List of Worst Major League Baseball Season Records - 1898 St. Louis Browns and 1899 Cleveland Spiders

1898 St. Louis Browns and 1899 Cleveland Spiders

The 1899 Cleveland Spiders own the worst single-season record of all time (minimum 120 games) and for all eras (with one exception), finishing at 20–134 (.130 percentage) in the final year of the National League's 12–team era in the 1890s. The only major league team to do worse, the 1884 Wilmington Quicksteps of the Union Association, played only 18 games, compiling a 2–16 record and a .111 winning percentage.

With shorter schedules during much of the 19th century, it was much more common for teams to finish with sub-.300 winning percentages. For example, the 1876 Cincinnati Reds (not the same franchise as the modern-day Reds) went 9–56 for a .138 percentage; by 1899, the National League was playing the standard 154-game schedule.

The Cleveland Spiders had had a fair amount of success in the 1890s, with seven straight winning seasons from 1892–98 and a Temple Cup victory in 1895. Meanwhile, the once four-time American Association champion St. Louis Browns had fallen to a then-all-time low of 39–111 in 1898. But Spiders ownership (the Robison brothers) bought the Browns in time for the 1899 season, creating an obvious conflict-of-interest situation, which was later outlawed. On the eve of the season, they traded almost all of Cleveland's good players to St. Louis for very little in return, with respectable results for St. Louis and disastrous results for Cleveland.

The 1899 Spiders set the major league record for most consecutive losses in a season (24, from July 26 to September 16), and had 6 losing streaks of 10 games or more. The Spiders lost 40 of their last 41 games, and finished 84 games behind the 1899 National League champion Brooklyn Dodgers. They lost 27 games in September, a record for the most games lost in a month until the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics went 2–28 in August.

The 1899 Browns, renamed the "Perfectos" and staffed with all the best players from the 1898 Spiders (six of the Spiders' eight starting position players and four starting pitchers, including the great Cy Young) would improve by a whopping 44½ games, from 39–111 to 84–67. However, all St. Louis did ultimately was to trade places with Cleveland in the standings. The Browns/Perfectos would be renamed the St. Louis Cardinals in 1900, and are unrelated to the American League St. Louis Browns that adopted the discarded nickname and also appear on this list.

After the 1899 season, the National League contracted from twelve to eight clubs, and the Spiders were one of four teams to fold, along with Baltimore, Louisville and Washington. Baltimore had also been stripped of its best players by Brooklyn in 1899, to somewhat less dramatic effect, but still enough to speed their demise. The American League soon arose to fill the void.