the DiMaggio 56-game hitting streak, a monument that would never be equaled. After all, baseball has had many innovations since 1962, such as bonus babies, free agency, more sponsorship, more foreign players, and whatnot that prevented other expansion teams from being so awful. Brand-new teams would always struggle to get their feet, but they would not be forced to pick from the unwanted of the league to assemble a squad. So no one, I was sure, would ever get 120 losses again. 

Detroit came as close as one could fear in 2003, losing 119 games, but just managed to avoid the crown of shame. Surely that was just a fluke; the Tigers bounced back the next year to a more normal 72-90.  

Then along came in 2024 Chicago White Sox. 

They have tied the Mets' 120-loss record. With a handful of games left, they will almost certainly break it. Without having all the "advantages" that the first-season Mets had 62 years ago, how did the Sox do it? 

It depends on whom you ask, but most of the blame seems to go to the owner, who knew the team had to be rebuilt but went about it in a stingy way that was ill-suited to modern baseball, resulting in a 1962-expansion-team-like roster. A Double-A team in big league pants. 

Like most guys who do not labor under the delusion that we could go out there and play pretty well, I harbor the sense that any man who can play ball on a professional level is an exceptional talent compared to the rest of us and could be an asset on a team. Therefore, any group of them assembled with the awareness of baseball tactics and strategy would be able to compete. But that depends on your definition of compete.

Winning only a quarter of your games must be painful, but compared to the 2008 Detroit Lions and the 2017 Cleveland Browns, who won 0 games, it's pretty good. 

Furthermore, if you really did pull together a roster of American males at random and throw us out there, we'd go 0-162, so there's that to consider. 

Ultimately, though, someone has got to be the worst just because that's how numbers work. Unlike football, you can't win 'em all in baseball, and nor can you lose 'em all. But someone has to lose the most. And for now, that someone will likely be the Chicago White Sox. 

Sorry, guys -- I hope it doesn't take you 62 years to lose that title as it took the Beloved Mets.