Rockies are worst team in MLB history through 42 games, and it can get worse

With a loss on Tuesday night, the Rockies’ record now stands at 7-35. Reaching that 35th defeat after 42 games puts the Rockies in historic territory, as they’re the fastest-ever to 35 losses in a season. The previous quickest to get there was the 1904 Washington Senators, who lost their 35th 45 games in, after they had already won their eighth contest of an excruciatingly long season.

If the Rockies don’t turn things around in a hurry, you’re going to be hearing a lot about the 1904 Senators for the next couple of months. That’s because the Senators, with a brief interruption, are one of the standard-bearers for "worst record through X" games, starting with the 43rd of the season up to the 91st, at which point a different team well over a century old becomes the stick against which awfulness is measured. The Rockies’ season is going so poorly that the previous statement might not even be true anymore by the time you read this, since the ‘04 Senators were 8-33-2 through 43 games — yes, their catastrophe of a season happened so long ago that ties were still a thing at that point. The Rockies are two losses ahead of that pace even before we find out if Wednesday’s game will result in yet another L or a rare Colorado win.

Which means that the Rockies, regardless of Wednesday night’s outcome, are already the holders of the worst record through 43 games, despite not even playing 43 yet. And if they fail to win no. 43, they’ll also have locked down the worst record through 44 before they even get to that game on the schedule.

Now, all is not lost for Colorado. Before the 1904 Senators come up again and again as the worst team through X games, it’s the 1988 Baltimore Orioles who are repeatedly referenced in the same space. In fact, the Rockies share the worst record through 41 games with them, at 7-34, as well as a few other progress (for lack of a better word) markers through this point of the season.

But it’s the ‘88 Orioles who make up the vast majority of the list from 14 games into the season through 41, owing to their 0-21 start. (To put that into perspective, the Orioles were the only team to start a season 0-14 at the time that they managed the feat, and then they pushed that to 0-21.) Somehow, a team that began the season 0-21 finished it 54-107: that’s not a record to be proud of by any means, but considering that 41 games in they were the worst team in history to that point and on pace for a 28-134 record, the O’s had to be happy with where they ended up instead. 

Finishing with 107 losses probably sounds amazing to everyone in the Rockies organization at this point, but one thing the Orioles had in 1988 were a mix of promising younger players and productive veterans, the latter of whom saw their seasons recover. Hall of Famer Eddie Murray, then 32, finished the year batting .284/.361/.474, good for a 136 OPS+. Fred Lynn, then 36, wrapped at .252/.312/.482 for a 122 OPS+. Mickey Tettleton (27) hit .261/.330/.424, Joe Orsulak (26) added a 113 OPS+, and another Cooperstown inductee, Cal Ripken Jr., wrapped his age-27 season — one in which he was the Orioles’ All-Star representative — with a line of .264/.372/.431. 

The rotation was a disaster, especially after the one average pitcher on the staff, Mike Boddicker, was flipped in a midseason deal. But that trade brought back Brady Anderson and Curt Schilling. Neither of whom were ready for the majors at that point, but Anderson ended up sticking in Baltimore for 14 years, most of them real good ones, and Schilling ended up with a borderline Hall of Fame career. Of course, none of the good parts of that career happened in Baltimore unless they were in a different teams’ uniform. Still! 

The Rockies don’t have any of that. Veteran Kris Bryant is suffering from back problems that have mostly kept him off of the field in 2025, but his bat has been gone for a couple of years now, too. There’s a Tettleton equivalent in backstop Hunter Goodman, who is hitting .299/.354/.497 in what appears to be a breakout campaign, and Jordan Beck (.264/.325/.528) has started strong, but this lineup doesn’t have the depth of the 1988 Orioles, a team that is likely one of the 50 worst in the history of baseball after adjusting for era, strength of competition, and more. And their pitching is at least as bad as that Baltimore squad’s, too. 

It doesn’t help that it’s not like the Rockies being terrible is a surprise. This is a continuation of the status quo. The 2021 team went 74-87, which probably did not feel at the time like it was going to be as good as things got for a while.  The ‘22 squad lost 94 games. The 2023 team lost 103, and 2024’s "improved" to 101 defeats. Dating back to the start of 2023, the Rockies are just 127-239. A bounce back, like some members of the ‘88 Orioles experienced, isn’t necessarily something that can be relied on here, as there isn't anything to bounce back to that looks meaningfully different from where they are.

The 1904 Senators — known as the Minnesota Twins from 1961 to the present — didn’t start quite as poorly as those 1988 Orioles, but they made up for it later on. They would finish the season 38-113-6, in dead last in the majors with 14 fewer wins than the next-worst Philadelphia Phillies, and 13 more losses than the only other club to hit the century mark. They played just 41 games against teams with a worse than .500 record and went a modest 18-23 in those games, in part because there were just eight clubs in the AL at that time, and most of them spent their season beating up on the Senators. Which helped them to a record well over .500 in the first place: in those games against teams that ended up over .500, the Senators were just 20-90 for the year.

The Senators had two players produce above-average seasons at the plate: first baseman Jake Stahl (118 OPS+) and outfielder Frank Huelsman (112 OPS+). The team, as a whole, produced a line of .227/.275/.288 — remember, this was the Dead Ball era, but the ball seemed even deader for Washington’s hitters — and an OPS+  of 79. The pitching was even worse, with no starter even coming close to being considered average, never mind above it, and the staff as a whole producing an ERA+ of 74. 

They began their season 0-10 in April, and with one exception were actually more like a standard 100-loss team for the rest of the year, but that exception was a 4-19 June with a .174 winning percentage: in combination with the win-less April, the Senators never really had a chance, and they’d finish with what is now the fourth-worst winning percentage (.252) in modern MLB history (1901 and onward), as well as the eighth-most losses ever, despite playing in a shorter season of 154 games. 

The Rockies, by the way, currently have a team OPS+ of 72, and team ERA+ of 84. A bit worse on offense than the ‘04 Senators, but a bit better on the mound. Not exactly a comfort.

This is looking far-forward, but the next teams up on the list of history that the Rockies would love to stop chasing any time now are the 1932 Red Sox — they briefly interrupt the Senators’ run of anti-dominance with the worst records ever for a team through 60 and 61 games — and then it’s the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics from there on out, until a very recent addition to the list, the 2024 White Sox, arrive on the scene 140 games in, when they were 31-109. The ‘32 Sox would lose 111 games and finish with the 12th-worst winning percentage ever — a 117-loss pace in a 162-game season — while the 1916 Athletics actually did lose 117 games, despite playing just 154 of them, but are better known for holding the worst winning percentage in history at .235.

The 2025 Rockies, 42 games in, have a winning percentage of .167. It bears repeating: the Rockies need to turn things around, and in a hurry, if the wrong kind of history is to be averted.

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