King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Enough with the Tigers' 119-loss season three years ago. We get it! Plus: Tigers-A's ALCS preview.
Read more: Sports, Baseball, King Kaufman, Baseball Playoffs, Sports Daily
Oct. 10, 2006 | I am officially sick of hearing about how the Detroit Tigers lost one hundred and nineteen games three years ago. I'm having T-shirts made and everything.
The Tigers play the Oakland A's in the American League Championship Series beginning Tuesday night in Oakland. The St. Louis Cardinals play the New York Mets in the NLCS starting Wednesday in New York.
It's a remarkable achievement for Detroit to have won 95 games and a playoff series just three years after having lost -- in case you hadn't heard -- 119 games, one shy of the major league record.
But how remarkable is it? I mean, yeah, it's really something. But is it a bigger achievement than making the playoffs three years after losing, say, 100 games? I don't think it is.
If there's some point between 100 losses and 119 beyond which a comeback in a certain amount of time becomes somehow more remarkable, I'd like to know where that point is and how it was decided upon. Is it 105 losses? 112?
I don't think so. A hundred losses means "lousy team." A hundred nineteen losses? Still a lousy team. Lousier, for sure. But what you have to do when you lose 119 and you want to win is get rid of your lousy players, keep your few good ones, and get a bunch of new ones who can play.
This is also what you have to do when you lose 100. There's a certain point, I don't know where but I'd guess it's around 95 losses, beyond which you're pretty much starting over. You're an expansion team.
Some teams in that situation may have greater disadvantages than others. But those disadvantages have to do with market size, revenue potential, the number of bad contracts the team is saddled with and the management skill present in the front office and the dugout, not with having lost 119 games as opposed to 101.
The last time a team lost 100 games and then even had a winning record three years later was the when the San Diego Padres lost 101 in 1993, then went 91-71 and won the National League West in 1996. After 1993, seven teams lost 100 games in a season through 2003, the last season for which there is a three years later.
So you can see how rare it is to come back from even 100 losses in three years, but you can also see that it does happen.
There were nine guys who played for both the 1993 and the 1996 Padres. Eight of them played in the playoffs. Guess how many men played for both the 2003 and the 2006 Detroit Tigers. Go on, guess.
Did you guess nine?
Good guess but it's 11. Eight made the playoff roster.