Column: Bad News Spiders

What is the most unbreakable record in baseball history? Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hit streak? Not quite. Cy Young’s incredible 511 career wins? Probably unbreakable, but theoretically assailable. How about 101 losses — on the road? No, nobody will ever pass the tremendous futility of my all-time favorite baseball team, the immortal 1899 Cleveland Spiders.

In the 1890s, baseball had some astonishingly inefficient practices. The most hilarious of these was the lack of any rule preventing the same people from owning part, or all, of more than one team. This, almost literally, led to a system in which teams would play against other teams who were effectively their farm teams. Only the games actually counted. In 1898, the Robison brothers, who already owned the respectable Cleveland Spiders (who had finished a strong second in 1895 and 1896, and fifth out of 12 in 1897 and 1898), acquired a majority share of the doormat St. Louis Browns. Bizarrely renaming the St. Louis squad the Perfectos — which, last I checked, is not and never has been a word — the Robisons gutted Cleveland of all its best players and simply transferred them to St. Louis, including a 31-year-old ace pitcher named Denton True Young — as in Cy Young. That Cy Young.

On April 15, 1899, the Spiders played their first game of the year, losing 10-1 to their new nemesis, the Perfectos. A historic season was born, in which the Spiders did not have a winning streak longer than two games, finished 84 games out of first place (and 35 games out of 11th place) and limped to the finish with a record of 20 wins and 134 losses. When I say limped, I mean limped. As in, on Aug. 25, the Spiders were 19-94, and on Oct. 15 they ended the season 20-134. That’s a 1-40 finish, helping to put the 2007 Mets in perspective (or so I tell myself).

The Spiders’ best hitters were probably 34-year-old Australian second baseman (ouch) Joe Quinn and outfielder Tommy Dowd, whose on-base plus slugging numbers were only about 10 percent below the league average. That’s comparable to Derek Jeter’s this year, by far the worst of his career. And these were the Spiders’ best hitters. More representative was third baseman Suter Sullivan, who had a slugging percentage below .300, never played after 1899, had unknown batting hand dominance and was named “Suter.”

Cleveland’s ace pitcher was Jim Hughey, who went 30-4. Oh, wait. He was actually 4-30, with an ERA of 5.41, which at the time was 32 percent worse than the league average. If he didn’t pitch, 4-22 Charlie Knepper took the hill, or perhaps it was the truly unbelievable specimen of Frank Bates. Bates put up a record of 1-18, pitching 20 games (17 of them complete games — no rest for the weary) with an ERA of 7.24 in 153 innings, giving up 239 hits and 105 walks while striking out only 13 batters. Bates actually hit 10 more batters than he struck out. The Spiders as a team had an ERA that was 42 percent worse than the league average. This season, the frustrating and atrocious Oliver Perez stunk out the joint for the Mets until he was removed from the starting rotation, and then from the roster altogether. His ERA was 40 percent worse than the league average.

As I write this, the 2010 Pittsburgh Pirates have given up 278 more runs than they have scored. That is an abysmal and embarrassing figure. But they’re the 1998 Yankees compared to our friends the Spiders, who scored 529 runs and gave up (wait for it) 1,252. That’s more than 8 runs per game, and enough that even if the Spiders had scored twice as many runs as they did, they still wouldn’t have come close to .500, let alone the pennant.

As you can probably tell by now, I love this team. But wait, what about the 101 road losses spoken of earlier? How is that even possible? Yes, we have come to my absolutely favorite fact about the Spiders. On July 1, they dropped a close 14-0 decision to the Boston Braves at home, taking their record to a robust 12-49. Clearly, nobody showed up, because two days later, the Spiders took to the road. And the next day. And two days after. The next time Cleveland played a home game, it was Aug. 24, as they fell to 18-94 with a loss to the New York Giants. On Aug. 31, it was back to the road, with only one home game out of their last 36. The 1899 Cleveland Spiders played 85 of their last 93 games on the road, losing 78.

So that is how you make the most unbreakable record in baseball: 101 road losses, 134 overall losses and immortal status as the worst team of all time.