Most of the list is new to me, but every baseball fan knows about the 1899 Cleveland Spiders. Among teams that played a full season, they were the worst major league team in history, with 20 wins and 134 losses.
Just before the turn of the century, the National League monopoly was plagued by interlocking ownership, with some owners holding stock in several teams, and some owning majority control of two different clubs. By owning two teams, they would take all the best players to the “A” club to create a super team, leaving the “B” club to die a natural death.
- Ferdinand Abell and Harry Vonderhorst drained the once-great Baltimore Orioles to stock their Brooklyn Superbas. It was a short-term strategy that created an all-star team of established superstars. It worked for two years. The Superbas, a pathetic 54-91 in 1898, managed to win pennants in 1899 and 1900 by poaching many top-line players from the Orioles, including four players from their starting line-up and the three 20-game winners on their pitching staff.
- Barney Dreyfuss drained the Louisville Colonels to stock the Pittsburgh Pirates, allowing the Pirates to pick up the greatest player of the era (Honus Wagner) in the process. That one paid off in spades. As soon as the Superbas squad headed for the old-age home, the Pirates became the best team in the league. They won in 1901, 1902 and 1903, and remained contenders or winners until Wagner turned 40. Wagner led the league in WAR an amazing 12 times, and his 1908 season was considered the all-time best for a position player in the era from 1893 to 1919, meaning from the beginning of the modern pitching distance until the beginning of the “lively ball era.” In 1920, when they started using fresh balls instead of keeping the same one in play for the whole game, some big kid named George Ruth took advantage of the new procedure to eclipse Wagner. (But it’s noteworthy that Wagner’s 1908 season, as measured by WAR, was better than Ty Cobb’s best years!)
- Owner Frank Robison drained the Cleveland Spiders to stock the pathetic St. Louis team that he had bought out of bankruptcy. He didn’t have as much talent to work with as Abell and Dreyfuss, so he succeeded only in creating the worst team of all time in Cleveland, while the St Louis team was never much better than mediocre under his ownership. He did manage to improve the St Louis team significantly, but they were atrocious to start. They were 29-102 and 39-111 in the two seasons before Robison poached the best of the Spiders, and they jumped to 84-67 after the merger. Their winning percentage went from .260 to .556 in one year. That was impressive at face value, but the Spiders went down more than the Perfectos went up! In 1900, the Spiders were dismantled, and the Perfectos were renamed the St. Louis Cardinals, a name that has stuck with the franchise to this day. They were never much good under the Robison family, but they eventually became the best team in the league, and their reign endured for two decades, right up to the last pre-integration year (1926 to 1946). The Cardinals remained a strong club after integration began in 1947, but they were slow to integrate, failing to field a black player until 1954, and lacking any top black players until 1958-1959. Branch Rickey, the man whose innovative farm system had made the Cardinals a powerhouse, had moved from the Cardinals to the Dodgers, and he grasped the importance of integration. By the time the Cardinals decided to place a tentative toe into the pool of black talent, the Dodgers had already scooped up Jackie Robinson, Joe Black, Jim Gilliam, Don Newcombe, Sandy Amoros and Roy Campanella. Thus was the torch passed from Rickey’s old team to Rickey’s new team.
I’ve been reading all about this in Koppett’s Concise History of Major League Baseball. Very entertaining book.
The first Major League Baseball commissioner Judge Landis did away with a lot of these shenanagans after he was given full control after the Black Sox scandal but it came at the expense of his arbitrary rulings and empire building.
The baseball team owners didn’t really start to take back power until the Great Depression when the MLB teams started to buy up the minor league teams to save them from bankruptcy which created the farm system and which Judge Landis initially opposed.
Judge Landis was also virulently racist.
There isn’t a lot of hockey in the list. One of the strangest is the Jersey Knights of the old World Hockey Association (1972-1979, four teams merged into the NHL) that played in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
Sports Illustrated later described Cherry Hill Arena as “perhaps the worst facility” used by any WHA team, noting that it lacked showers in the dressing room for visiting teams, who had to dress at a Holiday Inn two miles away, and that the arena’s ice surface was not even level, giving the home team a distinct home advantage as the visitors would have to skate uphill to the opponent’s goal for two of the three periods.
There was also a huge dip in the ice.” In fact, one night Ted Scharf of the Knights was waiting for a pass when the puck shot straight up and struck him between the eyes.”
Most arenas have a long players’ bench for each team, but in Cherry Hill the players’ section consisted of three rows of five seats. The teams looked like choirs. There was little room for a coach in Cherry Hill, so one night Winnipeg Coach Nick Mickoski sat in the first row of the stands. But every time he stood up to make a line change or give instructions to a player, the fans would complain so loudly that he would have to shout his orders sitting down.