On July 5, the Seattle Mariners defeated the Oakland Athletics 4-3 in 10 innings, evening their record at 43-43 and moving to within 2.5 games of first place in a tight AL West race.
Mariners’ Losing Streak Approaching Historic Lows
I should preface the rest of this post by saying that I have the utmost respect for my fellow Baseball Nation editor Jeff Sullivan, who runs our SB Nation Mariners site Lookout Landing. He'll probably want to avert his eyes from the rest of this article, but I do want to say that as a Cubs fan, I feel Mariners fans' pain. (Seriously. And that isn't even including the Milton Bradley/Carlos Silva debacle.)
The Mariners have dropped 13 games in a row since July 5, and put themselves out of any sort of contention, now 13.5 games out of first place. In the first nine games of the streak, they scored just 11 total runs. It’s gotten a bit better in the last four -- 20 total runs -- but they’ve still been outscored 72-31 during the loss skein.
How does this streak stack up against other recent loss streaks? Oddly enough, the worst team of the last 30 years -- the 43-119 2003 Tigers -- had their longest losing streak at just 11 games. But their 3-20 April, 5-22 June and 6-23 July sealed their fate.
The longest losing streak in the last 40 years is 21 straight, famously done to start the season by the 1988 Baltimore Orioles; that cost their manager, Cal Ripken Sr., his job after just six of those games. The 2005 Kansas City Royals come close in this category; they dropped 19 consecutive games from July 28 to Aug. 19. That streak might in some ways be worse than the Orioles'; of the 19 losses, the Royals gave up 10 or more runs seven times.
Only two other teams have lost that many in a row in the divisional play era; the 1969 Montreal Expos, who lost 20 straight from May 13 to June 7. They had an excuse -- they were a first-year expansion team. The 1975 Detroit Tigers dropped 19 in a row from July 29 to Aug. 15. That was an old team that had several players playing out the string; two years later, with the debuts of Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker, among others, they were on their way to a World Series nine years after this awful streak.
I do feel your pain: the Mariners, if they lose today, will match the 1997 Cubs, who dropped their first 14 games of that season and were 8.5 games out of first place with only two weeks gone in the year. Can you imagine your season being over before April is? Essentially, it was for the 1962 Mets, who were 11 games out of first place on May 1 and who, later that month (on May 21) began a 17-game loss streak which ended on June 6 with them 24 games behind.
Finally, if you want your team to have something to shoot for -- after all, if you’re going to be bad, why not be historically bad? -- the longest MLB losing streak of the post-1900 era is 23 consecutive games, by the 1961 Philadelphia Phillies, who finished 47-107 in the last year of the NL’s 154-game schedule.
Anyway, if you're a Mariners fan you probably don't want to hear that they have to face the Red Sox' Josh Beckett Saturday night, when a loss would tie Seattle's franchise record, 14 straight, accomplished from Sept. 2-18, 1992 -- on a team that lost 98 games despite having two future Hall of Famers in Ken Griffey Jr. and Randy Johnson, and Edgar Martinez having the first big season of his career.
Or maybe you do. A streak of 18, 19 or 20 games would put this year’s Mariners in historic company. And many of those teams recovered to be contenders within a few seasons. Sometimes you really have to hit absolute bottom before you can reach for the top.
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