Baseball is simultaneously a beautiful and elegant sport and the cruelest torture device ever devised by man.
Everyone fails more than they succeed. Perfection over a season is impossible. Perfection on the mound? Twenty-four times. And our sport’s history dates back to the Civil War.
As you know, the hitters who manage a hit a third of the time are considered elite as are pitchers who are only scored upon twice or thrice per nine innings.
The winner of the World Series is the Final Girl.
For those of you who aren’t horror film fans, the “Final Girl” trope portrays a single main character, typically a young woman, who is the only person left alive after two hours of terror. Everyone else knocked off one by one.
In baseball, we call that the postseason.
Winning the big one in the end often feels as much a relief as a celebration. Because this game necessitates that countless times throughout the year, you were certain you were left for dead.
So, if baseball is painful even when you are good, what about when you are bad? What about when you are truly, and epically, terrible?
The Colorado Rockies, of course, find themselves in that position as they narrowly staved off 120 losses in their third straight hundred-loss season. They avoided the worst win/loss record of all time but are in danger of making even more dubious history.
Next season they, and the Chicago White Sox, will risk becoming the first teams in the expansion era to have four consecutive 100-loss seasons. Given that it will be a “lame duck” season before a new CBA and potential lockout, this outcome is more than likely.
So even that, I would argue, is secondary to avoiding the kind of history that has befallen some of the most crestfallen teams in MLB history. The Long Drought.
Much like a player, a team can have a great or awful season (sometimes even back-to-back) and not have it define them. The tale of a player, and an era, is told over time.
In the grand history of this eloquent torture device, there has been some stretches of losing that boggle the mind. Many of them stretch back to olden times when the structure of the game was quite different. So go easy on the St. Louis Browns who hold the record at 41 straight years without seeing the postseason from 1903 to 1943.
However, the Cleveland baseball team now called the Guardians are in second place far more recently. Their drought lasted 40 years from the Eisenhower administration in 1955 to the Clinton administration in 1994.
Next are the White Sox (1920-1958) and A’s (1932-1970) who each spent 39 years wandering through the desert. Rounding out the bottom five are the Chicago Cubs who, despite owning the sixth best win/loss percentage in MLB history, missed the playoffs in the 38 years from 1946 to 1984.
There are 28 instances where a team went at least 20 years without a postseason appearance. And 43 instances of 15 consecutive losing seasons. It is true that the lion’s share of those seasons come during earlier eras of the game when fewer teams made the postseason.
There are still some doozies in the modern age, though.
The Montreal Expos/Washington Nationals hold the expansion era record for most consecutive playoff-less seasons at 29 from 1982 to 2011. The Kansas City Royals won the world series the year before I was born in 1985 and didn’t make the postseason again until I was out of college and in my first season covering the Rockies in 2013. Two years later, they won the World Series again.
The Texas Rangers had a 26-year-long drought from ‘69-’95. But perhaps most ironically and inspiringly are the Milwaukee Brewers and Cleveland Guardians who each had 24 year long stretches. Now, both teams are fixtures in October and this may well be the Brewers year. Finally.
The Rockies low mark is the 10 years from 1996-2006. They are about to experience their seventh. So the first order of business should be trying to avoid adding the word “decade” to the drought.
An immediate turn around next season feels next to impossible. Turning it around in the next three, especially with a new CBA and even potential expansion and realignment, much more doable. Though, they have a long checklist of changes to make for that to happen.
So should Rockies fans rejoice in the fact that they are technically not the worst team of all time? Or that this drought doesn’t rank among the worst in history? Obviously not.
Rockies ownership and the front office, though, should be mindful of how long this game can punish you for poor management. It is not a given that success will follow simply because we now have two Wild Card teams. Nor will it happen on its own even if the economic issues in the game are finally addressed.
A decade can become two in a hurry.
The Rockies need to take full inventory and frankly take all baseball decisions away from the owner. Because, while they aren’t in danger of becoming the St. Louis Browns, if they make the right changes, one day – maybe – they can become the Final Girl.
